For people who grew up in the immediate shadow of the Second World War, entertainment was, unlike today, severely limited and therefore savoured whenever we were able to obtain it. Those of us who lived in the country mostly had no electricity and therefore, no radio. Moving pictures were a rare treat, to be taken in while visiting Kingston or the few big towns which had a cinema. Music was mostly live and therefore limited to occasions like a fair or concert or while visiting the home of some well-off person who had a piano or pump organ and someone to play it.

But we had something which made up for the shortage or lack of those things – reading. My parents encouraged us youngsters to read and set an example by themselves devouring books – not only for the particular purpose of learning and instruction, but also for the sheer entertainment and joy of it. Our reading was not limited to books but also to comics (when we could get our hands on them) and magazines, which filled the space occupied ubiquitously by television these days.

One of the magazines we read avidly was Reader’s Digest. Leaving aside the particular America-is-best bias infused by its founders (which in the end left us unscathed), the magazine seemed tailor-made for young readers. The articles were short, the book featured in each month’s issue was condensed to a manageable length, and the range of topics it tackled was breathtakingly wide. Best of all were the little features sprinkled throughout each issue. One of them still resonates in my mind – it presented a list of short, snappy jokes dug up from publications all over the place and from submissions by readers. It was titled “Laughter – the best medicine”.

The slogan contains more than a grain of truth – laughter does work wonders when you are feeling put upon, when it seems that the world doesn’t love you, when things are going all wrong, when the storm clouds are the greyest you’ve ever seen, when you want to crawl into a barrel and pull the lid over you.

The point was reinforced in an old movie I saw many years ago in which an idealistic young cinema director during the Great Depression in the United States wanted to make movies that would be relevant and would show the world just how hard it was to live as a person who fell on hard times and was at the bottom of the society.

So off this fellow went, donning the raggedy clothes of a street person and stripping himself of all identification except for a couple of vital pieces which he hid in his scruffy shoes. Early on in this adventure, someone stole his shoes while he slept in an open place and he was picked up by the unsympathetic police in one of their regular sweeps of the neighbourhood.

To the court he was just another vagrant cluttering up the cityscape and since he couldn’t prove who he was he had to join the other hapless street people in the very unpleasant world of a primitive prison. He worked on a chain gang, spending his days in back-breaking manual labour, sleeping in a crowded dormitory and eating absolutely basic meals in a scabby mess hall. There was only one bright spot in the entire week – Saturday night, when after dinner the inmates would be herded into the all-purpose meeting hall, and for a blessed hour or two, watch a movie.

In the darkness, while the creaky old projector spewed fleeting images on a makeshift screen fashioned from a bedsheet, the men were transported from their miserable existence to a different world. They were treated to a variety of fare, depending on what was currently available from the movie distributors. But by far the favourites on those life-affirming Saturday nights were the corniest of comedies. The stupider the jokes, the crazier the situations the actors portrayed, the more contrived the gags, the harder the men laughed.

For the limited periods when those images flickered across the screen, the inmates forgot where they were, forgot the dismal conditions they endured every day, forgot the bone-crushing labour, the searing heat, the chilling cold and the harsh inhumane treatment of the unforgiving guards. They laughed their heads off. They laughed until it hurt, and they laughed until tears filled their eyes. Then the film ran out, and reality set in once again.

Through one of those dramatic cinematic devices, our hero was discovered and released from prison. After he was re-introduced to the comfortable world he once knew, his colleagues asked what his experience had taught him and what kind of movies he would now make. He emphasised just how important those Saturday nights were to him and all the others and vowed that from then on he would shoot nothing but comedies.

I was reminded of the story this week as I read an item in my local newspaper about a scientific study that reinforces the old Reader’s Digest slogan. Robin Dunbar, a professor at Oxford University who specialises in evolutionary psychology, says that laughter does, indeed, ease pain. And it’s not because of the intellectual pleasure we get from a well-told joke or the peculiarity of a particular comedic situation. No; laughter actually raises our threshold of pain because it increases the amount of endorphins in our brains. Endorphins are chemical compounds which make us feel good and are also what cause drug addicts to continue coming back for more hits.

Perhaps the most celebrated effect of endorphins is what is called runner’s high. As the person engages in the sustained activity of running, the body releases lots of endorphins which overcome the pain which results from working the muscles too hard and even from the damage which such vigorous exercise often produces. Of course, we also get an endorphin rush from a delicious meal, affection and sexual activity.

Professor Dunbar and his colleagues conducted a variety of tests in which they inflicted pain or discomfort on groups of volunteers before and after exposing them to humorous situations. For example, the volunteers would fit each person with a sleeve used to cool wine bottles by deeply freezing it and record how long they could withstand the cold. Time after time they found that the subjects could last much longer after a period of good laughter. They would also tighten a blood-pressure cuff around a subject’s arm until it was unbearable. Again, after a bout of laughing, the subject would wait much longer before complaining.

When the researchers analysed the results of the studies, they found that laughing increased a person’s resistance to pain. But the same didn’t apply to simple good feelings arising in a group setting.

The studies are based on a long history of efforts to understand what laughter is and how it works. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually. That’s why we got interested in it”, Dunbar explains. The paper presenting the study’s findings states that although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has received less attention than it deserves in the scientific world. It suggests that laughter, through this endorphin-mediated opiate effect, may play a crucial role in social bonding.

Joseph Addison, who co-founded the English publication The Spectator in the 17th century, once remarked, “If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.” Dunbar agrees: “Laughter is an early mechanism to bond social groups. Primates use it.” He believes evolution may have favoured laughter because it helped bring human groups together, just like singing and dancing. Those activities, which are primarily physical, also produce endorphins, which is why we enjoy doing them.

One person who devoted his entire life to making others laugh – by the roles he played in a variety of pictures, by his wry observations of the world, by the many characters he transformed himself into employing a variety of accents and situations, was the Russian-English actor, Peter Ustinov. In 1977 Ustinov published an autobiography he called Dear Me, in which he observed: “Laughter … the most civilised music in the world.”

Amen to that!

keeble.mac@sympatico.ca