There are two people in this country who've taken the smile right off my face - well, two people in particular. And I'm not sure I can forgive them for that.
They are Albert Nerenberg and Jennifer Philbrook, a pair of well-meaning but misguided promoters and exploiters of laughter. And they must be stopped!
Nerenberg, who's recently produced a documentary studying how and why people laugh (which, as far as I'm concerned, is reason enough to dislike the man), now wants to compound his crime by staging something called the World Laughter Games next year in Toronto.
Of course, some of you will say that if there ever was a city that needed more laughter, surely it's Toronto. But we're not talking about real laughter here, not about laughter that comes from the mind by way of the belly. We're talking about the artificially-induced kind, the sort that's accidentally started by one person and spreads automatically to others like swine flu.
That's the kind Philbrook encourages in her "laughercize" courses. She thinks the Games would be "a fabulous idea, because we take ourselves pretty seriously."
Well, you do, Jennifer. That's for sure!
A friend of mine runs similar sessions in Thunder Bay. And when I noticed on a poster advertising them that she was credited with having "an Honorary Degree in Leisure" (appropriately enough, from a university in Newfoundland), I asked her if she'd been too lazy to attend classes and get her doctorate the usual way.
But most disturbing of all was the claim that her workshops would help people "laugh even without the need for stimulus".
"Can it be a good thing," I asked, "to have people running around giggling for no good reason?" Of course, if they do, they won't be running around loose for long.
No, it's enough of a nutty, nutty, tabloid world out there without the need to create classes or competitions or any other artificial means of getting us to laugh at it - or ourselves.
In fact, I'd strongly recommend to Albert and Jennifer that they take a quiet moment, sit down and ask themselves what the hell they were thinking when they proposed this idea, then have a good, honest chuckle and pick up and move on with their lives.
Because, take it from someone who's made a living from humour, there's nothing funny about laughter!
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