The Humor Code (30 page)

And then there's laughter yoga, a movement that now involves 16,000 laughter clubs in 72 countries, offering people the world over a chance to chuckle their way to physical and mental health. To experience laughter yoga for ourselves, Pete and I had stopped by one of the weekly meetings of the Denver Laughter Club. In a downtown Unitarian church, we joined a dozen or so club members being led by two so-called laughter leaders (“Jovial Jeff” and “Crazy Karen”) through a surreal chain of exercises. We began with “greeting laughter,” moving around the room and shaking each other's hands with a hearty, forced chuckle. Then we carried on extended conversations in nothing but gibberish, and imitated lawn sprinklers while others pretended to run through our spray. Other drills followed—“bumper-car laughter,” “happy pills,” “laughter bombs”—each designed to encourage so much fake laughter that everyone broke down for real. At one point, I passed an imaginary laughter bong to a gray-haired grandmother, from which she took a deep drag and burst out cackling.

“I do feel more energized than I did an hour ago,” admitted Pete when it was over. I, on the other hand, felt like I'd gone through a trial run for living in a loony bin. Still, the regulars, a welcoming and normal-seeming bunch, seemed to be getting a lot out of it. “You don't need stand-up comedy or movies or plays,” one of them told us. “You can just laugh.”

That's the point, said Madan Kataria, the doctor who developed laughter yoga in 1995 and is now recognized internationally as the “Guru of Giggling.” When I reached him via Skype in his home base of Mumbai, India, he told me, “Laughter was always conditional and dependent on jokes, comedy, life happenings. For the first time, in laughter yoga, laughter has been disconnected from our daily lives, because there are often not enough reasons to laugh. My discovery was that laughing without reason was enough to give people benefits.”

According to Kataria, those benefits include decreased stress, better immune-system function, improved cardiovascular health, enhanced mental states, stronger social ties, and a more spiritual
approach to life. Those are far from humor's only purported medical benefits, which have expanded far beyond anything ever suggested by Cousins, who passed away in 1990. These days, you can find claims that laughter and humor relieve headaches, provide good exercise, ward off coughs and colds, lower blood pressure, prevent heart disease, mitigate arthritis pain, ameliorate ulcers, vanquish insomnia, combat allergies and asthma, prolong life spans, protect against AIDS, and help cure cancer.
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Some go so far as to suggest that clowning improves pregnancy rates for in vitro fertilization—although fair warning: if you try wearing a clown nose to bed, there might not be any fertilization.
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As humor has become increasingly “healthy,” it's also become increasingly lucrative. While Kataria stipulates that all laughter yoga clubs must be free, he makes money from laughter leader trainings and other related enterprises, and in Bangalore, India, he's now building the first of what he hopes are many Laughter Universities. At the AATH conference in Chicago, the schedule was packed not just with seminars titled “How to Establish an Intergenerational Laughter Club” and “Holy Hysterics: Laughter and Joy in Your Community of Faith,” but also “How to Turn Laughter into Revenue.” Many of the attendees had figured out how to do that. At the conference's ritzy awards dinner, a signed portrait of comedian Red Skelton—which resembled one of those bad clown paintings you find at the back of a thrift store—was auctioned off for more than $1,600.

Is all this attention and investment worth it? For his book
The Psychology of Humor
, Rod Martin looked into the matter, reviewing the dozens of scientific studies dealing with humor and physical health. What he found was far from encouraging. As he puts it, “Those who advocate humor and laughter as a pathway to better health seem to have moved too quickly to promote their views on the basis of rather flimsy research evidence.” So far, none of the most common claims about humor and laughter—that they boost immune-system function, stave off various illnesses, and decrease heart-disease risk—have been substantiated by rock-solid research findings. Some studies have found the opposite—that laughter and humor appeared to decrease empirical indicators of good health.
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Ten years ago, to settle the matter once and for all, a professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology named Sven Svebak included a brief sense-of-humor questionnaire in one of the largest public-health studies ever performed: the HUNT-2 study, in which members of the entire adult population of the county of Nord-Trøndelag in central Norway were surveyed about their blood pressure, body-mass index, various illness symptoms, and overall health satisfaction. According to Martin, it was “the largest correlational study of senses of humor and health ever conducted.” In 2004, Svebak and his colleagues unveiled the results: there was no connection at all between sense of humor and any objective health measures.
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“Well, we have anecdotal evidence that humor helps with cancer patients,” argued one nurse at the AATH conference when confronted about such research. Sure, replied Pete, “But we also have anecdotal evidence that supports the existence of ESP.”

