Laughter is more than frivolous fun - it's a survival skill. So say social scientists. Or anyone who has weathered a life crisis, like Louis C.K.
He suggests, if you meet someone, fall in love and get married. ". . . Then get divorced. Because that's the best part. Divorce is forever! It really actually is. Marriage is for how long you can hack it. But divorce just gets stronger, like a piece of oak. Nobody ever says 'oh, my divorce is falling apart, it's over, I can't take it.'"
Or Tig Notaro, who made breast cancer funny by revealing her diagnosis in her stand-up act. She later said on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, "I made so many jokes over the years about how small my chest was. I started to think maybe my boobs overheard me. And were like, 'You know what, we're sick of this. Let's kill her.' "
I remember getting a grim diagnosis 10 years ago from a gastroenterologist I called Dr Death (not to his face). I waited weeks for a second opinion, biding my time listening to the same comedy bit over and over again, nearly crying with laughter. Pop star and guest host on comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live Justin Timberlake was crooning about gift-wrapping his anatomy. Juvenile. Just the escape I needed.
Turns out, Dr Death was wrong. Justin may have been, too. But I love what his silly song brought me - a reprieve (I never did receive anything from JT in the post). A dance with the absurd. Or, as Charles Darwin said of humour, a "tickling of the mind".
Laughing, even in death's face, is what we do when we've run out tears, courage or stamina. My late aunt Cheryl and I sat together in a church pew during my grandmother's funeral, heads bowed, shoulders quaking in harmony.
People sitting behind us probably thought we were crying. Instead, we were trying to hide our giggles as one of Grandma's friends performed a warbly, off-key tribute, accompanied by a boom box. We knew we shouldn't laugh, which made us laugh harder.
For five years, I woke up at 2.30am each weekday to present a TV breakfast show.
I'm not sure I could've sustained the gig as long as I did without Charlie Laborte, our veteran camera operator and card-carrying stand-up comedian. He had left the national circuit to live in North Idaho and raise his son. Still, he exercised his comedy chops during commercial breaks, occasionally wielding nunchucks to imitate a cheap kung fu movie. Charlie's talents would be better appreciated in front of the camera, not behind it.
Laughter promotes attraction, social bonding and learning. It can dilate the narrowest of views, softening our armour while palpating our brains' frontal lobes.
Conventional wisdom and even scientific research suggest something is funny because it's true. Just ask John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Rhys Darby, Taika Waititi . . . or Facebook, where funny memes and videos get mega-shared.
My 11-year-old aspires to be class clown. I tell him his audience will decide what's funny.
"Stop calling me Butthead Nugget," I tell him. "Save it for your friends. And don't put other people down."
Master Eleven strikes comedy gold mostly when he's not digging. He was 6 when he asked me to revisit how babies were made. "How does the sperm get inside the woman - does she swallow it?" he asked. I nearly drove off the road.
New Zealand has poet laureates - what about a laugh laureate? Put a list of Kiwi comedians on the election ballot. Imagine the water cooler chat, televised debates, media interviews . . . More than ever, those of us uninspired, even saddened, by politics need a candidate whose sole promise is to tickle our funny bone.
Dawn Picken also writes for the Bay of Plenty Times Weekend and tutors at Toi Ohomai. She is a former TV journalist and marketing director who lives in Papamoa with her husband, two school-aged children and a dog named Ally.
