The Nature of Laughter

Sermon

Today, April 3, is the Sunday closest to April Fool's Day.

The history of April Fool's Day is not entirely clear. One account says that prior to 1582, the new year was celebrated for eight days, beginning on March 25, and culminated on April 1. With the reform of the calendar in 1582 New Year’s Day was moved to January 1.

However, communications being what they were in the days when news traveled by foot, many people did not receive the news of the new calender for several years. Others, the more obstinate crowd, refused to accept the new calendar and continued to celebrate the new year on April 1. These backward folk were labeled as "fools" and were made the butt of practical jokes. Overtime the first day in April became associate with laughter.

In honor of April Fool's Day I have been reading a British book called "Laughlab: The Scientific Quest for the World's Funniest Joke."

In 2001 a British research group at the University of Hertfordshire set out to discover the world's funniest joke. More than 300,000 people from around the world visited an Internet web site called laughlab where they submitted 40,000 jokes and to rate other people’s submissions. The web site and the book have several categories including the top jokes based on people’s ages. I want to start with jokes that were ranked high by young people.

Out of 40,000 possible jokes, people age 11 to 15 voted the following as the funniest:

A new teacher was trying to make use of her psychology courses. She started her class by saying: "everyone who thinks they’re stupid, stand up!" After a few seconds, Johnny stood up.

The teacher said: "Do you think you’re stupid, Johnny?"

Johnny replied: "No, ma’am, but I hate to see you standing there all by yourself."

Here are some of the runners up top rated by children:

** A boy is digging a hole in his backyard. The neighbor asks why he’s digging the hole. The boy replies: "My gold fish died. I have to bury him."
The neighbor observes: "That’s a mighty big hole for a goldfish."
The boy says: "Yeah, but he’s in your cat."

**In a 3rd grade class Johnny was asked if he knew what a cannibal was. He said to the teacher: "No sir."
"Well," Johnny’s teacher asked him, "if you ate your parents, what would you be?"
Johnny replied, "An orphan, sir."

**Two kids were talking in the playground. The first kid says: "My mum is from Ireland and my dad is from America. That makes me an Irish-American."
The second kid says: "Well, my mum is from Iceland and my dad is from Cuba. So I guess that makes me an Icecube."

**Customer: "Waiter, this fish is bad."
Waiter: "You naughty fish, you!"

**What do you get if you cross a snowman with a vampire?
Frostbite!

**What is the difference between a golf player and a sky-diver?
The golfer goes: "Whack! . . . Darn it!"
The sky diver goes: "Darn it! Whack!"

**What do you call a snowman with a suntan?
A puddle!

**How do you get a skeleton to laugh?
Tickle its funny bone.

As we age our sense of humor changes. The top joke as voted by people ages 30-40 was this one:

**A man makes it to the front of the supermarket check-out line. The check-out girl, while swiping through his frozen pizzas, TV dinners, cases of beer, and TV guide, asks: "You’re single, aren’t you? "
The man replies: "Why yes, I am single. How could you tell?"
"Well, because you’re really ugly," she answers.

The top joke, as voted by people over the age of 50 was this one:

**An elderly woman went to the police station with her next-door neighbor to report her husband was missing. The police officer asked for a description. She said: "He’s 35 years old, 6 foot 4, has dark eyes, dark wavy hair, an athletic build, weighs 185 pounds, is soft-spoken, and is good to children."

The next-door neighbor protested: "Your husband is 5 foot 4 inches, chubby, bald, has a big mouth, and is mean to your children."

The wife replied: "Yeah, but who wants HIM back."

The Old Testament contains one of the oldest recorded fits of laughter. In Genesis God and Abraham talk. Abraham is 100 years old and his wife is 90.

God said, "As for Sarah your wife . . . I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her." Abraham fell on his face and laughed.

In spite of Abraham’s laughing at God, Sarah did have a child, and he is named Isaac, which means laughter.

While Rabbis have always told jokes, it was only in the 20th century, under the influence of radio and television, that humor became common in Protestant worship services. Today one Christian congregation is famous for its laughter. In the 1994 a movement called holy laughter was developed at a Pentecostal church called the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, because of its original location near the airport. According to descriptions I have read, laughter starts with jokes from the minister and builds into a contagious laughter response by the congregation. Many in the congregation laugh so hard they stagger and fall to the floor wailing, laughing, and making animal sounds. Visitors experience holy laughter service and carry the "Toronto Blessing" back to their home congregations passing on this church specific laughter.

The Christian religion has also simulated laughter in Africa. In 1962 there was an outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanzania. The setting was a missionary boarding school for girls between 12 and 18 years of age about 20 miles from Lake Victoria. The first symptoms appeared on January 30, when three girls started laughing. The symptoms of laughing, crying, and agitation quickly spread to 95 of the 159 students, forcing the school to close on March 18, 1962. The school reopened on May 21, but was closed again within a month after 57 pupils were stricken with individual laugh attacks lasting from minutes to a few hours. In a few cases the symptoms persisted for 16 days. None of the missionary teachers, two Europeans and three Africans, were afflicted. Before finally ending 2 ½ years later in June of 1964, this plague of laughter spread through villages forcing the temporary closing of more than 14 schools and affecting about 1000 people in tribes bordering Lake Victoria. Doctors could find no evidence of a toxic reaction or encephalitis and concluded that they were simply dealing with hysterical laughter. The quarantine of infected villages was the only means of blocking the laughter’s advance. No cases involving policeman, schoolteachers, or other better educated or more sophisticated people was recorded. The laughter spread among the lines of tribal, family, and peer affiliation, with females being most affected. Although temporarily debilitating, laugh attacks produced no fatalities or permanent after-effects. The accounts I read did not say what subject the Christian missionaries were trying to teach when the first young women became overwhelmed with laughter.