Still, Pete wasn't willing to write off humor's healing effects just yet. That likely had something to do with his relationship with psychologist and “joyologist” Steve Wilson. Founder of the Ohio-based World Laughter Tour therapeutic laughter program, Wilson has been working in humor and health for more than 25 years, and he held court at the Chicago conference in his polka-dot clown hat like a wise old Jedi master. He was eager to welcome us into the fold, since he's known Pete for years. When Pete was pursuing his PhD from Ohio State University, Wilson and his wife, Pam, welcomed him into their family.

Understanding humor and its therapeutic benefits, Steve Wilson told us, isn't as simple as taking saliva samples and comparing blood-pressure readings. “We don't claim any cures,” he said. “If we have to claim anything, it is adjunctive therapy. It is something that a person can engage in to help a primary treatment work better. The secret to a happy life is balance. If you are running away from humor and laughter all the time, you are going to miss the balance.”

Maybe Wilson was right. But we weren't going to take his word for it. To find out for ourselves, we decided to track down the most famous hospital clown of all.

At the end
of the 1998 Hollywood blockbuster
Patch Adams
, in which Robin Williams portrays real-life clown-doctor Hunter “Patch” Adams and his attempt to inject compassion and humor into the American medical system, the audience is told that Patch ends up launching a medical practice that treats patients without payment, malpractice insurance, or conventional health facilities, just as he always dreamed, and that construction of his world-changing “Gesundheit! Hospital” is under way.

What the movie never says is that after twelve years of operation, Patch's medical practice shut down because of doctor burnout and lack of resources. Raising the millions needed to complete the Gesundheit! Hospital in West Virginia has proven next to impossible. To help raise attention to his cause, Patch and his colleagues launched Gesundheit Global Outreach, an international service organization that has sent clown brigades to 60 countries on six continents. Since 2005, Gesundheit Global Outreach has focused much of its attention on one venture in particular: an annual, multiweek project involving international clown groups, government organizations, and NGOs, all focused on helping the community of Belén, a slum on the edge of the Peruvian city of Iquitos that's one of the most impoverished communities in the Amazon. The Belén project is one of the largest and most ambitious international clown endeavors anywhere.

Which is why we're standing in the lobby of our hotel in Iquitos, a building that has been overrun by clowns. The building has become the Belén project's makeshift headquarters. All around us, folks are in their clown costumes, ready for the first activity of this year's endeavor: a celebratory parade into the heart of Belén. Meanwhile, Patch Adams is standing at the front of the crowd, lecturing on the dangers of sunburn.

“Put on sunblock!” demands Patch, gesturing for emphasis with the rubber fish in his hand. “Here's what happens if you don't: ‘Ow, ow, ow!' ” He cringes in mock agony, rubbing at a make-believe sunburn all over his body.

This is the latest in a long list of instructions Pete and I have been given about joining the Amazonian clown brigade. John Glick, one of
Patch's closest friends and the calm-and-composed director of Gesundheit Global Outreach, was happy to have us along when I first contacted him. But he warned me, “Organizing clowns is like herding kittens.” That meant we were in for a lot of organizing. Soon we were receiving e-mail after e-mail detailing all the things we'd have to do to get ready for the trip. Make sure your vaccinations are up to date for all third-world communicable diseases, we were told, which led me to spend a colorful morning at my local travel health clinic, learning all the unpleasant yet fascinating ways my body could implode in the middle of the Amazon. (“You don't want any diseases that end with ‘osis,' ” I was instructed. “ ‘Osis' means ‘worm.' ”) Then we were schooled in the basics of Amazonian “clown fashion,” the more colorful, garish, and humidity-friendly the outfit, the better. For starters, Pete and I raided thrift-store racks of their most outlandish Hawaiian shirts. Then my five-year-old son, Gabriel, decided to contribute one of his prized possessions: He offered up his extra-large polka-dot dress-up tie, solemnly handing it over like it was one of the Crown Jewels.

