The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  Alvin Plucker, survivor of the USS Pueblo incident, reached that point—though it wasn’t while he was locked away in North Korea. It was after he returned home, in the subsequent decades as he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder because of what he’d been through. “It changed you,” he told me. “There was no more laugh in you.”

  Gizelle experienced that moment during the Holocaust. For her, the laughter came when there were flashes of relief—the time she spent at a work camp, the moments she spent with her sisters. But often, she says, the oppressive doom of Auschwitz killed all potential for humor. The thousands of gaunt faces, the omnipresent aura of dread, the terrible cold and hunger—it was too much for humor to survive.

  Pete has found this comedic point of no return in his research. When Hurricane Sandy first developed in the western Caribbean in late October 2012, he and his collaborators, Lawrence Williams and Caleb Warren, collected potentially humorous tweets from the Twitter account @AHurricaneSandy, such as “It’s RAINING men. Literally. I just picked up a bunch of dudes and threw them” and “OH SHIT JUST DESTROYED A STARBUCKS. NOW I’M A PUMPKIN SPICE HURRICANE.” Then, at various points as the hurricane approached the East Coast of the United States, came ashore, and subsided, online study participants rated the funniness of these tweets. The resulting humor ratings followed a curvilinear pattern. The day before the storm hit, participants scored the tweets the funniest. Humor ratings peaked again 36 days later, then dwindled as the catastrophe faded from memory. But in between these two comedic high points, as the hurricane made landfall and left millions without power, the nation reeling from billions of dollars in damages, and communities in mourning for the hundreds killed? Far fewer people found @AHurricaneSandy funny.10

  While our circumstances in Ramallah are far less dire than those in Hurricanes and POW camps, Pete and I seem to be approaching some sort of laughter-free zone, too. When we first arrived in Palestine, the quirks of our travel arrangements were entertaining, even comical. Like how every taxi driver insists his meter is broken, charging us a flat fee of twenty Israeli shekels, whether our destination is clear across town or just a few blocks away. Or how in our hotel room, the transparent glass wall separating the bathroom and the bedroom makes it all too easy for one of us to play “guess the body part” while the other is showering.

  It doesn’t help that we have a lot on our minds. We have been traveling a lot, and the time away from my family is getting to me. Juggling his research and teaching hasn’t been easy on Pete, either. For the first few days, we chuckled about our difficulties. These days, not so much.

  In Palestine, there seems to be at least one subject that’s off limits for comedy: Israeli settlers. The settlers are seen as usurpers, evicting Palestinians from their land; the situation is too troubling, too upsetting, to make light of. In all his years of Palestinian joke collecting, Kanaana insists, “I never came across jokes about Israeli settlers.”

  If that’s the case, there may be one place in the West Bank where the line has been crossed, where there is little to joke about. That place is Hebron, a city where Palestinians and Israeli settlers live side by troubled side.

  “You will never see anything like you see in Hebron,” Mehdawi, our nightlife guide, tells us during one of our evening excursions. “I am Palestinian, and I don’t understand it.”

  “Hebron?” adds Jacob Gough, amid the turmoil of the Freedom Theatre. “Oh, yeah. That place is really fucking crazy.”

  When we get to Hebron, after another long, stomach-churning taxi ride, Bashar Farashat is waiting for us. Farashat, who’d been recommended to us by a contact in Ramallah, flashes us a boyish smile and hands us his card. “International Trainer,” it reads. “Life skills and human development.” Business is surely going well for a professional problem-solver like Farashat. These days, Hebronites have a lot of problems that need solving.

  Hebron, the biggest city in the West Bank, has long been a center for trade and commerce. It’s also a spiritual hub. At the heart of the city lies the Cave of the Patriarchs, the supposed burial place of Abraham, the forefather of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That makes Hebron one of the holiest places on earth. It would make sense, therefore, for Hebron to be a beacon of industry and unity, a place where people could come together in recognition of their shared spiritual roots. Unfortunately, little in Hebron makes sense.