This is not just a Christian phenomena. Hindus also engage in contagious laughter. In Bombay an ancient yoga breathing exercise based on laughter has been transformed into a booming enterprise called the Laughing Clubs International. Started in 1995, the clubs have grown to over 2,000 chapters. After starting with a warmup unison ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha, the group moves on to more esoteric variations with mouth open and closed. The favorite laugh posture is standing with arms raised above the head, this is similar to the posture Christian Pentecostals use when performing their own holy laughter in Toronto. Last month Laughing Clubs International held the first International Laughter Yoga Conference in India. Hundreds of Delegates gathered from fifteen countries to laugh. A participant from Australia won the Best Laughing Man prize. The Best Laughing Woman award went to a participant from India.

So why do we laugh? The earliest theory of laughter is from Plato. He said laughter helps us feel superior to other people. So when the standing teacher asks the stupid students to stand up, kids feel superior to adults. Plato thought that it was wrong to laugh at the misfortune of others and he urged people to refrain from laughing.

Sigmund Freud developed another explanation as to why we laugh. Laughter, Freud said, is a way in which people can release our pent-up thoughts in a socially acceptable way. These include pent-up thoughts about death, sex, marriage, authority figures, certain bodily functions, anything that is socially unacceptable to say with a straight face. To Freud humor provides a kind of relief, a way of coping with the problems of our lives or issues that we are embarrassed or reluctant to confront.

In many jokes, there is an apparent release of repressed thoughts. For example:

**A newly ordained priest is nervous about hearing confessions and asked an older priest to observe one of his sessions to give him some tips. After a few minutes of listening, the old priest suggested they have a word. "I’ve got a few suggestions," he says. "Try folding your arms over your chest and rubbing your chin with one hand." The new priest tries this. "Very good," says a senior. " Now try saying things like ‘I see’, ‘I understand’ and ‘yes,
go on’." The younger priest practices these sayings, also. "Well done," says the older priest. "Don’t you think that’s better than slapping your knee and saying: 'No Way! What happened next?'"

Since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have asked how laughter might have evolved in us to help us survive. They note that babies begin laughing at a fairly early age. Studies indicate that children laugh about 400 times a day. Evolutionary theorists say that a baby’s laughter is positive feedback to hard working parents who need such encouragement as they care for the child.

Adults laugh on average about 18 times a day. As we grow older and continue to laugh, other survival explanations for our adult laughter have been proposed.

In 1979 Norman Cousins published his book called Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient suggesting that a purpose of laughter is to help us heal. Although this has become popular, so far little empirical research has been done on the effects of laughter and health. The best-known research, which claims that people who laugh have healthier immune systems, is based on studying only five people. (Immune System Changes During Associated Laughing, 1991. Berk.)

In the words of one expert: "The evaluation of health issues relating to laughter and humor is at a very early stage with most of the important work yet to be done. . . . Faster and better physical healing with laughter remains an unrealized, tantalizing but still reasonable prospect." (Robert Provine)

The philosopher Henri Bergson argued that the purpose of laughter is to communicate with other people. Dr. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland at Baltimore spent ten years studying laughter and came to the same conclusion. In his book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. He argues that laughter evolved as a way to interact with other people. Dr. Provine recorded and studying many conversations. He documented that in general men tell the jokes and women supply the laugher. He also looked at personal ads in newspapers and documented that many women seek men who make them laugh and many men try to comply with this request.

In a study of spontaneous conversations between mixed sex pairs of young German adults who were meeting for the first time, the more a woman laughed aloud during these encounters, the greater was her self-reported interest in seeing the man again. A man’s laughter did not indicate interest in the woman, but men were interested in seeing again women who laughed a lot in their presence. Also, simultaneous male and female laughter was a predictor of mutual interest.

Laughter, researchers conclude, is one way we communicate attraction or lack of attraction in relationships. Laughter is a form of communication that plays a role in social bonding, in solidifying friendships and pulling people into the fold. Most ministers know this. We tell jokes as a way of solidifying a religious community, a way of pulling people into the fold of the congregation.

So these are some theories as to why we laugh:

• Plato said laughter helps us feel superior to others.
• Freud said laugher helps is release repressed thoughts and feelings.
• Darwin said laughter helps babies survive.
• Cousins said that laughter helps us heal and stay healthy.
• And Bergson said that laughter helps us communicate.

All these are true. But I want to suggest still another reason why we laugh. I think our laughter can be a religious affirmation. Laugher is statement that life is still worth living, in spite of everything.

One of the things our laughter communicates is our courage in the face of difficulties. Recently I spoke on the phone with my 88-year-old aunt. She lives in the northwest corner of Arizona. In January her house of 25 years was swept away in a flood. I asked her how she was feeling "Well"” she said, "I have to look at the positive side. When it was clear we were going to lose the houses, we had about an hour when everyone ran in and carried everything thing they could out into two trucks. I discovered that you can get a lot of stuff out of a house in an hour when you have a lot of people helping." She paused, then she said. "As for the rest, I had wanted to throw< out a lot of stuff. Now I don’t have to!" And she laughed.

On the deepest level, laughter is a religious affirmation, an expression of faith in people and in the future. It is an amusement with life itself, a sign of courage in the face of tragedy, a thumbing of the nose at a disaster.

Finally, I want to close with the joke that was rated the best of all the jokes submitted to Laughlab. Here is the joke that was considered the funniest:

**A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing. His eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "my friend is dead! What can I do?"

The operator in a calm soothing voice, says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead."

There is silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"