Last but not least, we were told to get clown noses. “The nose is your most important feature,” noted one of the organizers in an e-mail. “Your magic. Your power. Your passport into the world. It opens doors for you and allows you to do things you never imagined yourself doing.”

I had no idea what the organizer meant, but I was referred to someone who would: Jeff Semmerling, a Chicago-based mask maker who crafts noses by hand for Gesundheit and similar organizations. Semmerling, I was told, is the Ralph Lauren of red schnozzes.

“Some say the clown nose is the most evolved mask,” said Semmerling when I called him in Chicago a few weeks before our trip. It's so simple and elegant—slip a red bulb over your nose, and people the world over know you're a clown. Semmerling offers a catalogue of nearly two dozen varieties in neoprene and leather, from rotund bulbs to diminutive nose caps to elongated missiles. Since I couldn't choose, I sent Semmerling photos of Pete and myself and asked him to do the honors. He selected a big round nose for me and a large button cap for Pete, then sent them along with a warning: “Don't be
surprised what you might find yourself doing or becoming when you release your clown.”

And now here we are, at the start of the parade into Belén, red noses on and ready to release our clowns. Everyone is far too hot and sweaty here to bother with clown makeup, although many never paint their faces at all. “The face is more open without the paint, thus allowing more intimacy,” Glick tells us. “Plus it tends to freak out the clown-phobes less.” Patch is nearby, and he seems to notice my apprehension. He catches my eye and grins like a maniac. “Are you ready to go nuts?”

With a cacophonous eruption of drums, whistles, and the blaring horns of a Peruvian Navy marching band that's volunteered to lead the parade, we're off. A rainbow-colored river of tutus, suspenders, and baggy tie-dyed pants streams through Iquitos—a city whose existence here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. While Peru is most commonly associated with llamas, mountaintop ruins, and other images of the Andes, a good 60 percent of the country is taken up by the jungle fed by the gargantuan Amazon River system. And here, in the heart of this vast, nearly uninhabited wilderness, lies a city of half a million people where no city of half a million people should be. Iquitos is the largest community in the world that doesn't have any roads to it. The only way to get here is the way we did, via aircraft. Or you can take a long, slow boat ride.

The city blossomed here because it was an epicenter for the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But that golden age has come and gone. Now grimy three-wheeled motor taxis clog the streets, and the city's grand European-style river promenade is decorated with billboards demanding “No child sex tourism.” The rubber barons' once-opulent, porticoed mansions have been gutted, their interiors filled with grocery stores and curio shops.

But the shabbiness of downtown Iquitos resembles Beverly Hills compared to what comes next. The parade route makes a left at an intersection, snakes past a fragrant open market, and slopes downhill toward the river. The street becomes a packed-earth lane lined with open-air sewage ditches, and the brick and cement buildings shift to thatch-roofed wooden shanties perched on ten-foot-tall stilts or
resting on horizontal logs lashed together like rafts. We've reached the slums of Belén. The 60,000 inhabitants, we've been told, live in destitution. Rampant unemployment. Minimal electricity and no sanitation system. Spotty health care and extensive malnutrition. Widespread alcoholism and drug use. Wide-ranging family violence and crime, with no official police presence.

Each year, during the rainy season between January and June, the river here rises several meters, which is why the houses are built on stilts and rafts. But this year, the area experienced 100-year floods. Marching past the stilt-legged homes of Belén, we can see water stains and washed-away paint reaching halfway up the houses' walls, marking where a few months earlier, the buildings were half-submerged. Scores were killed, and hundreds more were forced out of the area, relocated to schools and shelters. When they returned, they found new disease epidemics taking hold, including dengue fever and leptospirosis.