Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
Over the past year, health has been at the forefront of most of our minds, but did you know that laughter has a wealth of positive effects on your health? As well as relieving stress, a good fit of laughter causes deeper breathing, a healthier heart rate and relaxed muscles. Alongside these immediate benefits, laughter can also improve your immune system, decrease stress hormones, and aid healing. As Groucho Marx once said, “a clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast.”
After the year we have all had, we need a good laugh. While a good cathartic cry has its place in theatre, just ask Aristotle, the importance of humour and comedy can’t be overstated. Laughter draws us together and creates social bonds, and we are 30 times more likely to laugh when we are in the company of another person. It is sociable, stress-reducing and fun, exactly what we all need right now.
Though we can’t gather in auditoriums to laugh together, theatres across Ireland and beyond are still bringing comic fare to their audiences to keep us laughing through the hard times. If you want something to look forward to post-lockdown, there are a variety of stand-up shows rescheduled to later this year, including Callan’s Kicks Live at Dunamaise Arts Centre, Milton Jones and Des Bishop at the Town Hall Theatre Galway, and Sarah Millican, Katherine Ryan and a host of others at The Olympia Theatre, Dublin. Or, if you are looking for something to enjoy from the comfort of your own sitting room while in lockdown, there are plenty of streamed productions on offer. Fishamble Theatre Company is touring a streamed production of Eva O’Connor’s Mustard to theatres across the country. The Irish Times notes that in a script “densely packed with jokes and rich metaphors and [O’Connor] explores the issue of mental health with sensitivity and aplomb.” If graveyard humour is more your style, you can tune in to The Everyman Theatre’s production of A Skull in Connemara. Martin McDonagh’s rich script confronts death and rumours with dark, bizarre humour and rich dramatic writing, and I look forward to revisiting it in this new production.
Whether it’s tuning in to a live-streamed comic play, watching yet another repeat of your favourite sitcom, telling a joke over the dinner table or maybe even taking part in a laughter yoga session, make some space for a giggle, chortle, guffaw or chuckle this month. You’ll be helping yourself and others; we naturally laugh when someone else does. In one study, when someone was having a brain scan, not a very fun or funny activity, the sections of their brain involved in laughing still activated and sent signals to the facial muscles to join in when the person heard someone else laugh. As the song goes, don’t you know everyone wants to laugh? So have a giggle and spread the joy. To quote Charles Dickens, a great literary purveyor of wry humour, “there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”
