The best medicine
If you have a good laugh you could be extending your life. Apparently
DO YOU know how to turn a cat into a dog? That’s right, you pour paraffin over it, set fire to its tail and it goes “woof!”. Sorry. Very, very sorry. In fact, anyone who feels moved to write and complain about the depravity of taste in this column might wish to call upon my friend Charliey, who not only reads newspapers for a living, but he does it in Tunbridge Wells. A hundred times a day he gets the opportunity legitimately to blast off emails signed ‘disgusted, Tunbridge Wells…’ Perhaps he could do it for you. I am sure he could steal time from the important clients awaiting his trawl through all the press titles relevant to their interests. But if I know Charliey he would actually find that joke quite funny. In fact, if there are two things I know about him, one is that he likes a good laugh and the other is that his heart is likely to be in a robust state of health.
How so? Well don’t tell his boss but I am on the very select forward circulation list for the more bizarre topics which crop up in the course of his work. And sometimes the articles, and especially the photos, are pretty hilarious. I am still waiting for the skateboarding duck but we have had everything else… stories about men who sell their wives for a thousand rupees, adjacent to stories about other men who are presumably glad they didn’t because their wives have rescued them from tigers with their bare hands and so forth. Sometimes I envy him his job because if you were only disgusted some of the time, and had a sense of humour like his, you could just giggle away all day and it would prolong your life.
As we all know, laughter is the best medicine. We know by instinct that laughter releases tension and therefore must be good for the body as well as the mind. But, bless us all, we have to go and pay for the scientific evidence as well.
Last week I saw an article in The New Scientist that grabbed my attention from the first line: ‘What do you call a cat that swallows a duck?’ You got it: a duck-filled fatty-puss. Then, worse: ‘Did you hear about the two antennas who fell in love? The wedding was terrible but the reception was fantastic.’ Now, these may be straight out of the ‘Ha-Ha Bonk’ book, but, said the article, if you laughed at them you did your blood vessels a favour…
Michael Miller from the University of Marland recently published the results of an experiment to measure blood flow and dilation of arteries in the upper arm of 20 volunteers before and after watching hilarious clips from the movie Kingpin. In all but one (what happened to him?), their blood flowed more freely for 45 minutes afterwards. Interestingly, showing them a violent movie later had exactly the opposite effect although history doesn’t relate how the person unaffected by the first experiment responded.
All this suggests that laughter could keep the lining of the arteries healthy and reduce the risk of heart disease. “We don’t know if is a direct result of laughing or an indirect one of laughter reducing stress,” Miller said at a cardiology conference in Orlando, Florida. Well, thank you for sharing that one. All I can say is I am glad that my taxes didn’t help pay for it.
Interestingly The New Scientist article was illustrated by a roomful of Indian men laughing their heads off. Maybe the way to be sure to ward off heart attacks is to go and do your laughing in India. Only today Charliey sent me a link from India entitled: ‘Jalloo Wadia wins Best Laughing Woman award.
You read it here second! The first-ever International Laughter Competition has just been held in Bombay. Hundreds from India and across the world converged for a competition held to promote laughter in preventive heart care and to celebrate 10 years of the laughter club movement. The concept owes its origin to Hasyayoga (Yoga of Laughter), which is mentioned in ancient Indian scriptures. “Besides acting as a stress buster, laughing requires extensive contortions of facial muscles, which help in improving blood circulation and ligament strengthening”. Aha! A little bit like anger then?
But no. Says founder and president of Laughterclub International, Madan Kadara: “It has been proved by scientific studies that laughter has a strong impact on the immune system. It unwinds the negative effect of stress, increases blood circulation to increase oxygenation and relaxes muscles. There is one tablet which can do all that magic and that is laughter.” She and Michael Miller have obviously been talking. But neither of them say what you have to do if you don’t feel like laughing in the first place. If you are not on Charliey’s circulation list you are definitely at a disadvantage.
But maybe this one will do the trick… “What’s the fastest cake in the world?” Scone!! Me too. Bye
