“Haahaahaahaa”, pants prehistoric man, excitedly clubbing another man over the head. He’s having fun, the man is his friend, and this is the elemental sound of laughter. A couple of million years later, we find Albert sitting in his dressing gown in a grey city apartment. It’s a picture of stress and exhaustion broken only by the giggle of his baby daughter. “Who taught this baby to laugh?”, Albert demands. He hasn’t laughed in months and has all the symptoms of seriousness.

“He-he-he”, demonstrates the Indian doctor, who gave up traditional healing for laughter therapy, “try it!” Doctor Michael Miller has a more scientific approach: “when you take yourself too seriously, you begin to respond to stress in a more negative way that has been proven to harden arteries”. Both believe that laughter is not only an important social tool, confirming social alliance, but an instant stress-reliever.

“Hyuck, Hyuck, Hyuck”, laughs Doug Collins, the man with the most contagious laugh in the world. Albert has his friends in hysterics with jokes every day, But proof that we don’t decide to laugh, that it’s something in-built, is very new. “I’ve yet to come across anything that has a neural response that is more contagious”, says British doctor Sophie Scott. It’s the science behind the ‘laughter tracks’ we find on almost every comedy show.

“There’s the point laugh, the guffaw, the cry laugh, the Alabama-thigh-slapper...”. The laughers were hired in as professional laughers for several comedy shows during the 90s. Now out of work, they go to the laughing groups that have sprung up across the world in recent years. Some believe laughter gets them closer to God. “Jesus didn’t come to condemn. With a lot of religious people, the thinking is if I can keep them sad, I can keep them coming back”.

“Ho ho ho” - one of the Inuits who live on the incredibly harsh conditions of ‘Baffin Island’, is throat singing. “We were taught from a very young age to play laughing games. I think it’s the way we’ve survived”. And as the Inuits explode into laughter, Albert’s laugh comes back. “I have a message for the world”, says Doctor Kataria, “life is serious, death is serious, it’s time to take laughter seriously”.

"screamingly funny!" - THE NATIONAL POST

Meaning of Laugh Inc