Laughing at medical laughter and causing a healthy pandemic

Have you had a hearty laugh lately? If you have not, better hurry and find yourself a good dose of it, as medical science has “discovered” that laughter has significant health benefits for you. Centuries before this recent discovery, however, ancient oral performers had the saying (msemo in Kiswahili) that “laughter is the best medicine”.

The moral of the tale is that there is little that is really new under the sun. New techniques and technologies might help us to refine, reorganise and utilise the resources around us, but the likelihood is that some people have all along known about these resources. You may remember that, just as one prominent leader was saying that literature “cannot help us defeat Covid-19”, I was telling you of the many herbs recorded in Song of Lawino that had plausibly inspired modern researchers in their formulations of medications for respiratory complications.

The modern researchists into the health benefits of laughter offer fascinating descriptions of the release and movement of hormones in our bodies in the process of laughter and how they affect our physical and mental states. Several other details struck me in the pieces I was reading on the subject. I learnt, for example, that a child might laugh some 400 times during the course of one day, while we adults can barely manage 15 times. The savants also suggest that communal or shared laughter is more beneficial than solitary laughter.

Since, however, I do not have the scientific skills or tools to test these claims, I turned to my literary resources for some revelations about laughter. One of the best-known works about laughter is an early eighteenth century French text, commonly referred to as “Rire” (laugh or laughter). Its full title is Le rire de Voltaire (Voltaire’s laugh).

Voltaire, the author of the treatise, is one of the French Enlightenment philosophers, among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“man is born free but is everywhere in chains”) and René Descartes (“I think therefore I am”), who claimed to bring to human society the best in systematic thought.

Healthy sense of humour

In the case of laughter, a systematic investigation reveals that it is unique to human beings. Indeed, laughter, alongside language, is listed as a characteristic that distinguishes us from all other species. The Waganda say that the dog (and implicitly all other animals) gave up on laughter a long time ago.

Incidentally, one of my readers suggested that I should write exclusively on Kenyan affairs and Kenyan personalities. That made me laugh, because I know that that the Nation Media Group has never been myopically inward looking, ignoring even its nearest relatives in the East African Community. In any case, a Kenya wrapped up in itself would make a very small bundle, as novelist Somerset Maugham would put it.

Back to laughter and creative matters, we orature and literature practitioners invented comedy and farce, to make people laugh. I would hypothesise that the phenomenal growth of the stand-up comedy genre in our times (from our Churchills to the Trevor Noahs of international fame) points to a need for laughter in our intensely conflicted times. For laughter is, ultimately, a conflict resolution mechanism.

What the comedian or satirist does is to highlight the incongruity or the illogicality and conflicts within a situation. Our response to those highlighted incongruities is laughter, both as relief and as temporary escape from the absurdities. Francis Imbuga’s plays, for example, amuse us mostly with the highlighting of the clash between our high ideals of nationhood and the base failings of greed and selfishness. That is what Imbuga’s friend and colleague, John Ruganda, called his Telling the Truth Laughingly, in a book of that title.

I think that the creative artists’ concern with laughter, and humour in general, derives from their conviction that a healthy sense of humour is essential for survival and successful living. Humour does not necessarily mean uproarious laughter. Rather, it is a way of looking at life in a fairly detached and relaxed way. H. G. Wells, author of the famous science fiction War of the Worlds, suggests that humour would help human beings defeat any invasion by humourless beings from anywhere in the cosmos.

Best type of laughter

What creativity or art helps us to do is to reflect on ourselves and our activities. Most of the time we are busy organising ourselves, in politics and social identities, and producing and sharing our means of survival. These are what we call the “identitive”, regulative and productive aspects of culture. But the creative arts, including literature, belong to what we call the reflective aspect. Here we sort of stand back and look at ourselves and the way we go about our hectic identity, regulation and productive activities.

One constructive approach to this reflection is the sympathetically critical one, noting our weaknesses and shortcomings, and where feasible laughing about them. We can, thus, laugh at others, laugh with other or laugh at ourselves. I think the best type of laughter is that directed against ourselves There are many funny bits in us, contradictions, inconsistencies, even absurdities, as individuals and as societies, and having a good laugh at and about them is a positive step towards rectifying them, or at least coping with them.

Finally, we note two irresistible values about laughter. The first is that it is free, and the second is that it is contagious. There are few good things in today’s world that cost nothing. Health products, whether vaccines, medications or supplements, are among the most monetised commodities in the world. The coronavirus pandemic may have battered world economies, but pharmacology is certainly not the worst affected.

If you get an activity like laughter, with proven health benefits and costing nothing, is that not something to smile or even laugh about? Then you realise that if you laugh genuinely and sincerely, other people will laugh with you. You will infect others with your laughter, and who knows? We might have a healthy laughter pandemic one of these days.

Don’t laugh.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature.