Transcription of Laughter #29
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Dr. Lisa: Hello! This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast which is airing first on Sunday, April 1, 2012. Today’s show theme appropriately enough for April Fools’ Day which today is, is laughter. This is show number 29. Joining me in the studio is our co-host and wellness editor for Maine Magazine, Genevieve Morgan.
Genevieve: Hi Lisa!
Dr. Lisa: How are you today?
Genevieve: I’m great. I’m so excited about this show. I love to laugh.
Dr. Lisa: I love to laugh too and the people who are coming on are going to help us with this in various ways. We have director, writer and comedian Tim Farrell. We have John McLaughlin who is a spiritual counselor and holistic astrologer. Kind of interesting, right?
Genevieve: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: Then we also have Celine and Heather coming in from Glitterati which is the function that you’re going to tell us about also for the Telling Room.
Genevieve: It’s on April 5th and it’s a place to go and have a lot of fun. It’s an annual fund raising bash that we do every year and there’s live music by This Way, people get all dressed up, we go dance, and there is a lot of funny stuff that happens. Last year, we played with kind of glow in the dark big rubber balls. Do you remember that?
Dr. Lisa: Yes. It was at the space gallery last year, is that right?
Genevieve: It’s time to get goofy and glam.
Dr. Lisa: That’s April 5th which is going to be next week.
Genevieve: Yes, it’s coming soon, so get your tickets now.
Dr. Lisa: We thought that this would be appropriate because it’s April Fools’ Day of course, but laughter is not just about tricking people or fooling people. It also has very healing elements to it.
Genevieve: Yes, I think that laughing is the biggest stress release that you can imagine. Whenever I think of … When I’m in a funeral, I always start to laugh. I’m starting to laugh now, I guess I must be stressed. Yes, there’s this weird thing that happens almost when emotions get peaked that you get into a giggle fest. It happens even from day one practically.
Dr. Lisa: This is very true. I think some of us are more prone to laughing, maybe not completely appropriate time than others. Have you ever actually burst out in laughter in a funeral?
Genevieve: I have strange reactions. I have the opposite reaction when I’m … I haven’t actually laughed uproariously like big belly laughs, but I will often smile and kind of, not giggle but chuckle because I think the emotions are too intense.
Dr. Lisa: It really isn’t that you’re laughing per se, it’s that you have this sort of energetic something that kind of needs to come out. You feel like it’s sort of bubbling up from within.
Genevieve: Yeah, and I think that laughing is easier than crying sometimes for me, but I don’t know. I think everyone deals with their emotions in a different way, but laughter seems to be this universal human language that we all migrate towards. Everybody wants to do it, but sometimes it’s really hard especially right now.
Dr. Lisa: We know that there is a physiologic response that’s produced by laughter. Endorphins are released and people do actually feel better. People bond when it comes to laughing together, so there’s a shared something that happens as well.
Genevieve: How do you use laughter? What does laughter do for you?
Dr. Lisa: I love to laugh and I have a slightly different view of the world. I’m a western trained physician with a master’s in public health and two different residencies/fellowships and that’s all very serious. I’ve delivered babies, I’ve been in emergency rooms, and I’ve done all the very serious things, but I also trained in traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture and medical Qigong.
My Qigong master is a very funny and joyful guy. He is extremely learned and knowledgeable, but he finds the joy and humor in a lot of things. I think that when I study with him, it almost gave me permission to translate that into my practice. When I meet with my patients, we talk about good things and bad. We talk about things that are happy in their lives and not so much. We talk about how they are coping with their own lives.
I use it in my medical practice. I use it also personally as sort of my own personal coping strategy and I use it in my family with my children.
Genevieve: That’s actually a pretty holistic thing that you’re saying then that in any situation you can look for the bad or you can shift your perspective and look for the good, or look for the humor or look for the joy.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, and you can also attempt not to take yourself too seriously which I have to say that we do. In this culture, we really take ourselves very seriously. I’m just as … I’ve had a lot of transitions in my life over the last five years. I’ve have had the same sort of job loss and housing, financial stuff.
I’ve really experienced a lot of down days, but in the big picture, life is still pretty good and there’s a lot of times that I find myself still able to really laugh about some of the ridiculous things that I’ve done or said or situations I’ve been in. If you can maintain that sense of perspective, I think you will end up a healthier individual.
Genevieve: That’s a good note for today, April Fools’ Day, when things are turned topsy-turvy that you can try to turn your own emotions topsy-turvy too.
Dr. Lisa: Absolutely and I think this is what Tim, John, Celine and Heather, our guests that are coming up, are going to help us do.
Genevieve: Lighten up.
Dr. Lisa: Lighten up, absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is pleased to offer a segment we call Wellness Innovations sponsored by the University of New England. This wellness innovation comes from the New York Times.
In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Oxford University evolutionary psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter.
Pain came from a freezing wine sleeves slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise. The results published in the proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences showed that laughing increased pain resistance, whereas simple good feeling in a group setting did not.
For more information on laughter as a wellness innovation, visit doctorlisa.org.
Speaker 1: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at une.edu.
