Laughter: best medicine or elaborate placebo?

A few weeks ago, during the Easter long weekend, I headed over to Melbourne to attend some gigs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as well as catch up with a few friends. Little did I know that when I left I was carrying the seeds of a potentially deadly illness. The sniffles that annoyed fellow passengers on the plane to Melbourne soon turned into a raging flu that put me out of action for much of the first couple of days of my stay. After trying various remedies for cold and flu, I eventually turned to laughter, the so-called "best medicine". So, how did I fare?

My first dose of laughter came in the form of Heath Franklin as Chopper Read. In Making Deadshits History, the satirical alter-ego of Chopper Read outlined in hilarious fashion what made people stupid and how we could eliminate these people from the world. I laughed hard, but I also coughed a whole lot, so this laughter technique didn't seem to be working.

I was feeling marginally better on day two, and after meeting some friends and consulting with a few Guitar Heroes, I continued with this potentially volatile experiment. That night we saw Arj Barker serve up some humour as only he could. I still wasn't feeling the best after the gig, but I was a bit more optimistic when I went to bed trying to cough my lungs out.

I looked less like a zombie the next morning and felt that this day may be the turning point in this illness. Perhaps the laughter was working after all. Kristen Schaal provided some incredibly awkward laughs and a ludicrously catchy tune, and it began to purge the sickness from my body. However, it was not enough. I needed just one more laugh-filled show.

This came in the form of comedy troupe called The Hound of the Baskervilles presenting Every Film Ever Made. It was easily the best show I saw in the entire festival, and was notable not only for the fact that it was consistently funny throughout the whole show, in which the trio performed famous scenes from as many films as they could think of, but also for the fact that there was a woman in the crowd who was laughing so hard you could swear she was on the brink of having a seizure. After the show, I felt revitalised. So much so that I decided to stay out and check out some comedians at the Hi-Fi Bar.

Sadly, most of the acts that went on stage were average to poor any my illness threatened to fight its way back. It was saved by the very last act, Canada's Glenn Wool, who made some clever quips about alcohol and religion. We also met some cool comedians who were just hanging around.

You would generally want to keep treating illnesses like this for a while after it has gone away to avoid it recurring, so I decided to continue my doses of laughter for the rest of my stay. On Easter Monday, we saw Mark Butler do a gig about Body Language, which was as entertaining as it was informative (infotainment, so to speak), and on my last day we saw Jason Byrne, who was worth seeing for the fact that he made fun of one of our friends.

All in all, I can report that I am now feeling (mostly) fine, and the flu has not come back to cause any further annoyance since the experimental treatment. However, is laughter the best medicine? Probably not, but it sure seemed to work for me.


Disclaimer: The author of this article does not endorse trying to use laughter as a cure for anything other than being emo. He especially does not recommend trying laughter to cure the following - AIDS, pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and Tom Cruise.