Reprinted with permission of Imagine Magazine
(www.imaginemagazine.net)

     Anyone who considers brain surgery no laughing matter hasn’t come across Suzy Becker’s new illustrated memoir, I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse? In this original hybrid of cartooning and narrative, the central Massachusetts resident (and author of the best-selling book, All I Need to Know I Learned From My Cat) chronicles her operation and its aftermath. Author Anne Lamott calls it “a wonderful book, funny and touching, harrowing and sweet.”
     It’s hard to say what’s more harrowing: the fact that Becker’s brain was sliced into in order to remove a seizure-causing mass or that the surgery, for a time, wiped out her speech, reading ability and her sense of humor. This is a woman who defines herself as a humorist. “It’s just the way I go about the world,” she says. “I walk around looking for things that are funny or ways of re-framing circumstances so they will be funny.”
     That tendency came in handy, from the diagnosis on. She also had a little help from a friend. After CAT scans revealed the brain mass, her best friend accompanied her to a pharmacy to pick up anti-seizure medication. “My friend said, ‘We’ll sign for the medication like this.’ And he fakes a spastic signature. That was a big stress release.” Humor like that is empowering, Becker says. “You can take control of a situation by laughing at it instead of the situation taking control of you.”
     After the surgery, she acutely felt the loss of her sense of humor. And it was a big relief when it returned. She recalls the turning point, during a checkup two months after surgery. Waiting to see the doctor, she was alone in the examining room for nearly an hour. She retrieved a piece of paper from the trash, folded it into a tent card and wrote “Hello?” on it. She placed it in the center of the hall, but nobody paid attention. So she made another one, this time bearing the word “Anybody?” The ploy drew laughs, and Becker was back in the humor business.
     Even with the pathways in her brain interrupted, Becker began scrawling notes for her book just two days after the operation. “I couldn’t say the word pen, but I could write it down,” she says. The book, which was published in March, became a form of occupational therapy. Becker had long dreamed of creating a work that used drawings as an integral storytelling device. Prior to her surgery, she wasn’t motivated enough to sit down and try it; after the surgery, it was the only kind of book she could write. Humor, she says, “is one of the best coping mechanisms out there. If you have the capacity to laugh at yourself and laugh at situations, it’s so obvious you’ll feel a lot better than crying or feeling terrified.” 

One man's magic
     Joel Goodman, Ph.D., learned that lesson years ago, when his father suffered an aneurysm in his aorta. Goodman accompanied his parents to Houston, where a world-renowned surgeon was to perform the life-or-death operation. As Goodman and his mother climbed into the hotel shuttle that would take them to the hospital, “we were literally frozen with fear and tension and angst,” he recalls. Yet, minutes later, they disembarked essentially stress free.
     The transformation came courtesy of Alvin Herndon, driver of the van. “In the short four minutes it took us to go from the hotel to the hospital, he magically transformed uptight, stressed-out people like us into people who were able to laugh and chuckle and let go some of that terrible terror," Goodman says.
     Though some of the humor was of the “you-had-to-be-there” variety, Herndon also did some specific things to make people feel better. For instance, he gave every passenger a smiley-face button, which at that point had just hit the market. The buttons, paid for by Herndon himself, served as a "visual anchor to remind us to put a smile on our face," Goodman says.
     In addition, Herndon was spontaneous, childlike and playful. Goodman recalls one woman in her 80s who was en route to visiting her husband at the hospital. As Herndon helped her into the back seat, he cheerfully invited her to go out dancing with him after her visit. "It was not a come-on," Goodman says. "It was a playful break-the-set kind of thing. We all cracked up laughing. "Herndon’s magic was his sense of humor,” Goodman adds. He used that magic trick to melt our tension. When we saw Dad, instead of conveying our stress to him, we were able to lighten his load.”
     Goodman’s father recovered and, shortly afterward, Goodman embarked on a new career. Already a speaker, consultant and author on creativity, problem-solving and stress management, Goodman returned to his home in Saratoga Springs, New York, and began catching up on the work he’d missed during his two weeks in Houston.
     “All of a sudden, the light bulb went on and I got to thinking of this stranger Alvin who entered our family’s life at just the right moment. I began to wonder: If humor has such good effects, do we have to wait for the Alvins in the world to come into our lives when we need them? Or if it’s so good, couldn’t we and shouldn’t we make sense of humor, so to speak?”
     Goodman founded the Humor Project in October 1977 (he called it a project because he thought he’d do it for a while and then move on, he says). Twenty-seven years later, he’s still making sense of humor. And he’s never forgotten Herndon. Nine years ago, just before their 10th annual International Conference on the Positive Power of Humor, Hope & Healing, Goodman and his wife, Margie Ingram, tracked Herndon down.
     “Margie and I flew Alvin and his wife, Dawn, to Saratoga, where I told the Alvin story and then I said we are blessed with his presence here today. And at that point, a thousand people jumped to their feet and gave this man a 10-minute standing ovation. There was not a dry eye in the place at this international humor conference.”
     Alvin Herndon showed stressed-out people that there was another way to respond to a crisis at hand; Suzy Becker used humor and creativity to get through a frightening ordeal. Both stories illustrate the importance of resiliency and the connection it has to humor.
     Ingram has been looking into that connection for seven years. As a stress-management professional for nearly three decades, she says one way of dealing with stress is to ask, “What’s wrong? Let’s fix it.” But in situations that can’t be fixed, resiliency allows us to shift perspective. Humor helps us make the shift from viewing a situation in a negative way to looking at it in a positive way, Ingram says.

