Laughology

Director: Albert Nerenberg
Producers: Erin Faith Young, Jennifer St. John, Albert Nerenberg
Editor: Eamonn O'Connor
Cinematographer: Robin Bain

Official Selection: Hot Docs 2009
Official Selection: Just For Laughs Comedy Festival

Reviews:

“The screening had some of the loudest collective laughs I had ever heard in a movie,” “By the end, the crowd was in hysterics.”
- Gabor Pertic in AnE Vibe.

“Screamingly funny”
- The National Post

“Wonderfully funny.”
- Globe and Mail

“laughter has never been so thoroughly explored in a film as it is here.”
- Lia Granger, National Post

“revolutionary, highly recommended and a completely new way of looking at laughter.”
- The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

The National Post
by Lia Grainger
Posted: May 08, 2009, 9:23 PM

Albert Nerenberg's new documentary, Laughology, is screamingly funny – just don't call it a comedy. It's a personal and scientific look at the nature of laughter, and Nerenberg goes to great lengths to dispel the many misconceptions that we carry about what it means to laugh. Though it's an intrinsic part of each of our lives, laughter has never been so thoroughly explored in a film as it is here. We discussed the film, which plays tonight, and Nerenberg was chuckled the entire time.

Q. Why is it important that this story be told?
A. It starts with me having a daughter. My partner suddenly found out that her father had leukemia, six months into her pregnancy, and she became sick with stress. In the seventh month of her pregnancy he died, quite suddenly. She was totally in shock, and when the baby was born she developed postpartum depression, because one of the causes of PPD is being traumatized during the course of your pregnancy.

We were just not happy people at that time, and this weird little miracle occurred: at two months the baby starts to laugh, and not just a little bit, it laughs a lot. Laughs at us, laughs at the situation – just thinks everything is funny. Unintentionally we had performed a scientific experiment. We had created an atmosphere of gloom, and then this baby introduced laughter and joy into it because, as I would later discover, laughter is innate. I didn't know that. We refer to babies as bundles of joy, but we actually don't know why. It's because they demonstrate the innateness of laughter, and this exists across all cultures and civilizations. You'd think this would be well-known truth, but this information has been kind of cobbled together.

Q. What obstacles did you encounter during the planning and production of this film?
A. I think this is the first feature documentary in history about laughter, but when I told people that, they didn't believe me. There's a central confusion in Western culture that laughter and humour are the same thing. We think that the telling of jokes and humour, and the reward for that, which is laughter, are one and the same. However recently people started figuring out that laughter doesn't have anything to do with humour. It's a social behaviour, a bonding behaviour, a loving behaviour, and can also be vicious and sadistic behaviour, but it doesn't necessarily have to do with humour. So one of the obstacles was convincing people of that separation.

Q. Did your understanding of the subject change during the duration of the project?
A. Not just the film, me. I'm a completely different person now. I laugh way more, and I laugh at more things – I've lowered my standards of what's funny. When you find out the medical and intellectual and emotional benefits of laughter, you'll take every chance you can to laugh. My opinion of laughter changed, because like most people I thought it was a trivial accessory to language, but as you go deeper you discover that laughter itself is a language.

Q. Tell me something you learned while making this film that shocked you.
A. One of the big scenes is when we find this guy who is supposed to have the most contagious laugh in the world. That's a pretty big billing to give yourself, so everyone was wondering: is this for real? A scientific team that was studying laughter had heard about this man, Doug Collins, and they invited him to London to scan his brain and see if there was something different about him that could explain why he had this contagious laugh. But while we were shooting in London, everything went wrong. We were there during a heatwave and everyone was stressed out and exhausted. We thought he was going to be miserable, that the whole thing would be a disaster because the man with the most contagious laugh was going to be a big cranky grump. But he thought it was all incredibly funny, and when we told him how stressed we were, he thought it was really hilarious. The guy was a huge relief, and we discovered that he really was the genuine article.

Q. What doc do you wish you'd made?
A. The Cove. I love wild animal documentaries.

Q. Which film at this festival is on your must-see list?
A. The Red Chapel, and also Velcrow Ripper's film Fierce Light.

Q. Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock: how do you feel about their style of film-making?
A. It's fashionable to criticize Michael Moore. I've personally met the guy and he is a bit of a jerk. That said, those guys have improved the documentary for everyone.

Click here to watch a hilarious video of Doug Collins (the man with the contagious laugh) taking a tour of MTV and spreading the chuckles.

Laughology plays tonight at 7:30 at Toronto's Royal Cinema, and Sunday May 10th at 7:15 at the Isabel Bader Theatre as part of Hot Docs. For more information visit Hotdocs.ca.