Dr. Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we have the great privilege of speaking with writer, director and comedian Tim Farrell who’s already laughing and I’m not sure why.
Tim: A great privilege.
Dr. Lisa: Maybe it’s not a privilege, I’m not sure.
Tim: I know, I just put money in the meter and I walked through the door and I’m here.
Dr. Lisa: We think it’s a privilege. We’re happy to have you.
Tim: Thank you very much. I’m glad to very here.
Dr. Lisa: And Genevieve Morgan is sitting next to me.
Genevieve: Hi Tim! Yeah, it’s nice to be laughing before 9:00 in the morning.
Tim: Yes, and you are actually sitting next to each other. You’re not making that up.
Dr. Lisa: That’s true and we’re taping this of course in March, although this is airing on April Fools’ Day. We were talking about how maybe the joke is on you or maybe there’s some pressure to be funny today, I don’t know, but don’t feel any pressure from us.
Tim: I don’t feel any pressure, but the fact that it’s airing on April Fools’ Day which I call Amateur Day … That’s when everyone is aloud on some level to do something funny sometimes to the point of cruelty.
Dr. Lisa: What are you going to do on April … You can’t tell us I guess. When people are listening, then they’ll know.
Tim: I have a couple of friends and we are very competitive there in the comedy world and that is one of those days where good luck, don’t answer the phone, don’t believe anything that anyone says to you.
Dr. Lisa: That’s fascinating actually because I think of Valentine’s Day as for lovers and Christmas is for children, and so here we go, it’s April Fools’ Day and it’s for comedians. I had never thought of that before.
Tim: For some definitely. Again, there’s a long tradition. There are some of friends of mine that are trying to one up one another and they’ll put off the date also. It doesn’t necessarily have to be April 1st. Anyway, within that week, there’s a margin of error for April Fools’.
Genevieve: It’s probably funnier if it comes when you’re not expecting it.
Tim: Exactly.
Dr. Lisa: Tim, for over 20 years, you have “saved” sales people through CEOs, trainers, and teachers from delivering tedium to the world. Do you think the world is tedious?
Tim: No, but I … Again, this is a side-business to my core competency which is comedy, but I got in to the presentation skills business because I did a lot of corporate comedy and I had to sit around and watch a lot of presentations for over 15 years. They tend to be tedious.
My job with presenters is really how to streamline it, how to add a little humor and deliver the message with a little more punch.
Dr. Lisa: You were actually kind of saving yourself, because if you had to sit through these presentations, you wanted to hear them be more interesting.
Tim: That’s the approach too as I’ve tried to put myself in the audience’s position. The classic is a speaker that gets up and says, “I have 15 points to cover today.” You’re automatically just going, “Okay, he’s on number two, now he’s in number three.” That’s tedious right there. That’s just a speaker’s tick is what I call it.
Why are you adding a number to this presentation? Why are you indicating that you are going to cover 15 things? That seems like an awful lot of content.
Genevieve: As a writer, one of the hardest things to do is be funny, right funny, and I think a lot of people think that being funny is a natural characteristic, but you’ve made a big career out of making people … Having people understand that anyone can be funny. It’s not a natural characteristic.
Tim: Especially when I’m teaching stand-up comedy which sounds pretty pretentious unto itself, when I ran an ad or in some way promote a comedy workshop, stand-up comedy workshop, people call and they say, “My friends tell me I’m funny. My family tells me I’m funny. All my coworkers invite me to the party. They always want me to come along.”
That’s valid. The trick is that you’re funny in a social situation and there’s give and take and there’s no pressure. No one in the social situation says, “Okay Lisa is going to talk and you guys all need to put $5 down on the table and you all need to have two drinks and you really can’t talk. Only Lisa can talk.”
Dr. Lisa: Tim you’ve been performing in front of audiences since you were high school. You went from college to off-Broadway and you also teach workshops with students whose names are pretty familiar to I think most of our listeners, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, Ray Romano. You’ve written for Comedy Central.
Tim: How old am I?
Genevieve: You’re in good company here.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah and you’ve written for Nickelodeon. I guess you are. You must be of a certain age because you’ve been around long enough to be teaching these comics, but it sounds like this goes far back for you. How did you learn that you yourself were funny? How old were you? How did this come about?
Tim: I’m the classic. I don’t come from a horrible … There’s a myth that stand-up is you have to gone through some torturous childhood and something awful has taken place in your life. I came from a very supportive family, but humor was the driving force in our family and it was also a great mechanism for me to get through school.
I was not a sporty guy. I was one of the smaller ones in the class and humor was my way of coping. Funny attracted people. I developed that pretty quickly which is I knew that that would work for me. In a way, I was allowed to be in any of the clicks in high school, definitely … There are certain groups.
I take it back to my family and I remember distinctly like my dad saying, “Come in and watch this guy on Carson.” My dad was just a working collar guy and he loved comedy. It just translated. Bob Newhart, Bill Cosby, he had all the classics. I don’t think he was preparing me for life of comedy. It was just sort of organic to our family.
Genevieve: What makes people life? This is a show about laughter.
