Laughter Makes Good Medicine

I don’t know about you but I can sure use a few laughs this week.

It’s not good to let ourselves stay depressed when things go wrong, it’s important to at least act happy, for others’ sakes if not our own.... a lesson I was painfully reminded of during our hospital nightmare a few weeks ago. Thank God for the gift of our sense of humor, for otherwise the weight of life's miseries would break us like a twig.

Since I’m the poster boy for being un-hip, I was probably the last guy on the Web to hear about the group Improv Everywhere a few weeks ago, and their large-scale practical jokes that have been regularly posted at Youtube. Being late to the party, I'm having a blast making up for lost time, devouring their grandiose practical jokes with gusto.

Practical jokes can easily turn creativity into cruelty, humor into sadism. When Improv Everywhere are at their best, though, they raise this craft into a fine art. It must be a pleasure to be on the receiving end of their more ingenious pranks.

Today Hot Air links to a new one, and it’s delightful medicine for a gloomy day packed with bad news. They really tap into our competitive male egos with this dream-come-true moment that should make everyone smile: the Improv Everywhere group make two teams of young Little League baseball players feel like they’ve hit the big time in “Best Game Ever”.



Improv Everywhere seems to be most known for their ambitious practical joke, “Frozen Grand Central”, where 200 people simultaneously stood still in the middle of New York’s Grand Central Station terminal for five minutes, to the amazement of their fellow travelers.

But my personal favorite remains their clever attempt to blur the lines between reality and classic Hollywood fantasy with an impromptu musical bursting out in a shopping mall’s food court, in their memorable “Food Court Musical”. There’s a wit and ingenuity on display in this one that never fails to cheer me up when I need cheering the most:



Humor is at its most helpful when you're not so much laughing **at** somebody, but laughing **with** somebody. Like our other senses of hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste, our sense of humor allows us to connect with the world around us, and plug in to the wonder that is the experience of being alive.

To live without a sense of humor must be a deadly handicap indeed...