  Farashat offers to take us to the 2,000-year-old structure enclosing the Cave of the Patriarchs, which Muslims call the Ibrahimi Mosque. As he guides us through narrow, twisting alleyways that snake through Hebron’s old city, we pass underneath metal latticework overhead, a mesh ceiling littered from above with trash and bricks. Settlers who live in the buildings that line the alleyways toss detritus down upon those heading to the mosque, explains Farashat. The mesh stops litter, but not the dishwater, bleach, and other unpleasant liquids that sometimes rain down.

  Farashat’s tour of discord and sorrow continues. Here is where Palestinians were forced out of their homes to make room for Israeli settlers. The settlers said they were reclaiming land lost when they fled the city during the 1929 Hebron massacre, in which Arab rioters killed nearly 70 Jews. Here is the part of Hebron under Israeli military control, where thousands of soldiers protect 400 settlers. Here are the narrow passageways where Palestinian merchants hawk their wares—fresh spices and squirt guns and fragrant, de-skinned goat heads—ever since the settlers have shut down the city’s big central market.

  We reach the entrance to the Ibrahimi Mosque, where we’re greeted not by a majestic ancient gateway, but instead the somber turnstiles of a security checkpoint. Increased safety measures have been in place here since 1994, when an Israeli settler opened fire on Muslims praying at the mosque, killing 29 people.

  Past the checkpoint, we enter a sweltering courtyard. All around us, a sea of kneeling Muslims bow their heads in prayer toward rough-hewn temple walls dating back to the Roman king Herod. Helmeted Israeli soldiers brandish assault rifles and meander through the crowd. From stone minarets overhead, speakers boom out Arabic prayers. But then the prayers are drowned out by the sound of up-tempo Hasidic music pumping from a building across the way. It’s a Jewish event hall, and someone inside has decided that right now, in the middle of Ramadan prayers, is the perfect time to blast local Top 40 hits.

  While Farashat prays at the mosque, we procure a patch of shade beneath a nearby Palestinian shop awning and struggle to get our bearings. We notice on the street in front of us an approaching Israeli police officer, gun strapped to his belt. He makes a beeline for the Palestinian who owns the shop where we are. Pete and I brace for trouble.

  Instead, something unexpected happens. The two clasp hands and begin chatting in Arabic, yammering back and forth like old friends. Amazed, Pete snaps a photo of them together. Gesturing at Pete and his camera, the shopkeeper says something to the officer. “He says he’s going to post your photo on Facebook so all the officer’s colleagues can see it,” translates Farashat, who’s returned from prayer.

  “Oh, yeah?” retorts the policeman. “Then I’m going to print out a copy and fasten it above your shop and invite everybody from Fatah and Hamas to come see it!”

  The two double over in laughter. The Palestinian puts his hand around the Israeli and turns to us. “He is Palestinian in his heart, not in his uniform,” he says in English.

  We’re flabbergasted. Then we join in, laughing with relief. Everyone said we were nuts, looking for laughter in Palestine. But we proved them wrong. We found humor designed to ease people’s pain, a laughter shared by Palestinian street kids and Israeli Holocaust survivors alike. And we found humor that’s subversive, a way for people to stick it to their oppressors, whether they be gun-toting soldiers, hardline Islamists, or blundering officials.

  And, most incredibly, we’ve found humor in Hebron, like shoots of grass sprouting from scorched earth. And this humor is different. It’s not a weapon or a tool, a balm or a bludgeon for times of nee
d or turmoil. It’s simpler, more elemental—and possibly most resilient of all.

  It’s the basic, everyday laughter shared by policemen and shopkeepers, people bumping into each other as they go about their daily lives. Despite the years of discord, Israelis and Palestinians still inhabit the same world. And if they’re around each other enough, whether they like it or not, they’re going to laugh at many of the same things.

  Is it enough laughter to solve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis once and for all? No, but it’s a start—and in a place like Palestine, a little laughter goes a long way.

  8

  THE AMAZON

  Is laughter the best medicine?

  The cargo plane we’re sitting in lurches and bucks as it hits a patch of turbulence somewhere above the Andes Mountains. Mechanical whistles and squeals unlike any we’ve ever heard fill the long, hollow cargo hold. I tighten the safety belt strapping me to the cargo netting and distract myself by focusing on the tiny circle of sky I can see through one of the few windows in the fuselage. Pete slips on a sleeping mask and earphones to try to nap. I consider passing the time by chatting with my seatmates, but the deafening roar of the aircraft’s four propellers makes conversation difficult. Plus, I don’t know what to say to them. They’re all clowns.

