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The Healing Power of Laughter

Monday January 25 2016

The Very Rev Dr James Simpson reflects on the importance of humour.

Life is not just about work and duty. It is also about relaxation and fun.

Highly respected Christians like C S Lewis, Donald Soper, Harry Secombe and Tom Fleming all practised a religion that had a deep and joyous laugh in it. Their sense of humour permeated their whole outlook on life. They all believed that laughter is one of the few forms of contagion that we can rightly call a blessing.

The Rev Doyne Michie also believed that. As well as being a highly regarded American minister, he was also an excellent magician and entertainer. During his years as an army chaplain, he sometimes took along a few tricks when he visited seriously wounded soldiers in hospital.

During his own recovery from a heart attack, he persuaded his wife to bring him a deck of cards and his ‘multiplying rabbit trick’. The effect this fun had on his own recovery, and on his fellow patients in the cardiac unit, further convinced him, and many of the hospital staff, of the medical benefits of laughter therapy, and of the truth of what the writer of the Book of Proverbs had said thousands of years before, that ‘a merry heart doeth good like a medicine’.

On leaving hospital, Doyne offered his ‘Ministry of Laughter’ to the infirm, the elderly in hospitals, hospices and care homes, and to health care professionals. Hospital chaplains often contacted him.

In the children’s hospital in Atlanta, near to where the Rev Michie lived, his laughter therapy approach often worked its magic as he visited young patients. A few magic tricks, balloon animals, and a lot of hearty laughs helped reduce their anxiety levels. In a talk which the Rev Michie gave about fighting illness with laughter, he said: “It just may be that laughter is one of God’s great gifts to us. I personally have no hesitation in thinking of what I am trying to do as a ‘Ministry of Laughter.’” Today several US hospitals and health care facilities have laughter clinics.

Modern medicine has long known that negative emotions can precipitate or exacerbate illness, but recently physicians and psychiatrists have begun to explore the other side of the coin, what Aristotle hinted at more than 2000 years ago when he described the habit of laughter as a bodily exercise precious to health. Laughter is like jogging in the inside. It is good therapy. A hearty sustained laugh is one of the most positive and cheapest anxiety reducing experiences there is. It is a tranquiliser with no harmful side effects.

The film “Mary Poppins” dramatised laughter’s metaphoric lifting power. Though in real life we cannot laugh off gravity, we can laugh off gravitas, which literally means over-seriousness. Humour and laughter can ease the weight of life’s problems. They serve as shock absorbers, easing the bumps of life, which at some stage we all experience.

When my first grandchild Sally was born with Cystic Fibrosis, I decided to help by writing a little book of clerical humour and giving the royalties to support research into better treatment of the disease. For some reason Holy Wit took off, becoming for several months the best-seller in Scotland. Continuing to fundraise, there followed several other humorous books.

When visiting long-term patients in hospital I would give them a copy of one of these books. Although unable to concentrate to read a novel, they could pick up and read one or two of the short stories and humorous definitions. Many of these patients told me how the humorous stories had greatly brightened their stay in hospital.

When Sally was 11 she was invited to take part in a Blue Peter programme in the build up to Christmas, the aim of which was to raise funds to provide specialist Cystic Fibrosis nurses for remote parts of Britain. The crew informed Sally and her mother that they would be arriving 
at their home in Dornoch at 7am the to film her having her medicine, physiotherapy and setting off to school.

Being met on arrival with beautiful early morning sunshine, they suggested that instead they would take Sally and her little 14-year-old dog to the magnificent Dornoch beach and film her there. 
As Sally walked the dog, she was to tell the television audience how Cystic Fibrosis affected her physically and socially.

When the programme was screened my wife and
 I phoned Sally to say how well she had done. When I told her that my only worry was how her very elderly and frail wee dog would cope with all the national publicity, as quick as a flash she responded: “Yes Papa it is a worry. She has already had a phone call from one of the Queen’s corgis!” What a tremendous ally Sally’s sense of humour was in helping her cope with a very debilitating illness.

The Bible tells us that in heaven there will be no more sorrow or crying or pain. Thank goodness it does not say that about humour and laughter. How could we live without them.

Read the Very Rev Dr James Simpson every month in Life and Work. Subscribe here.

Dr Simpson’s books in aid of CF research are published by Steve Savage. They range in price from £5 to £7. They are available from most bookshops, or directly from the publisher at The Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane London E1 6QL, or from Dr Simpson.