Mind Moves:It is good to laugh. It is fun. It is one of life's elixirs. It is invigorating, uplifting, mentally healing and restorative. One cannot remain angry with someone with whom one is sharing a laugh for, in the words of Victor Borge, "laughter is the shortest distance between two people".
Those who are able to dissolve anxiety with humour, see life through an appropriate comedic lens, have an invaluable internal mental health safety mechanism that has proven autoimmune and psychologically resistant benefits.
Laughter has well-documented physiological advantages and positive psychological consequences. When it arises spontaneously, it puts problems in perspective, dismantles aggression and provides instantaneous release from stress. It reduces prejudice and, when shared interculturally, has significant power in challenging racist beliefs.
Laughter is "sunshine in the house". It is "the tranquilliser with no side effects". It is most joyous when it is shared and most seductive when it occurs impulsively in another person and is participated in by a group. This contagion is evident, because who can remain impassive amid laughter?
Who, upon hearing unbridled laughter, is not curious to know its source and join its merriment? The cobwebs of caution, control and of gloomy discontent are shook by laughter: daunting tasks become manageable, socially strained moments are relieved, heated exchanges are given perspective and self-importance is reduced to its proper size.
Recognition of the medicinal benefits of laughter date back at least to King Solomon's declaration in Proverbs that "a cheerful heart is good medicine" and Seneca's statement that "it better befits a man to laugh at life than to lament over it".
There have also been many adherents of the role of laughter in physical recovery, among them French surgeon of the 1300s Henri de Mondeville. In the 1960s Dr Norman Cousins recognised the anaesthetic pain-relieving role of laughter and its importance in psychoneuroimmunology and mental health. Few could forget Hunter "Patch" Adams, made famous when his life and book Gesundheit: Good Health is A Laughing Matter were the template for the 1998 Tom Shadyac directed film Patch Adams starring Robin Williams.
While research in Harvard on laughter in psychotherapy recognises the degree to which it may provide a unique emotional empathic communication in that context, the therapeutic nuances deserve further study.
Laughing is a unique human behaviour and a complex gesture, says body-language expert Desmond Morris in his book Manwatching, involving no fewer than 12 observable signals at the height of its intensity. These include opening the mouth, sounds, wrinkling the nose, crinkling the corners of the eyes, raising shoulders, clasping the body and, in extreme fits of merriment, stamping the foot.
What other species emits the shy chuckle and the raucous, ribald chortle? There is the derogatory guffaw, the snigger, the mocking laugh - one of the cruelest forms of bullying - and the sinister chuckle of the manipulator. There is the uncontrollable, irrepressible laughter that suffuses on the most solemn of occasions when the more one tries to suppress it the more it escapes in undignified snorts, snuffles and unflattering facial contortions.
There is the embarrassed laugh and, most misunderstood of all, the nervous laugh of teenagers falsely accused of misdemeanour.
For some people, quirkiness induces laughter, others enjoy intellectual quips and puns while others find the source of their amusement in the physical and unpredictable.
Laughter also serves a sexual function. Research shows that men are attracted to women's laughter when it is "voiced" and musical and that women tend to laugh more in male company, while men laugh longer when sharing a joke with them.
There is special intimacy and bonding in humour, a meeting of minds, as we are touched by our human capacity to observe ourselves, with insight and empathy, and even in the midst of sadness laugh lightly together at life.
There are also times when laughter conceals deep despair, when laughter is "but an art to drown the outcry of the heart" when "no one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much". "If I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep," said Byron and it is this terrible dissonance between the outward laugh and the inner despair that makes the face of the clown emblematic of the tragicomedy of life and gives insight into how short-lived our lives are.
This is, perhaps, why Oscar Wilde uttered these profound words: "behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous but behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain unlike pleasure wears no mask."
But true laughter lights up darkness, challenges fear, unites participants in shared simple enjoyment of the ridiculous, the absurd, the bizarre, the ironic and the wonderful ludicrous complexities and coincidences in life.
So when circumstances provide us with a good laugh, it is time to capture that emotion, revel in it, share it, remember it and store it with the other laughs that have lit our lives.
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is director of the student counselling services in University College Dublin.