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Globe and Mail
R.M. VAUGHAN
April 23, 2009 at 1:20 PM EDT

If anybody can make me believe in, well, maybe not believe, let's say tolerate, the latest alterna-health craze it will be the very earnest, very well informed, and wonderfully funny journalist/documentary filmmaker Albert Nerenberg. What makes him so convincing is that he himself appears to be the biggest skeptic of all.

Nerenberg's latest film, Laughology, is a free-association look at the burgeoning science of, and subsequent for-sale therapies based on "laughter studies." Not to be confused with humour studies, which have been around forever, laughter studies seek to find out what we communicate when we laugh, and if the physical activity of laughing is neurologically contagious; if indeed we are programmed to laugh when others around us laugh.

Like all such new sciences, laughter studies has bred a parallel field of laughter therapies, most of them tied into basic yoga practices. This is where I get off the laugh track, because I consider yoga little more than nap-time calisthenics, minus the nap, and strongly suspect it was invented by the Indians to torture the British. But Laughology makes an interesting case for the power of these new therapies by showing us their positive effects on Nerenberg himself, who sought out the world's leading laughologists after a series of devastating family losses left him, as he puts it, "without my laugh."

While my jury is still out on "laughing yoga" and "laugh parties", Laughology is a great primer on this growing field. And Nerenberg, acting as the film's narrator and lead foil, is as ingratiating a presence as Michael Moore used to be, before he became so crabby and thin.
Albert Nerenberg: ‘We’re born laughing, and then most of us reach adulthood and stop.’
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Albert Nerenberg: ‘We’re born laughing, and then most of us reach adulthood and stop.’

You've started your own laughing cure called Laughercize.

It was half a joke, but now it's become serious. There are a number of workshops going on —

I'm cringing here.

Ha! Really?

Sorry. Are you marketing this? Will there be seaweed T-shirts and organic mats?

No! No! The whole principle is not to be commercial, the same way as laughter yoga is not. But Laughercize is different from laughter yoga in that laughter yoga has a lot to do with being childlike, and I found that that scares people. A lot of people don't like what laughter yoga looks like. So, Laughercize is simply a series of triggers for contagious laughter, a series of exercises that usually puts people on the floor, literally, laughing. I had the privilege of doing all these laughter techniques all over the world, and I thought, there's still something that hasn't been done, which is sheer contagion.

How much of that contagion is social pressure? Nobody wants to be the buzz killer.

You're right, it is social pressure, but I would say the contagion has a number of factors, one of which can be social pressure — and one of the factors can simply be the sound. A weird example of that is when people hear friends laughing in another room, they often feel the need to rush and see — it's an evolutionary principle, the need to see that you are not being laughed at. Laughter has a very nasty side, which I didn't get into in the film, but there's a whole film to be made on the dark side of laughter.

You do touch in your film on the idea that laughter may have developed in early humans as a method of social control.

There's an interesting study that shows that women who are interested in men laugh at a different pitch, and the reason they do this is, again, social control. Because we're the only species that deals with strangers, laughter is one of the ways we placate strangers, and women do it in particular. They render strange men safe by getting them to laugh. They mould them into safety. So, laughter is a very manipulative behaviour, but I say mostly for the positive.

Is there a danger that by studying laughter we will undermine its charms and magic?

I think that actually applies more to humour. When you study humour, you tend to destroy the joke. But when you look more deeply into laughter, you tend to laugh. My experience making the film was not that I got smarter about laughter, but that I laugh way more than I did before.

Laughter is itself a mirrored behaviour. One reason we make ourselves laugh is we mirror our own laugh when we hear ourselves laughing — this does sound a bit like an obsession, or a kind of psychosis, but I think there's a breakthrough going on in these studies. Laughter is being liberated from humour, and laughter studies is an intensely democratic phenomenon, whereas humour has always been elitist and divisive.

And most people really have lost their laughter. We're born laughing, and then most of us reach adulthood and stop, or only laugh in tiny amounts.

All my quack bells went off when I watched the laugh doctors and laugh yoga teachers.

Me too! Quack bells! I really tried to be rigorous with them. One of the main proponents is a medical doctor, his roots in laughter studies are medical in nature, though they are overenthusiastic. And, early on, he had a choice about how commercial he wanted to go, but he deliberately did not copyright his practice, and he could charge much more for his workshops. He's not a wealthy man. And I've done laughter yoga, and it works.

Hmmm.

I can demonstrate it to you, make it simple and not mystical. When you inhale, you stimulate the part of your nervous system that makes you more anxious. When you exhale, you stimulate the opposite part, and it's relaxing. And laughter, by definition, is exhalation. We can try this simple game right now —

No.

I can show you.

Hell no.

Ha! Well, okay. Look, I can be serious and get stressed with the rest of them, but for me, laughter is also the expression of joy. It's that simple. You sure you don't want to try it?
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www.exclaim.ca
By Will Sloan
"snappily edited"