Most fascinating about Cousinn’s story though is the laughter. Despite intense pain and discomfort, Cousinn’s made a point of laughing so hard his stomach hurt during the early stages of his Marx brother ’s intervention, and this c“unquenchablee” laughter never failed to produce a strong reduction in his feelings of pain. Cousins goes on to mention many prominent thinkers throughout the ages who knew about the healing power of laughter, and this list includes Sir Frances Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, as well as the great Albert Schweitzer. This list could be much longer, and Cousins own story has given rise to many knew ways of thinking that helped contribute to the rise of phenomena such as the laughter club. Ultimately laughter may represent the rapture of the human spirit, and in finding this rapture we also find our way back to health. Norman Cousins certainly thought so, and his journey back to life through laughter is an inspiration to us all.
Norman Cousins was a famous American journalist. In 1964 he headed a cultural delegation to Russia and had a very stressful trip. Upon his return to the USA he became very sick and was quickly diagnosed with a fatal illness and given at best 6 months to live. He reasoned that if stress had made him sick, surely the opposite emotions would make him feel better. He checked himself out of hospital, rented a hotel room, hired a nurse to attend to him and started to watch everything funny he could find: Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, I Love Lucy, Candid Camera, etc. Within 2 weeks he was off his medication. Within 6 months he was back to work. He died 16 years later.
Cousin Norman, the son of my father's brother, had always represented living death for me. When I had last been in contact with him, Norman had been a middle-level civil servant responsible for the allocation of P--'s municipal tax revenues. He had possessed a faculty for total recall of the daily newspaper, pretending to do so in the name of Informed Citizenry, but in fact relishing victory over anyone so foolhardy as to disagree with him about what an article had said. Even as a young man, Norman had aspired to the title of Family Patriarch.
I have started with a list of very funny movies. Norman Cousins had fewer choices, and spent a lot of time watching the Marx Brother which he got from the NYC library and played on his huge projector. We have it a lot easier and I have added some of my favorite. Remember, adding yours here could lengthen someone's life!
