Laugh and the World Laughs With You

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A concrete Tyrannosaurus Rex stands at the entrance to Ambazari Garden in Nagpur, its expression locked in a grimace. I imagined it was reacting to the same sound I was hearing, a huge, primordial roar coming through a thick hedge. Entering the park, I emerged onto a large lawn. In front of me was a crowd of 500 people standing there laughing so hard that many were on the verge of collapse  It was 6:30 on a Sunday morning, and I could see nothing funny. In the middle of the crowd, a big man was shouting into a microphone, but since I don’t speak Marathi, I had no idea what he was saying. The atmosphere was electric. The next moment I was being chased by a gang of middle-aged men who were trying to tickle me. I was either going to stand and fight, run, or burst into laughter. For the next half hour, I laughed for every reason there is to laugh. I pretended to be an airplane, a monkey. I made imaginary phone calls. I bonded with a man whose laugh sounded like a walrus—he barked, I laughed. Then suddenly, at around 7 a.m., it all stopped. We walked to another lawn, bordered by large bougainvilleas, to be welcomed with garlands of flowers, food, and drink. I caught a lift back to my hotel with some of the laughers, and en route we pulled over for gas under a sign with a huge yellow arrow pointing to the exact geographic center of India. It seemed appropriate to laugh, so we got out and laughed until we couldn’t stand up. Some of the garage staff came over and joined in.

This was my first encounter with a Laughter Club. I’d come to India on assignment to photograph Gopinath Muthukad, a magician touring India. In the show’s finale that same evening, a local VIP was invited onstage to examine a box in which the magician was to be sawed in half. I recognized the VIP as one of the gang of ticklers who’d just chased me across the lawn.

I followed the magician on his tour and ended up laughing my way across India. It was an unexpected, madcap odyssey, and while on it I inadvertently discovered a new kind of vacation—laughter tourism. Laughter, I was tickled to learn, offers a different and stimulating way to see and experience Indian culture, a new twist on the old cliché of the Eastern journey of self-discovery—and it’s far more restorative than lying on a beach. My particular journey has resulted in my first film, a documentary called Laughter Club.

Laughter Clubs were born in the early hours of March 13, 1995, when a young Indian doctor named Madan Kataria was writing an article on the health benefits of laughter. Kataria had read the American writer Norman Cousins’s account of his recovery from the incurable degenerative disease ankylosing spondylitis. Cousins used a combination of laughter (from watching the Marx Brothers and Candid Camera reruns) and large doses of vitamin C. The thought struck Kataria, if laughter is so beneficial, why not do it deliberately? He acted immediately, going to a park near his home in Lokhandwala, Mumbai, and persuading four strangers to stand with him and laugh.

Soon a group of people were meeting there daily. At first they told jokes, but supplies quickly ran out, forcing them into increasingly blue humor, which upset the ladies present. Then Kataria had his second revelation: Why not abandon jokes altogether and laugh for no reason? A movement was born. In the years since then, Kataria’s simple idea has grown from four people to over 6,000 clubs worldwide, including over 100 in the United States, many in California. Oprah’s makeup artist tried it, and she featured him on her show (“The stress lifted from my soul,” he said).

In Kataria’s book Laugh for No Reason, he describes how he developed simple techniques for generating laughter. Instead of jokes, the clubs use physicality and playfulness. As I’d found out in Nagpur, laughter can be induced in a large group by doing silly things such as running around pretending to be airplanes or just by tickling. The key element is eye contact—look into the eyes of someone who’s laughing and just try not to laugh. In these conditions, laughter becomes involuntary and highly contagious. At first I found it hard to make a fool of myself in public, but I got used to it surprisingly quickly.