Introduction
In the long-popular television series Third Rock from the Sun, the three aliens who have come to Earth find themselves very puzzled by some strange behavior they observe among humans. The humans find or say something unexpected or incongruous and then emit this strange repetitive cackling noise that they call laughter. They seem to enjoy this and share it with friends whenever they can. Spock, the Vulcan from the famous Star Trek series, similarly found this part of human behavior very strange. We, of course, are fully aware of how good laughter feels and how it helps us cope with the trials of everyday life.
In this course, we will examine just how humor contributes to our physical health and wellness. There have been two general "waves" or thrusts in research on humor and health in the past 25 years. The first wave focused on general health-promoting mechanisms, while the second (more recent, covering only the past decade) wave has begun to examine the impact of humor and laughter on specific disease conditions. The companion to this course (Humor and Nursing II) discusses a) the use of humor in hospital and other healthcare settings, b) how humor helps cope with the stress that goes with nursing, and c) how to improve your own humor coping skills.
If you randomly select 100 people on the street and ask them if it's important to have a good sense of humor, most will say yes without hesitating. And yet the prevailing attitude toward humor was a negative one until the late 19th century.1 Until that point, laughter was commonly considered detrimental to physical and spiritual well being, as well as impolite and sinful by many.
A notable exception to this prevailing view was Henri de Mondeville, a 13th century surgeon, who argued that laughter facilitates recovery from surgery, while negative emotions slow recovery. Also, Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Reason, suggested that laughter improves health by restoring equilibrium to the body.
These views, along with people's own experience, eventually forged the current view that humor makes an important contribution to physical and mental health. The familiar phrase, "Laughter is the best medicine" - long a sought-out section of Readers Digest - reflects this folk wisdom. The health-promoting and healing power of humor was given its biggest boost by Norman Cousins' book, Anatomy of an Illness, published in 1979. He came down with a serious illness called ankylosing spondylitis, which caused him to be in constant pain. Cousins was aware of the evidence from psychosomatic research showing that negative emotions were harmful to one's health, so he reasoned that the opposite must also be true. That is, positive emotions should promote health and healing. There was no evidence for this idea at the time, and many even laughed at it.
Cousins' bold move was to check himself out of the hospital (with the consent of his doctors) and into a nearby hotel. A nurse was present full time. He invited friends over and spent a lot of time laughing while watching Candid Camera shows, Marx Brothers films and other comedy programs. Cousins beat the odds given to him and fully recovered.
There is no way of knowing the extent to which laughter contributed to Cousins' recovery, but the widespread attention devoted to his story had a tremendous impact in boosting the public's belief that humor and laughter have the power to heal. His book also stimulated new research on humor and health. This course summarizes those research findings.