  Next to me, a lady dressed as a giant bee fiddles with her red clown nose. Across the aisle, a young woman weaves rainbow-colored pipe cleaners into her dreadlocks. Bubbles float through the cargo hold, and a bright yellow smiley-face balloon bops here and there like we’re at a birthday party. Someone starts up a round of “Oh! Susanna,” and others join in on kazoos. Pete’s nap is a lost cause.

  We’re in a Peruvian Air Force cargo plane headed into the heart of the Amazon with 100 clowns, to answer a simple question: is laughter the best medicine? Yes, humor can tear nations apart and help inspire revolutions—but can it heal? Across the globe, careers have been launched, fortunes have been made, and medical practices have been transformed based on this idea—that laughter cures. To find out if that’s true, Pete and I are tagging along with the hospital-clown version of a biohazard team—an elite group of buffoons and pranksters who are planning to romp, frolic, and mime through one of the most beleaguered and destitute places on earth. They’re happy to have us along, on one condition: we have to become clowns ourselves.

  I cross my arms and huddle down in my seat, trying to keep warm. The Peruvian Air Force, as a gesture of goodwill, arranged transportation for us. But their method of transport leaves something to be desired. Sitting on the runway back in Lima, the plane’s cargo hold had been airless and stifling. Once airborne, the unheated cabin turns frigid, freezing our sweat-damp clothes. Around me, people pull out jackets and wool hats and huddle under swim towels. Shivering, I think about what my wife, Emily, said when I told her about this trip. She’d patted my arm and said, “You’re not going to be a good clown.” I haven’t mentioned her prediction to Pete. He’s been a bit distracted. Ever since we arrived in Peru a few days ago, he’s been focused on inserting the words “Lake Titicaca” into as many conversations as possible.

  With a stomach-roiling dip, the cargo plane begins its descent. The clowns begin to clap in unison. With a jolt and a cheer, the aircraft touches down. We’ve arrived in Iquitos, a city in the Peruvian rain forest. Upon landing, the cargo hold reverts to a sweltering oven. Stripping off sweaters and jackets, everyone piles out of the plane and into the Amazonian heat, the air thick with humidity. Waiting for our luggage in Iquitos’s bare-bones airport, our colleagues use the baggage carts as bobsleds, pushing each other across the concourse. Others are strumming on banjos and washboards. One clown takes a rubber pig he’s been pulling around on a leash and places it on the baggage carousel. Others coo and pet it lovingly as it glides by.

  “I’m really having fun,” exclaims Pete. I’m inclined to agree—but then again, we haven’t had to put on our clown suits yet.

  Our journey into the Amazon began several months earlier, when we were sitting in a grand hotel conference room in Chicago, Illinois, listening to a welcome speech presented by a sock puppet.

  “Welcome to the Annual Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference,” said the sock puppet, attached to the hand of AATH president Chip Lutz, sweeping its googly eyes around the several hundred people in attendance—men in loud Hawaiian shirts, women in sparkly flapper dresses. “The sock puppet has good eye contact,” noted Pete.

  Shenanigans like this are par for the course at the AATH conference, one of the oldest and largest gatherings associated with the therapeutic humor movement. At an evening cocktail reception, where we mingled with social workers, nurses, doctors, and professional speakers from all over the world, a typical icebreaker was, “Are you a Certified Laughter Leader?” Perusing the AATH conference store, we found table upon table covered with books like Laughter: The Drug of Choice, This Is Your Brain on Joy, and What’s So Funny about . . . Diabetes? Nearby stalls offered up water balloon launchers, light-up detachable ears, and bumper stickers that read, “Clowning for Jesus.” One afternoon, I stepped into a hotel elevator with a woman who had what looked like a butterfly sprouting from her head. “Nice wings,” I said. She looked at me like I was a pervert.