Tim: Laughter, it’s very subjective. What makes you laugh may not make Lisa laugh. How do you identify that? That’s really difficult. There’s so many different ways that people perceive what is funny and how they digest it, but it’s been around forever. It’s very primal, there’s no doubt about it.
I think the caveman, whoever could tell the best story about hunting down the woolly mammoth was the winner at night. What makes someone laugh, you tell me. It’s different for everyone. There are certain common denominators out there. There are certain comedians and certain styles that people gravitate to.
Specifically, really it’s on an individual basis. What makes you laugh? I can’t answer that. It’s different for everyone.
Dr. Lisa: Yet, there are some comedians whose names you have mentioned, Bill Cosby and Johnny Carson and I don’t know that he would have considered himself a comedian per se, but there is a common denominator. What is that?
Tim: That is truth. The bottom line is truth. On some level that you recognize some ounce, some nugget of truth in what they’re saying. What they’ve done is they’ve taken it and they’ve exploited it. They have exaggerated it, but you recognize something.
Cosby is a perfect example. He was a storyteller. His stories were really … They’re just chalk full of, “I recognize that. Oh my gosh, that’s something that I’ve always thought about.” The bottom line is that there’s some sort of truth to it that you recognize, that you acknowledge.
Then it really is just about how his voice is so strong and his point of view is so strong that you go for the ride with him. He’s probably one of the … Fundamentally, one of the greatest out there. He’s textbook, you can teach by his chops. His style, his meter, but his storytelling. It’s really basically story … He tells great stories.
Genevieve: It seems as if laughter and humor and comedy when it’s delivering that truth, people are more open to it. It’s more accessible. It’s the pill on the meatball. You can tell the joke and it has a negative truth in it and you might not have been willing to accept it when it was told straightforwardly, but if it’s funny like in Jon Stewart’s case, all of a sudden it becomes illuminated.
Tim: The thing about stand-up is you’re allowed to say things that we don’t say … We all have this voice. We all have this comedy voice. It’s a running commentary that we have going all day long, but we don’t say it out loud because it’s socially awkward and unacceptable.
If you put it in the context of stand-up or performing, you’re allowed then to let that voice speak and we want to hear it, we really do. It exposes sort of the foibles of our day, minutiae of our day. It’s really interesting when you think about it. But also like the hypocrisy of some of the things that go on in the world. It’s a sword, it really is. It levels the playing field.
Genevieve: Sounds like a great stress-reducer huh Lisa?
Dr. Lisa: Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of medicine that suggests that … A lot of medical research that suggest that laughter actually is a very healing tool.
Tim: That expression laugh … People say laughter is the best medicine and they’ve done … You probably have seen some of the research, they’ve done a lot of research on the mechanism of laughing and what it does bringing oxygen to the brain, going back to presentation skills.
No matter what you’re pitching, you’re speaking to a group of 1000 sales reps for AIG or whatever, it doesn’t matter is that if you can bring humor to your presentation, the information sticks. They retain more information because humor has this other chemical gets secreted in your brain and it becomes more memorable.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that having this exposure to laughter in your life and comedy in your life has kept you healthy?
Tim: Yes. There’s no doubt about it. You go through things in life and I know in our family like right now, we have some things going on, and at the end of the day, if we’re able to at least laugh a little bit about it and put it in perspective, it’s certainly I think makes it easier.
We just gravitate to it. It’s a way to sort of cope with life. This is a crazy world we live in and laughing a little bit about it, nothing wrong with that.
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Dr. Lisa: Do you think that the rise in popularity of comedians coincided with some sort of societal shift? I remember that there was sort of this pre-Cosby, pre-George Carlin. There’s always been stand-up comedy I assume, of some form, but I really do think that it’s sort of grabbed us in maybe 1980s. Do you think that there was a shift that occurred?
Tim: Yes, I think you can go back to where this started and that is that there were two, suddenly two comedy channels, the Hot Channel and the Comedy Channel and then they merged and became Comedy Central. Comedy Central all of a sudden became like the place where stand-up was full time. It wasn’t just late night anymore.
I still think that you can chart this by where we are in our culture especially in television. Right now, the top six programs in the last two weeks have been comedies. That speaks to … You can go back way back historically and watch how we are like financially in this country or how we are emotionally in this country.
Then what are the top … Whoever says they don’t watch TV, they’re liars. I’m sorry, we watch a lot of TV and there’s a lot of program out there that is comedy, but historically when times are bad, comedy goes up. When things are going well, then drama is and cop shows become the fodder.
A social issue right now that reality TV is really popular. I find that very comical, but reality TV, if you think about it, it’s a chance to judge. You sit in your room and you watch other people in reality and you judge them. I find that kind of comical too.
Dr. Lisa: Is it also the ability to read people that causes comedians to do well?
Tim: Yes and again that comes with experience. The more stage time you have and the more content you have, the more of a catalog you have to fall back on. The other is, really, what’s the venue. If you’re working in a comedy club where they’re serving drinks and it’s a $12 cover, that’s a completely different audience. It’s someone that just paid $45 to see you in a 3000 seat venue and you’re there for one hour. There’s a huge difference there.
