Laughter is good for you. Fact. It can strengthen your immune system, boost your energy levels and diminish pain. It’s also contagious. You must have seen those videos floating around cyberspace showing little kids completely losing their shit over daddy tearing up pieces of paper (if you haven’t seen this, stop reading immediately and go find it). It’s pretty much impossible not to be caught up in the moment and I dare you not to start giggling. It’s been proven that even faking it can do the body good (and yes, we are still talking about laughter you dirty bunch).
People tend to fall into different camps of laughter styles. My personal favourite is what I like to refer to as ‘the silent laugh’. You know the one – when something has become so amusing that sound has completely left the building and all that remains is a maniacal, horrific, open-mouthed silence that looks, quite frankly, terrifying. I belong mostly to this camp.
I have a strange sense of humour. It’s sarcastic, dry, silly and, more often than not, extremely rude. I am very lucky to have friends and a partner that share my sense of humour and are unlikely to disown me because I’ve just spent twenty minutes laughing to myself about a road sign that says ‘humps for 100 yards’. Most would, but mine are special, and I am thankful for them everyday.
There’s a lot in life to feel grumpy about and it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by these feelings, to drown in the negative and the scary and the dark. So I invite you all to stop what you’re doing right now and head to YouTube. You’ll find no shortage of inspiration for a good old belly laugh. May I suggest ‘Scenes from a Hat’ from Whose Line is it Anyway, anything by Eddie Izzard, or the aforementioned ‘little girl goes nuts over torn up paper’. If none of those get you giggling it’s quite possible that you’re a robot. Or dead.