Funny business

Stressed? Overworked? Depressed? Here's one solution you could try: join the Laughter Club. As Nick Duerden discovers, doing the funky chicken can be positively medicinal

I am 33 and three-quarter years old, and, on certain special occasions, I like to convince myself that I am a fully mature adult. This morning, however, I feel like anything but. Alongside approximately two dozen other card-carrying grown-ups, I am standing in a park, early on Sunday, with my hands tucked up tight underneath each armpit, and I am making chicken noises. More specifically, I am making chicken laughter noises. Under instruction, my elbows and knees are as loose as elastic and I am strutting haphazardly in ever-decreasing circles, the sole aim of this endeavour being to make my fellow happy clucker giggle hysterically. In any other circumstances, this would suggest incipient insanity. But this is Laughter Club, and I am laughing myself towards good health. Got that?

Laughter, they tell us, is the best medicine – "they" being the same kind of people, presumably, who insist that carrots aid night vision, and that spinach makes you grow big and strong. But while the Popeye effect after vegetable consumption always sounded particularly suspicious, there is now scientific proof to confirm that laughter really does keep us healthy and – as in the case of the American journalist who laughed himself free of cancer back in the 60s – assists in the curing of disease.

"Laughter also helps combat stress. It's fantastic exercise for your lungs, it removes everyday inhibitions and it encourages self-confidence." So says Julie Whitehead, a laughter "leader" living and operating in London. A yoga-teaching mother of two, Whitehead was moved to start her own laughter club after reading of their origins in India.

"I read about how they were becoming really popular over there, and then I began to pick up on the buzz revolving around stress these days. Newspapers are forever full of articles on stress and depression and overwork, and suddenly it seemed so obvious to me that we needed brightening up. You know, children laugh between three and 400 times a day. Adults manage just 15 times. We all love to laugh, right? It makes us feel great. Well, that's what we're trying to promote."

Laughter clubs were founded and developed in India in 1995, by a Bombay doctor called Madan Kataria. Convinced that laughter was effectively internal jogging, a key component to inner physical fitness alongside a more positive mental attitude, he conducted them in public areas, usually first thing in the morning before the heat of the day took hold. These sessions, he was convinced, would set people up for a better and more productive day's work.

Seven years on, there are now more than 800 such clubs across the subcontinent, and he has since developed them in America, Australia and across Europe, where they are becoming increasingly popular. In Norway last year, for example, one laughter event drew 10,000 people. The UK will be his final territory and, just possibly, the most difficult market to crack.

"In order for laughter clubs to take off over here," says Whitehead, "we have to battle against the traditional British reserve. We're not very fond of making public spectacles of ourselves, are we? So I think, initially at least, we may have a struggle in convincing people that they are incredibly beneficial and very social. But we're also optimistic, because almost everyone who attends them comes away with the same reaction – that they are wonderful!"

Back at the park on Sunday morning, desperately attempting to ignore the gawping looks from baffled onlookers, we form a large circle. We have come, this morning, from all over London, but not all of us are natives; Italy, Germany, Spain, Chile and India are also represented. Common to us all is a look of intrinsic fear: the knowledge that we shall make ourselves look really very silly indeed throughout the coming 60 minutes.

We begin by exercising our diaphragms and repeating the chant: hoho ha ha ha, hoho ha ha ha, and clapping our hands until they start to tingle. Then come the laughter exercises, which must be accompanied, at all times, with eye contact. We do the Roaring Lion (eyes peeled, tongue protruding, fingers splayed); the Fishermen's Tale (we've caught an imaginary fish, which gets bigger the louder we laugh); we talk gibberish, we pretend to receive an amusing mobile phone call, we make invisible milk-shakes. And then, the pièce de résistance: the aforementioned funky chicken.

By now, we have attracted quite a crowd. At one point, half-a-dozen youthful Scandinavians join in, as does a solitary German. The nearby football team pointedly ignore us, the way one would a religious cult; young children look on fearfully; and confused dogs give us the widest berth of all. But we no longer care about anyone else, for we are In The Moment.

After 45 minutes of forced, fake but merry laughter, we are told to lie down on the grass and gaze up at the sky above. Whitehead tells us that, soon, laughter will involuntarily bubble up from our stomachs. It seems unlikely somehow, but we do as instructed. For maybe five seconds, there is serene silence. Suddenly, one man begins to giggle, then guffaw. This starts a very rapid chain reaction, until everyone is laughing insanely. Beside me, my girlfriend has completely lost it. Her laughter is high-pitched and manic, and increasingly helpless. She sounds like Stan Laurel being tickled to death by that nasty woman in Way Out West. The tears are streaming from her eyes, her mouth is wide open, and she is clutching at her stomach. I barely recognise her.

This sustained, collective hilarity lasts almost 10 minutes. When we eventually rediscover composure, we sit up, dazed, exhausted and goofily happy. The eye contact comes easily now. A group of strangers no longer, we have shared something intimate and ridiculous together; it is difficult not to feel some kind of connection.

Half an hour later, my pink-faced girlfriend and I are walking towards a restaurant for lunch. A car passes us and the driver honks the horn. We look up. It is a family from the laughter club. Instead of waving and calling hello like normal people, they point and laugh, and we do similar in response, much to the evident bemusement of passers-by.

It's an image that stays with me long into the afternoon. Each time I think of it, I crease up again, feeling foolish and happy, and very nearly convinced of its medicinal qualities after all...

The next London Laughter Club session will take place on Clapham Common on 1 September. A seminar entitled The Power Of Laughter will take place on 12 and 13 October. For more information about either of these, or how to set up a laughter club of your own, call: 020-7733 2389 or e-mail: londonlaughter@aol.com