Genevieve: It’s a real artistic process though. It sounds a lot like creating a piece of music or writing a short story that you set out that piece of truth. You decorate it in a way and then you revise it and revise it and revise it.
Tim: It’s always a work in progress and that’s the thing. No matter what is that everything evolves no matter what. You’ve got certain jokes that work, certain content that works but you’re always … If you’re good, you’re really always reevaluating. Or at some point, you’re getting rid of it.
I’ve run this long enough, but I think you hit something there. That it is musical. There is a musical quality to comedy specially in stand-up, there’s a meter to it, there’s a rhythm to it, and there’s actually … I would say there are notes …
Genevieve: And I want to get back to that one point that you said about people having five minutes of content in them that what you’re really doing in your classes is a process of self-discovery, because I think that that’s where that truth piece comes out because you have to able to look hard at your own story and figure out what the universal element is in it.
Tim: Again, that’s probably day one for me which is they want to know where am I going to get my material. You just don’t pull it out of thin air and I walk through, I said, “What do you do? What’s your life? What do you do for a living?” These people that come to these workshops, they have lives.
It’s not like New York or everyone wants to be in the business. This is a great town because everyone that comes to workshop, they have a life, they have a job, they have a family and that alone right there, what they do in their family.
I go back to how do they view the world, what for them is exciting, what for them drives them crazy. For everyone, it’s something else. For one person, going to the bank is the bane of their resistance. For another person, going grocery … The simplest things.
Genevieve: So do people come out of your classes with better understanding of themselves?
Tim: Yes. I don’t want to overstate it, but there’s definitely … I want to take this workshop because I’ve always wanted to try this. I check it off my list of things that I always wanted to do. Number one, they walk away with a great respect for the art form itself. I think a lot of them come in and thinking this is going to be …
“I’m funny. My friends told me I’m funny and I come to find out.” That doesn’t exactly get you through this process. There’s a lot of work involved. That’s the other thing too. After seven weeks, we do a graduation show and the audience comes in and they don’t get a memo about the arduous journey that the workshoppers took to get to this five minutes. It’s really hard work to grind out five minutes. That’s a lot of words and that’s a lot of time.
In the old days when I would run a workshop, the first night I just have someone stand on stage for five minutes and say nothing. At first, everyone starts to giggle a little bit and then it just gets completely awkward. Five minutes is a long time and you can get a lot done in five minutes. You can cover a lot of territory in five minutes.
Dr. Lisa: One thing I’m interested in is the fact that the people that I see as patients who often outwardly are very funny and outgoing and the life of the party, when I see them as patients, there can be a world of pain behind that funny self that’s sort of outward …
Tim: I call that the tears behind the laughter.
Dr. Lisa: Is that common?
Tim: It is common. It’s not just the comedy world. I think you’re talking about life. Again, going back to comedy as a coping mechanism and it’s a good public face to put on. I think some people have … You meet them and you’re more entrenched in the deeper part of their lives, but on the surface, I think a lot of people can walk through life.
You can think they’re gregarious and they’re very funny, but once you start to dig down, they’ve got some issues like everyone. I think it’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way to put on a public face.
Dr. Lisa: Tim, how can people find out more about the work that you do?
Tim: I’m kind of like word of mouth. I have a …
Dr. Lisa: So we’re just going to send this out into the universe and people are going to somehow find you?
Tim: Call Tim. I have a website. I have for my business Before You Speak and I have a little website for the stand-up comedy workshop. It’s called The Comedy Workshop.
Dr. Lisa: So that is where people can go? If they want to get in their computer and find you?
Tim: Right or as my mom said you can Google me. You can find me on the Google.
Genevieve: Can you leave us with a joke? Do you have any in your repertoire?
Dr. Lisa: And of course, there’s no pressure.
Genevieve: Yeah, hear to five minutes.
Tim: This is not a joke, this is really the truth when I was coming this morning which was for me was really early and I’m coming across the bridge from South Portland and traffic has to merge and you have to behave like a human being. Gentleman, I’m being kind.
This gentleman cut me off and as he cut me off I’ve had to swerve and he got in front of me and slowed down and his license plate … I’m not making this up. Said, “Coexist.”
Dr. Lisa: I love that. That’s the way he’s choosing to coexist. He gets to be the dominant coexistor apparently.
Tim: But that’s comedy in motion right there. I didn’t have to … That really did happen this morning. That’s a lot of comedy right there. This morning that happened.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah, you can’t make it up. Tim, thank you so much for coming in. We appreciate you’re being with us today.
Tim: Thank you. Are we ending now?
Genevieve: We’re ending.
Tim: The joke is ending.
Genevieve: April Fool.
Speaker 1: Our bodies are often the first indicators that something isn’t quite working. Are you having difficulty sleeping, anxiety, or chronic pain issues? Maybe you’ve had a job loss, divorce or recent empty nest. Dr. Lisa specializes in helping people through times of change and inspiring individuals to create joyful sustainable lives.
Visit doctorlisa.org for more information on her Yarmouth, Maine medical practice and schedule your office visit or phone consult today.
