What’s so funny?

Unlike Philip Larkin, I’ve always thought that they tuck you up, your mum and dad. So, on the day my mother died, why did I laugh? That night, grief-stricken, I wandered into the living room where an abysmal sitcom was on television.

A feeble one-liner was cracked and I found myself hooting with laughter. while guilt quickly consumed me. Perhaps there's a psychological explanation which chimes with Beaumarchais in The Barber of Seville: "I quickly laugh at everything for fear of having to cry."

So is laughter really the best medicine? Might not antibiotics be better than an amusing anecdote for a throat full of streptococci? It seems churlish to raise this point, given the apparent popularity of laughter therapy.

In 1998 Dr Madan Kataria, the impetus behind the Laughter Yoga movement, proclaimed a World Laughter Day. This year, Laughter Yoga Ireland celebrates its 12th anniversary (see lyi.ie), and a paper entitled "The effect of mirthful laughter on the human cardiovascular system", published in the journal Medical Hypotheses (2009), concludes that it "may serve as a useful and important vehicle for the promotion of vascular health".

Given this, plus further scientific reports attesting to the role of laughter in enhancing immunity, raising pain tolerance and lowering stress, who would dare question laughter as a universal snake-oil lubricant for the soul?

But how healthy is mirthful laughter if it's the result of poking fun at vulnerable people? For example, where does Dr Kataria's World-Peace-Through-Laughter approach fit into the uneasy context provided by those who protested against the invitation extended to Frankie Boyle to appear at Belfast's Féile an Phobail festival in August?

They objected because of jokes he made during a 2010 stand-up show about the way people with Down syndrome speak. Nevertheless, thousands attended the event. However, speaking before the gig, Féile an Phobail’s press officer, Jo Nawaz, said: “It wasn’t the festival’s intention to upset anyone. But it’s been the fastest-selling comedy gig that they have ever put on and that’s the simple fact of the matter.” An even simpler fact of the matter is that Nawaz mentioned ticket sales in the context of an issue of principle.

Joke cruelty

In “Joke cruelty and joke appreciation revisited”, published in

Humor: International Journal of Humor Research

(2006), the authors describe a study of 491 students at an American university who assessed 54 jokes about people with disabilities.

They found that an appreciation of disability humour was far less prevalent in females, and ask, “Why should cruelty be relevant only for females?” They speculate that males might have become desensitised because of a greater immersion in a culture of violence, and wonder if biological or hormonal factors have a role in females’ greater sensitivity to cruelty?

So what might motivate individuals such as Boyle to poke vulnerable people with verbal sticks? An interesting perspective is provided by a study in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (2009).

The authors investigated psychological aspects of 31 professional stand-up comedians, nine amateur comedians, 10 comedy writers and 400 college students.

Compared with college students, “professional and amateur stand-up comedians on average showed . . . lower conscientiousness, extraversion and agreeableness”.

The authors had previously shown that people who were not conscientious tended to have negative styles of humour, of the type that use “humour to disparage others and creating and enjoying hostile and aggressive humour”.

Unsuitable topics?

So, are Down syndrome and other conditions unsuitable topics for comedy? Not necessarily; it depends on whether one wishes to exploit or include.

For example, Australian stand-up comedian Mandy Nolan, in collaboration with academic Dr John Stevens, devised a community-based approach with dementia sufferers in which they were taught comedy techniques to encourage the use of humour in an inclusive way.

In 2011, after an eight-week training course, these individuals, their self-confidence suitably boosted, performed at a live event organised by Alzheimer's Australia in front of their carers and relatives. Dr John Stevens, writing about the Stand Up for Dementia project in the journal Dementia (2012), reported that dementia doesn't prevent participants laughing appropriately or successfully creating and performing comedy: "The data suggest that the programme may have therapeutic benefits as improvements in memory, learning, sociability, communication and self-esteem were demonstrated."

Evolutionary biologists tell us that laughter has its roots in defensive, predatory and fearful behaviour. For example, primates, such as the great apes and football hooligans, typically resort to so-called “open mouth” displays when they wish to signal aggression, fear or a willingness to bite.

And evidence of laughter's sinister aspect can be found in The Mountain People (1972), an account of anthropologist Colin M Turnbull's experience of living among the Ik people of Uganda between 1964 and 1967.

Drought and starvation had led to such a degeneration of Ik society that the most common reaction was laughter. Thus, Turnbull described how men would watch a child crawl towards a fire before bursting “into gay and happy laughter as it plunged a hand into the coals”.

According to Turnbull, Ik laughter filled “an indefinable absence of something that should have been there, perhaps in its place”.