A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people. Laughter is the best creative medicine. ~John Cleese

Creativity Prompt #30: We Are Waughing and Waughing and Waughing | 30-Day Creativity Challenge

Sunset (ca. 1905–1906) by John Singer Sargent. Original from The MET Museum.

Friends, it has been my great honor and privilege to share this past month of creativity with you. Your comments on these posts and in the chat, along with your emails and notes and messages on social media, have been gratifying, uplifting, and inspiring. I simply love the community we are building here—and I am so very grateful to all of you. Please do keep your comments and questions coming, for even though April is ending, our shared creativity is just beginning, and I would very much like to continue our conversation and, in fact, see it grow in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Meanwhile, I know I promised we would have a little silly fun with this final post and prompt of the 30-Day Creativity Challenge. Emphasis on silly. Because, as my mentor Paul Matthews taught me, playfulness is a portal to the profound. And there is, perhaps, no personal trait I value more today than my reclaimed ability to be playful, and, above all, to laugh. In fact, I laugh so much with our grandchildren that I sometimes think I might float away with happiness. Some of my greatest joy comes from sharing laughter with them and generating laughter for them. A treasured and oft repeated memory from the recent past is how our oldest grandchild, Esme, who was born with the capacity for great seriousness, began saying with glee, back when she was about eighteen months old, “Nana! We are waughing and waughing and waughing.”

But for so many years of my adolescence and young adulthood, laughter—the kind that is spontaneous, free flowing, and easy—was rare and elusive. I believe this was yet another unfortunate after effect of childhood sexual abuse. It put a shell around me. I was careful. I was controlled. I was closed off. Laughter, after all, is a release. But my natural operating mode was to hold tight. Often in my younger years, I’d find myself in groups of people, friends or family, who were laughing and laughing at this or that, while I looked on straight faced. How, I wondered, did everyone find everything so funny?

Then, very gradually, a shift that took place during my thirties and forties. It started as I settled into my second marriage, when I began healing certain deep layers of myself I hadn’t even know were deeply wounded. I found myself, as the healing happened, increasingly able to laugh. At the antics of children. At dumb jokes and memes. At comic scenes in movies. At the wiggly, jiggly, tail-wagging begging of my little dog. Interestingly, as spontaneous laughter erupted more easily, so did spontaneous tears. At the sweet things people write in birthday cards. At the curb when waving goodbye to my children. At the joy of singing “Country Roads” with a wholly sincere toddler grandchild. At the orange and pink blaze of sky during a July sunset. At the news that the baby turkey we’d been watching since it hatched had disappeared from its flock and died. Meanwhile, the more I laughed and cried, the more open and connected I felt to everyone and everything. And the more open to and connected I felt to the world, and to myself.

To laugh, it turns out, is transformative and transcendent.

But to laugh is, perhaps, not as common as I once assumed, back when I felt quite alone in being locked out of laughter. Apparently, adults in general don’t actually laugh very much at all—only about twelve times a day, research suggests. Whereas an average child laughs hundreds of times a day. Speaking from my own experience, more laughter is definitely better!

Because, as I said, as I began laughing more, I found myself becoming more open in other ways. It was a positive feedback loop: laughter bred openness, and opennes bred more laughter. And as I opened, my creative life expanded, too. Perhaps not coincidentally, I discovered the creativity writings of comedian and actor John Cleese, who has written and lectured extensively about how creativity requires us to leave the “closed mode” (in which we spend most of our lives) and enter instead what he calls “open mode.” Here’s how Cleese defines open mode:

The open mode is a relaxed, expansive, and less purposeful mode in which we’re probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective), and, consequently, more playful.

It’s a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.

I think we all know that laughter brings relaxation, and that humor makes us playful, yet how many times have important discussions been held where really original and creative ideas were desperately needed to solve important problems, but where humor was taboo because the subject being discussed was “so serious?”

The two most beautiful memorial services that I’ve ever attended both had a lot of humor, and it somehow freed us all, and made the services inspiring and cathartic.

Humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of playfulness, an essential part of the creativity that we need to solve problems, no matter how “serious” they may be.

Laughter, Cleese believes, is the fastest, easiest way for us to get into open mode. And he’s not alone when it comes to extolling laughter’s virtues for our well-being. An impressive body of research shows that laughter can stimulate healing gamma waves (similar to those seen in long-term meditators), reduce stress and anxiety, decrease pain, strengthen resilience, boost the immune system, and calm the autonomic nervous system. 

And here’s the best news of all: your body and mind do not know the difference between real laughter and simulated laughter. In other words, you can pretend to laugh, or fake laugh, and reap all the same benefits as you would by actually laughing. Furthermore, you might even prime yourself to spontaneously laugh more (for real) if you practice simulated laughter.

This article on simulated laughter explains some of the laughter research:

Researchers at Georgia State University did a study in which older people participated in LaughActive, a strength, balance, and flexibility workout that incorporated playful simulated laughter. As an article on Georgia State University News Hub explains, “In simulated laughter exercises, participants initially choose to laugh and go through the motions of laughing.” The article noted that “Simulated laughter techniques are based on knowledge that the body cannot distinguish between genuine laughter that might result from humor and laughter that is self-initiated as bodily exercise.”

Indeed, participants noted great health benefits from the self-induced laughter (the full study was published in the journal The Gerontologist). Huffington Post editors noticed similar benefits when they tried a Laughter Yoga course with Francine Shore, a certified laughter yoga teacher who runs The Laughter Yoga Salon in New York City. “The body doesn’t know the difference between simulated laughter and spontaneous laughter,” Shore told editor Sarah Bourassa. “The body is still going to respond and release the [feel good] endorphins and lower the stress hormones.”

And anyway, a great big fake belly laugh is so dang silly that you simply can’t even hope to take yourself seriously should you choose to attempt it—and that, ultimately, is also a gift: that we might hold ourselves and our lives with a bit more levity.

The prompt itself will give you six distinct, specific ways to practice simulated laughter. These are practices you can incorporate into your daily routine just like the attention exercise, or you can use it when you need it to jolt yourself out of a creative funk, bad mood, or bout of writer’s block. It’s a quick, free fix that can’t hurt and might help, and, if you practice it regularly, could boost your creative state longer term. Why not give it a try?

Creativity Prompt #30: We are Waughing And Waughing and Waughing