Dr. Lisa: Our next guest is John McLaughlin who has a lot of interesting initials behind his name, AM, DRS. He has a lot of interesting training. He’s going to talk to us about laughter, specifically laughter and healing, laughter and health. John you practiced in Portland now, but you traveled all over the world to get your training.
At first, I want you to tell me, what AM? Is that a master’s?
John: It’s a master’s degree. It’s the way Harvard writes its master’s degree is reverse from an MA.
Dr. Lisa: Actually Bowdoin does that too. Genevieve both have … Genevieve is sitting right next to me.
Genevieve: Hi John. So nice to see you.
Dr. Lisa: She both and I both have an AB as oppose to a BA, a bachelor’s.
John: I have an AB as well. We’re reading this of certain institution.
Dr. Lisa: They’re just tough to be special, but DRS. Tell me what DRS stands from.
John: That’s a doctorandus which is from Amsterdam.
Dr. Lisa: Which is one of the places you studied, the Netherlands.
John: Yup, it was in the Netherlands. It was really great to study in another language because it gave one a remarkable perspective. All this is a different way of thinking and I was reading last night of an interesting book on turbulence in weather and the writer whose writing in first person mentions the fact that he would only work with another meteorologist who is German if they were allowed to speak German together.
This really had to do with the way in which our English language is always straight forward and German and Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have a lot of reflection back on ourselves which is really what a lot of humor is about. When we can begin to laugh at ourselves, we are well on our way to getting better.
It’s just simple as that, because most of us take things very, very seriously particularly ourselves.
Dr. Lisa: And our stories.
John: And our stories to which we deeply attached. We go to therapists and we’re not going to let go with our favorite neurosis. To some extent, speaking and writing in another language double backs on itself, German and Dutch do particularly,altered the way in which I saw life in a very major way.
At the same time, I was taking the train down from Amsterdam to Florence and studying with this remarkable Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli who developed psychosynthesis. My American head was being unscrewed and I sort of let it happen. I said, “Oh well, this is different.”
Dr. Lisa: And psychosynthesis, that is your field. That’s your field of interest.
John: That’s is the way I most like working with people as well as meditation.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me what that is.
John: Basically, it’s a depth psychology that is done in a very, very deep trans state. We call that hypnotherapy in this country, but I’ve been coaching a couple of hypnotherapists recently and the training in this country which I’ve also been though doesn’t go to the depth of trance that allows really ancient, personally ancient injuries to the come to the surface.
I worked with a woman recently who went and continuing to do work who went back into a point at eight months old where she was heaved against a wall and the wall became bloody. Her father threw her at the wall and just terrible, terrible stuff, and she was able to release all of this material shrieking and screaming and the whole body shaking.
The way that she came out of it, her whole being had gotten so much lighter because we carry this stuff somatically. One of the laughter muscles are on the sides of the body. This week, we’re going to have some laughter because I talked with her last night.
The laughter muscles, when they start releasing, release the material that we hold inside ourselves, mostly around our viscera. I don’t know whether you remember the issue of Norman Cousins who was …
Genevieve: Yes he was the pioneer of laughter therapy.
John: Yes. He was diagnosed with very serious cancer and what he did was watch two or three movies a day that were really, really funny. When our medical profession … In fact, all of the scientific professions, we cannot use anecdotal evidence just for the list or to define anecdotal evidence.
It’s Norman Cousins’ listing to funny movies and year and a half later not having any cancer. You can’t do a double blind study with that.
Genevieve: It won’t work for everybody.
John: No, it wouldn’t work and it wouldn’t necessarily work for anybody, but more with Norman Cousins, so you can’t come to a conclusion, but boy laughter makes us feel better. Often, in working with people, I will give them peculiar assignment to wake up in the morning in that sort of half state between sleep and waking and roll over if they need to go immediately to the bathroom, put their hands on their tummies and start to laugh for five minutes.
Genevieve: Just laugh even if they don’t … Nothing is funny? Even if they feel like crying, just laugh?
John: Yeah you just laugh.
Genevieve: Fake laugh?
John: Fake laugh. First five to seven to ten days, one feels like a real idiot. Absolute idiot. I can remember when I did it because I did two 30 day periods of this and the first time I did it, I thought, “What is going on? Is this …” The fact is I was living in the house up in Robin Hood that I had and we were all doing it. It was a community.
Dr. Lisa: That’s what I was going to ask. You wake up in the morning and you laugh, but what if other people around you are not doing what you’re doing and …
John: That’s one of the things that we can laugh at.
Dr. Lisa: That’s one of the things that’s kind of ridiculous is that you’re sitting there laughing by yourself?
John: That’s part of it because if we can allow ourselves to see our ridiculousness and laugh about it, then we begin to go to free. Basically, I’ve always had the premise that not until we can stand up in front of 500 people and be seen as absolute idiots, clowns, do we begin to go free.
When we can do that, then we have our freedom because we say, “Oh guess what? I just am who I am.”
Dr. Lisa: So this is the identification from the ego self that needs to happen?