  Considering the current enthusiasm for therapeutic humor, it’s easy to forget that for most of recorded history, humor and health were considered to have nothing to do with one another. The ancient Greek founders of Western medicine had a whole lot to say about all sorts of therapeutic concepts, but were noticeably silent on laughter’s role in health, other than a stern warning that those plagued by too much mirth should take up a steady diet of boring lectures.1

  Everything changed, however, with the publication in 1979 of Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, journalist Norman Cousins’s account of laughing away a possibly fatal degenerative disease of the joints with a steady diet of Candid Camera and Marx Brothers films. As Cousins wrote in his bestseller, “I was greatly elated by the discovery that there is a physiologic basis for the ancient theory that laughter is good medicine.”2

  He wasn’t the only one excited about his discovery. Since then, a booming industry has sprung up around the idea of healthy humor. Clown programs, comedy carts, and humor rooms have become common hospital elements. A variety of therapeutic humor conferences and consulting businesses compete with AATH in the business of teaching people how to infuse trauma and tragedy with humor.

  And then there’s laughter yoga, a movement that now involves 16,000 laughter clubs in 72 countries, offering people the world over a chance to chuckle their way to physical and mental health. To experience laughter yoga for ourselves, Pete and I had stopped by one of the weekly meetings of the Denver Laughter Club. In a downtown Unitarian church, we joined a dozen or so club members being led by two so-called laughter leaders (“Jovial Jeff” and “Crazy Karen”) through a surreal chain of exercises. We began with “greeting laughter,” moving around the room and shaking each other’s hands with a hearty, forced chuckle. Then we carried on extended conversations in nothing but gibberish, and imitated lawn sprinklers while others pretended to run through our spray. Other drills followed—“bumper-car laughter,” “happy pills,” “laughter bombs”—each designed to encourage so much fake laughter that everyone broke down for real. At one point, I passed an imaginary laughter bong to a gray-haired grandmother, from which she took a deep drag and burst out cackling.

  “I do feel more energized than I did an hour ago,” admitted Pete when it was over. I, on the other hand, felt like I’d gone through a trial run for living in a loony bin. Still, the regulars, a welcoming and normal-seeming bunch, seemed to be getting a lot out of it. “You don’t need stand-up comedy or movies or plays,” one of them told us. “You can just laugh.”

  That’s the point, said Madan Kataria, the doctor who developed laughter yoga in 1995 and is now recognized internationally as the “Guru of Giggling.” When I reached him via Skype in his home base of Mumbai, In
dia, he told me, “Laughter was always conditional and dependent on jokes, comedy, life happenings. For the first time, in laughter yoga, laughter has been disconnected from our daily lives, because there are often not enough reasons to laugh. My discovery was that laughing without reason was enough to give people benefits.”

  According to Kataria, those benefits include decreased stress, better immune-system function, improved cardiovascular health, enhanced mental states, stronger social ties, and a more spiritual approach to life. Those are far from humor’s only purported medical benefits, which have expanded far beyond anything ever suggested by Cousins, who passed away in 1990. These days, you can find claims that laughter and humor relieve headaches, provide good exercise, ward off coughs and colds, lower blood pressure, prevent heart disease, mitigate arthritis pain, ameliorate ulcers, vanquish insomnia, combat allergies and asthma, prolong life spans, protect against AIDS, and help cure cancer.3 Some go so far as to suggest that clowning improves pregnancy rates for in vitro fertilization—although fair warning: if you try wearing a clown nose to bed, there might not be any fertilization.4

  As humor has become increasingly “healthy,” it’s also become increasingly lucrative. While Kataria stipulates that all laughter yoga clubs must be free, he makes money from laughter leader trainings and other related enterprises, and in Bangalore, India, he’s now building the first of what he hopes are many Laughter Universities. At the AATH conference in Chicago, the schedule was packed not just with seminars titled “How to Establish an Intergenerational Laughter Club” and “Holy Hysterics: Laughter and Joy in Your Community of Faith,” but also “How to Turn Laughter into Revenue.” Many of the attendees had figured out how to do that. At the conference’s ritzy awards dinner, a signed portrait of comedian Red Skelton—which resembled one of those bad clown paintings you find at the back of a thrift store—was auctioned off for more than $1,600.