As the silly season draws to an end it’s time to turn to more serious matters. So let’s talk about laughter, humour, health and Provocative Therapy.

The current edition of The New Yorker (Aug 30, 2010) features a nine-page article on the world’s most famous advocate of ‘Laughter Yoga’, Dr. Madan Kataria, a celebrity doctor endorsed by Goldie Hawn and Andrew Weil, MD. Although laughter does not feature in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the most succinct text on the practice of yoga, Kataria has apparently linked the term ‘yoga’ to his laughter practice because some of his exercises use controlled breathing – which could be construed to be a new form of pranayama.

Laughter clubs have sprung up all over the world and have even been promoted by the city council of Teheran. Perhaps Ahmadinejad and Obama should have been invited and the world could have laughed its way to peace? Or maybe not…

The title of Kataria’s book, Laugh for No Reason, makes it clear where he stands on the issue of laughter and health: Laughter is good for you physically, mentally and spiritually and it does not matter why you laugh – only that you laugh. He is by no means the first to point out the therapeutic benefits of laughter. William Fry, Norman Cousins, Patch Adams and many others have spoken and written of the physiological benefits of laughter – the most important of which I have encapsulated in the mnemonic SMILE.

So what makes Dr. Kataria different? Khatchadourian describes Kataria as an ‘exceptional fake laugher’ and this is probably the key to his international success. But can satire, farce, burlesque and theatre of the absurd be utilised to help us overcome psychological issues in ways that ‘laughing for no reason’ cannot?

Provocative Therapy is the cutting edge in the use of reverse psychology and humorous insights in psychotherapy. Patients undergoing Provocative Therapy need to give the therapist permission to say things that might sound absurd, rude, inane, surreal etc. The idea is to provoke (ie.to call forth from Latin pro-vokare) the patient to locate the solution to his/her problem within himself/herself. Although laughter is not absolutely necessary for Provocative Therapy to have a therapeutic effect, its paradoxical approach to dealing with psychological issues often produces a great deal of laughter in the consulting room.

When a Provocative Therapist induces patients to laugh, this is very different from the ‘laughter for no reason’ of laughter yoga. When patients are warmly and kindly provoked into laughing at the absurdity of aspects of their psychological suffering, they can often liberate themselves from that suffering. Frank Farrelly’s Golden Rule of Provocative Therapy (Only do it with ‘affection in the heart and a twinkle in the eye’) ensures that the patient knows that the Provocative Therapist has a therapeutic objective at all times. As people are therapeutically provoked to laugh (and occasionally cry or just stare into space in semi-trance) a window of opportunity can open for them to locate, prescribe and enact their own solutions to their problems.