John: Yes, exactly. That is the central premise of all of the eastern paths. The whole Buddhist path is … The core is this identification that I have an ego, I have a mind, I have emotions, I have a body, but I am not them. If we actually look rather analytically, we’re always able to observe ourselves.
When we start identifying with the observer or what is often called a witness, we start going free and we see, “Up there goes John, he’s doing that number again. Up there goes his mind …”
Genevieve: There’s that same mistake, “Oh yeah, I’m doing it.”
John: That’s it Gen. That’s the, “Oh God, I’m doing that again.” If we’ve started to laugh at ourselves and we’ve done our 30 days of ridiculous laughter, then we can approach that habitual mind patterning and we can say, “Oh guess what, he’s off on it or she’s off on it.” We can start referring to ourselves with a sort of distancing which is not a pathological condition.
It’s really sort of saying, “Oh well, don’t take it all too seriously. It’s going to go pretty fast.”
Dr. Lisa: So as long as you don’t speak about yourself in the third person, it’s okay to look at yourself from the third person.
John: Yes and sometimes actually particularly when I’m working with people, I will encourage them to refer to themselves in that third person way.
Dr. Lisa: I just meant in polite companies so people don’t think you’re somehow to the manner born or the royal we.
John: That would be Downton Abbey or upstairs, downstairs. No, no royal we. If we look at ourselves, we’re probably usually many different people depending on the day and depending on the people that we’re with.
Speaker 1: We’ll return to our interview after acknowledging the following generous sponsors. Akari, an urban sanctuary of beauty, wellness and style located on Middle Street in Portland, Maine’s old port. Follow them on Facebook and learn more about their new boutique and Medispa at akaribeauty.com.
And by Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth Maine, makers of Dr. John’s Brain-ol-a Cereal. Find them on the web at orthopedicspecialistsme.com.
Dr. Lisa: I have a strange questions for you. Are humans the only species that laugh? Do monkeys?
John: Monkeys seem to do this funny chirping laughter and there are times when the primates seem to have some sort of sense of humor or perspective, but I don’t think any other animals do.
Dr. Lisa: So it is a part of consciousness then.
John: It’s part of consciousness. It releases us from attachment and that’s the real issue. The degree to which most of us are attached to whatever it is we’re attached to, we grab a hold of … We wonder why we get tired and our hands get stiff. When we release that, we start to be able to breath.
Often, when I work with people, they will stop their breath when the emotions and the feelings really start coming to the surface and I’ll say, “Breathe, breathe.” Then that starts to open up the body, and laughter does the same thing. It’s these lateral muscles which also get worked in pilates. Pilates, do they get worked.
Dr. Lisa: I think I’d rather laugh given the choice between that and pilates. Don’t tell the pilates people who are listening.
John: The bad pilates will help the laughter.
Dr. Lisa: Okay, so you get to do both then?
John: You get to do both.
Dr. Lisa: And laugh at yourself while you’re doing it?
John: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it that you decided to go towards laughter yourself, in your own life? I guess you went to Harvard, that’s pretty serious and straight forward.
John: Really, really funny depending on where you look at it.
Dr. Lisa: But why did you need laughter in your life for healing?
John: I was raised in rather serious household. My mother was a writer, published poet and essays and things of that sort. My father was on the supreme court in Massachusetts and came from long line of jurists and this was a household where we had very intense discussions at dinner. Laughter was fairly rare.
My father have wonderful sense of humor which my mother disapproved mind you so that it would have been of a cap on things. I went through Quaker Boarding School. The Quakers take themselves very, very seriously.
Genevieve: Quaker meeting has begun, no more laughter, no more fun.
John: Exactly. Though it was a wonderful introduction to meditation because we started every school day with 15 minutes of absolute silence. You can imagine in boys’ school absolute silence for 15 minutes of the beginning of the day in a room that was from the 1780s. The floors were creaking. Forget it kids.
There were times when I would just start to giggle and I realized, “Oh maybe this is a whole part of this path,” that is we get a little quiet and decide ourselves we get a little perspective. I didn’t have the words for it then.
That was some of it. Then my undergraduate work was at Oberlin. And Oberlin was a congregational college and we were still having to go to chapel on Thursdays and chapel was very serious. I said, “Ugh, this is all too much,” and I started doing theater.
I only played one serious role, a lot of very, very funny roles, but the one serious role was Tiresias in Oedipus Rex. That also sort of opened up something in me that people call psychic but this sort of “Oh, I just saw certain things and I started realizing certain things.”
The comic roles were just wonderful and at the time I had a very Boston accent and the drama coach at Oberlin said, “We’ve got to do something with your accent. You cannot take that accent out on to the stage.” We managed sort of semi to get rid of it and my first role was the barber at the very beginning of Matchmaker.
I had seven measly lines. I got eight major laughs every evening and applause as I got off the stage. I said, “Okay, this is where I belong which is a little something funny.” I got this six foot four frame or six foot three and pretty skinny and right from the beginning, this is a clown figure, so let’s not take it too seriously.
I think here, our culture tends particularly in this time to be a very, very serious culture we’re living in. I had drinks last night with another therapist and her husband and my partner and another friend. She looked and we’ve started talking about the clientele that she’s getting.
