Last week I was hanging out with my friends Mitch and Andy at their Love Shack in Carlsbad, Californee.
It’s a wonderful place to stay and they treat me like royalty.
Well, they don’t carry me around from room to room on a chair while fanning me with palm fronds, but one morning I got up real early and the coffee pot was all prepped and waiting to be turned on.
How lovely! And thoughtful. But one of my favorite things about visiting my amigos?
Mitch has a great laugh.
Infectious. Genuine. Almost boisterous.
It’s a legendary laugh. Everyone who knows Mitch knows about her sudden eruptions of elation.
Mitch is a merry soul! It's a pleasure to be around such cheerfulness.
Especially when your leg is broken!
I was sitting in the living room early one morning, drinking coffee while icing and elevating my fractured fibula when I heard Mitch laughing all the way from the other side of the house.
She was chuckling really loud. Guffawing. Six or seven bursts in a row, starting high, ending low. It's a unique laugh. Singular!
She’d hoot and holler for ten seconds or so. Then stop. Then start up again a few seconds later. Explosive, loud, contagious. Her laugh alone had me laughing out loud.
All by myself.
I was cracking up! And I didn’t even know what Mitch was laughing about. Just the sound of Mitch's outrageous outbursts was enough to make me giggle.
And that got me thinking, which is a bit risky because of my ailment. Attention Surplus Syndrome. You know the acronym. I think about things for too long.
As my ASS kicked in, I began thinking, if the sound of laughter is enough to make me laugh, maybe you don't need jokes or funny stories to crack you up.
Maybe you don't necessarily need a knee-slapper, a rib-tickler, or a back-smacker to get you chuckling.
Then theoretically—stay with me on this one Slim Folks—theoretically, you and your friends could get together and just start chuckling and chortling about nothing.
I say “get together” because if you’re walking down the street all by yourself and start laughing uncontrollably and hysterically about nothing that might not be real…funny.
It might be kinda creepy.
But what if you did it in a group? Got your peeps together and just laughed for the sake of laughing?
I grabbed my computer and Googled “group laughter.”
Well, I’ll be…
I found a thing called Laughter Yoga. Seriously. I spit on the floor!
It’s called hasyayoga, and there are more than 5,000 clubs around the world that get together and laugh about nothing. No joke!
People join these clubs to chuckle and chortle. Hoot and holler. Snort and snicker. About nothing. No jokes. No funny stories. They just gather and giggle for no good reason.
Laughter Yoga was developed by a guy in India named Dr. Madan Kataria. On his website, you can sign up to be a Laughter Yoga teacher.
Seriously.
It’s a five-day course and when you complete it, you’re a certified Professional Laughter Yoga instructor. It costs $995.
A thousand bucks. NFK.
Not Effing Kidding!
But I didn’t want to become a Laughter Yoga teacher. I just wanted to see if there was a Laughter Club near Carlsbad.
There ain’t.
However, the Laughter Yoga Institute does have a free daily Zoom call where folks all around the world can get together online and laugh.
The password is 12345. That sounds like a joke, but it ain't!
It happens at 7:30 AM India time. Which is 7 PM Californee time.
So one evening, as I was creating a new pasta salad dish with Mitch, we joined the Laughter Yoga Zoom call.