She said, “Most of them have major injuries as a result of working in corporate America or in the business environment that we’re working in where people are not cared for. They’re just throwaways.” We had a lot of laughter last night. It was a lot of laugher because sort of we had to take that standing back and say, “Oh well, we can’t get too serious about it, but we have to be aware of it.”
The laughter also brings awareness, because only when we distance ourselves somewhat from what’s going on can we get aware of what’s really happening inside ourselves and what’s really happening outside ourselves. If we’re too attached, we don’t see it. We don’t have any perspective.
Dr. Lisa: We love to speak with you for so much longer. I feel like we’ve just started this conversation and maybe we’ll have you back. It’s been great to talk with you. How can people find out more about you John or how can they reach you?
John: I have a phone number. May I give that out over the air?
Dr. Lisa: Yes.
John: It’s 522-4465. You can find me on Facebook and you can contact me that way. I do not have a website. I do have email which is simply [email protected].
Dr. Lisa: Are you accepting new patients?
John: Yes.
Dr. Lisa: And we will put this all on the Dr. Lisa website, so people will be able to get in touch and learn how to laugh and disintegrate from their selves and all the goods things that you offer.
John: And reintegrate.
Dr. Lisa: That’s important but we want to …
John: It’s really putting ourselves back together, but in a different way.
Dr. Lisa: Living?
John: Yeah living. Dare to live.
Dr. Lisa: With that, we will leave you and thanks so much for coming in.
John: Thank you Lisa. Thank you Gen.
Speaker 1: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors. Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at ourheritage.com.
And by Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial with offices in Yarmouth, Maine. The Shepard Financial Team is there to help you evolve with your money. For more information on Shepard Financial’s refreshing perspective on investing, please email Tom at Shepardfinancialmaine.com.
Dr. Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’ve had the good fortune of being associated with the telling room from the very beginning. Our very first show featured an interview with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc who was, I believe the outgoing president, director …?
Genevieve: Executive director.
Dr. Lisa: Executive director. Genevieve Morgan is correcting me because she is very involved with the telling room herself, but he is one of our first guests, so we’re circling back around about a half a year later and we’re about to celebrate an interesting and exciting event on April 5th. I’m going to bring in our Glitterati guests to talk about it.
This is Glitterati, the event on April 5th to raise money for the Telling Room. Thank you for coming in today.
Celine: Thank you for having us.
Heather: Thank you.
Dr. Lisa: Your names are …
Heather: I’m Heather Davis. I’m the executive director of the Telling Room.
Celine: And I’m Celine Kuhn, I’m the vice president of the Telling Room board.
Dr. Lisa: Genevieve has given us a little bit of background sort of over time about the Telling Room and Gibson came in in the first episode of the first podcast. It’s still out there that people can listen to if they go to iTunes. I’d like a little bit more background about the Telling Room.
Celine: The Telling Room was founded in 2004 by three local writers, Sara Corbett, Mike Paternitti, and Susan Conley and they have incredibly successful careers as writers for the New York Times Magazine, GQ. They’re all published authors and they travel the world to gather stories, but they make their home in Portland, Maine.
What they decided was that was that they wanted to be more involved in their community and so they gathered together a group of volunteer writers and educators to go into the schools and start offering free writing programs. From there, they developed a number of different project that engaged local kids in telling their stories, publishing them, and then giving those kids a real audience for their work by touring their stories around.
They had gallery presentations that toured around and they did public readings of their work. From there, the telling room was born. We became a non-profit in 2006 and we’ve grown from having one staff person and a very small budget to now serving 2000 students between the ages of 6 and 18 every year. We have eight staff members and we offer a variety of free creative writing and arts programs to the community.
Genevieve: Glitterati is on April 5th, tell us what we’re going to find out, what we’re going to do.
Celine: This is our second annual bash. We started offering it last year and it’s sort of the Telling Room’s first major fundraiser for its program. It’s called Giltterati, a Sparkling Literary Ball. We’re going to feature many notable authors. We’re going to have great live music, catering by Blue Elephants.
The event takes place at the Masonic Temple on Congress Street which is a really incredible building if you haven’t been there. It’s on the historic register. Throughout the evening, there will be tours of the space and where the Masons meet which is very mysterious and interesting.
Heather: It has an amphitheater that can seat 700 people. Original furniture, and artwork, and marble.
Dr. Lisa: The Masons is very sort of Da Vinci Code at best.
Heather: Yeah exactly. Secret handshakes.
Genevieve: What is going to happen at Glitterati aside from the live music? We have an auction coming, right?
Celine: We have a pre-party for authors that will take place at 5:30 and people can mingle with the authors. Do you want to name a few?
Heather: Some of the authors that are coming are Mary Polls who’s a local writer and Ron Currie, Jr. who published a book called Everything Matters. It’s a really fantastic book. We’ll have … Who else is on our list?
Genevieve: There’s Claire Messud and James Wood. Sarah Braunstein who is a favorite of Maine Magazine. She and I write from Maine Magazine and a number of others.
Heather: And her husband Justin Tussing who’s a really accomplished author is going to be there as well. Jaed Coffin, he’s the writer living in Brunswick who has a new memoir coming out soon but he is known for writing about a year that he spent in Thailand getting to know his ancestry.
And there’s many more authors but they are going to be there all throughout the nights and mingle with and like Celine said, we’re having a special champagne reception where if you’re really have been dying to ask these writers a few questions about how they became writers or their lives, that’s a great chance to come and mingle with them. Really in an intimate setting.
Genevieve: And there’s another connection too which is Glitterati is sponsored by Maine Magazine.
Dr. Lisa: And I was at Glitterati last year and you did a really great job. I think I remember that there were actually some of the writers there as well. Is that going to happen this year?
Heather: Absolutely.
Dr. Lisa: So some of the young writers, not just the published writers.
Heather: We have a couple of goals with Glitterati. One is to throw an incredible party. We want everyone to come whether they know what the Telling Room is or not to have a really great experience.
Genevieve: Writers throw amazing parties. It started with Ernest Hemingway and it was continuing today in Portland Maine.
Celine: Yes, absolutely. We want to throw a great party, but also it is for a cause. It is to support our mission. We want some of our students to take to the stage to remind party goers why they’re there. It’s because of people coming to parties like this and spending their time and investing their resources, bidding on the auction, buying tickets, having this great experience.
We take that and that goes directly towards being able to offer our programs to kids all of which are free. It’s a big, it’s an important party for us.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out more about the Telling Room?
Celine: They can visit thetellingroom.org.
Dr. Lisa: And do you have a Facebook page?
Celine: We do have a Facebook page.
Heather: We do. We have a young savvy staff, so we’re everywhere. We have not only a Facebook page, but a Twitter feed, a Pinterest site, a Flickr page and a YouTube channel. It’s almost embarrassing but we sort of have the whole spectrum of social media and on the homepage of tellingroom.org. You can find really quick easy buttons to each of those things.
Genevieve: Will you speak really briefly about the movie that David Michael John is making? Because you can see that on YouTube and on Facebook.
Heather: This year, we have a program called Young Writers and Leaders. That’s a nine month long program for refugee and immigrant teenagers. They’re with us twice a week after school during the entire school year. Part of what they do is they complete a major piece of writing for publication and they also complete another creative project, because we really like to help kids tell stories in a variety of media which is really helpful of going into the 21st century. They need that broad skill set.
Last year, they created a whole repertoire of hip hop songs and spoken word that they performed and this year they’re making a feel with a local filmmaker named David Michael John. He made a movie called My Heart is an Idiot that’s starting to be shown nationally and features Ira Glass and other notable people talking about love.
He is really generously giving a lot of his time to work with our students this year. The project is also being overseen by Sonya Tomlinson, a local hip hop artist and educator. They’re working with the kids to tell their stories about coming to Maine and sort of what myths they held about America and about Maine and what myths Maine and America might have held about them.
They’re each creating a short segment that will blend together in a feature length film that we’re going to premier on May 24th at Space Gallery.
Dr. Lisa: So that will be after the April Glitterati event?
Heather: It will be after the April Glitterati event, but some of those Young Writers and Leaders students will be at Glitterati either reading or talking about their work, so that’s going to be really exciting.
Genevieve: Celine, how do we buy tickets to Glitterati?
Celine: You can buy tickets at tellingroom.org or you can access it through brownpapertickets.com and just type in Glitterati.
Genevieve: And on the Facebook page?
Heather: We had a Glitterati event set up on Facebook and there are links to buy tickets there as well, but it all comes back to tellingroom.org and the brownpaperticket site.
Dr. Lisa: Celine and Heather, thank you so much for coming in today and talking to us about the Telling Room and Glitterati and all the projects you’re doing. I suspect that the reach is going to continue out into the community and we appreciate the work you’re doing.
Celine: That’s our pleasure. Thank you for having us.
Heather: Yeah, thank you for having us.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 29, Laughter which aired first on Sunday, April 1st, 2012. Today’s guests included writer, director and comedian Tim Farrell, John McLaughlin spiritual counselor and holistic astrologer, and Celine Kuhn and Heather Davis from the Telling Room discussing the event coming up very soon, Glitterati.
These guests gave us their perspective on the importance of laughter and telling stories and generally having a sense of lightness and joy in one’s life. For more information about these guests, please go to doctorlisa.org. To download this podcast or any other of our past 28 podcasts, we suggest that you go to iTunes, Dr. Lisa Belisle and maybe even sign up as a subscriber.
We appreciate you’re joining us every week on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast and we hope that you will be inspired to go out and laugh and find joy in your own worlds. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being a part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Mike Lepage and Beth Franklin at RE/MAX Heritage; Robin Hodgskin at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney; Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine; Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial; Booth; UNE, the University of New England; and Akari.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Editorial content produced by Chris Kast, and Genevieve Morgan. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Jane Pate.
For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org and tune in every Sunday at 11am for the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour on WLOB Portland, Maine 1310 AM or streaming WLOBradio.com.
Show summaries are available at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.