Making work fun
     Ron Culberson, owner of FUNsulting Etc., agrees. FUNsulting is a company that is dedicated to helping groups of employees “lighten up” at work. “The first thing is to understand the power that humor has,” say Culberson. “The very nature of humor is that it forces us to see things differently. If you dissect a joke, what it’s really doing is taking you down one path and then changing directions. And it is that change of perspective that generally makes us laugh.”
     This has benefits that go far beyond entertainment, he says. For nearly eight years, the Washington, D.C.-area resident has traveled the country, giving presentations on this topic. “I work with people who want to lighten up. My main message is that humor is an actual tool that people can use to cope with stress, to become more creative, to communicate more effectively, to make work more fun – all these different things that we often don’t see as a product of humor.” 
     For example, he cites a group of district court clerks who attended one of his workshops. “They had to rotate the responsibility every day for opening the mail, and none of them liked it because it was just drudgery to them. So in a brainstorming session, they came up with the idea that they were going to hide something fun in the mail every day, maybe a coupon for a candy bar, an ice cream cone or a movie. That simple process made the work of opening the mail more enjoyable so people didn’t dread it anymore and there was a bonus at the end, a benefit. “That’s what I’m encouraging people to do, is to try to think of all those different things they do every day and how they can change the way they’re done," he adds.
     Even the most tedious tasks can be fun, Culberson insists. “I used to run a quality improvement committee and people hated it. So one meeting, I actually sang my report to the tune of Gilligan’s Island, and it had this dramatic effect on how people saw the meeting. From that point on, every time I gave my report, I did it differently but in a fun way. The tone just made people look forward to the meeting. They knew it was going to be enjoyable, they knew it was going to be different every time and they were more likely to be there on time," he adds. “The meetings were more productive.”
     Culberson, who wrote his graduate thesis on humor, says work in this field “all started with Norman Cousins, who battled pain with laughter. Since then, research has shown that the body does do a lot of very positive things when we laugh.” Humor professionals invariably reference Cousins when they’re discussing the healing aspects of humor. The Humor Project’s Goodman and Ingram each quoted Cousins’ well-known line comparing laughter to internal jogging.
     “When you laugh, respiration and circulation are enhanced, internal organs are massaged, stress-related hormones in the brain are suppressed and the body’s immune system is activated,” Goodman says, noting that there are mental-health benefits as well. In addition, Ingram says, “Humor is a bridge between people. When people laugh together, there’s a connection that they have that can go far deeper than surface conversations.”
     Personal benefits aside, one of Ingram’s favorite stories has global implications. And its central figure is Cousins. As editor of The Saturday Review, Cousins was chosen to be one of a group of Americans who traveled to the former Soviet Union in October 1962. They were in the midst of background diplomacy discussions when the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. To break the tension, Cousins suggested they each tell a favorite story. One of the Soviets started things off: “What’s the difference between communism and capitalism? In capitalism, man exploits man; communism is the other way around.”
     By the time everyone had a turn and there was laughter all around, the group members “were able that very afternoon to get back on track with what their mission was, which was incredibly important between the two countries,” Ingram says. To do otherwise “would have been to succumb to the Cuban Missile Crisis tension.”


Laugh at adversity
     Comedian Brett Leake learned how not to succumb to adversity from his mother. He was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age 14; his brother received the same diagnosis. There are 40 different types of this genetic disease, Leake says. “My dad had it. The doctors at the time told my parents that whatever he had, he wouldn’t pass it on.”
     Leake describes the scenario this way: “My mother marries a man she falls in love with. It turns out she’s the only able-bodied person in a family of four.” What does a person do in this situation? “I watched my mom handle that. I didn’t know I was watching, but I was.”
     To cope, she used humor, which she expressed through creativity. For example, she’d make him funny shirts, so that other kids would laugh at his shirts and not at the way he walked when his leg muscles began to weaken. She also made sure “the house was filled with games and fun things that my brother and I could still do," he says.
     A few months ago, after his now 72-year-old mom was hospitalized with bleeding in the brain, she had healed enough to make a joke: “My memory’s not what it used to be, but how would I know?” Leake likes that approach to disability: “The lesson I take from it: I’m not going to get better physically, but I always have the capability to make the most of whatever situation I find myself in.”
     Leake lives in a fully accessible home in Maiden, Virginia, 30 miles west of Richmond. His popular PBS special, Laughing Matters with Brett Leake, is airing for its second year.  The hour-long comedy show focuses on Leake’s brand of observational humor (“the stuff of daily life: the expiration date on cheese, the cash value on coupons; [the fact that] the thread is stronger on the spare button than regular buttons. You don’t lose the spare button but you lose the regular buttons.”).
     He also performs at least 100 shows a year. “I like hearing people laugh,” he says. “I like being around people who are happy. Just being around humor gives so much more back to me than what I put in. I don’t know exactly what goes on. My body doesn’t rebuild itself during the show, but I feel better, more energized than going into it.”


The healing power of humor
     Both Leake and Florida nurse Leslie Gibson were presenters at the Humor Project conference held in Saratoga Springs in April; Gibson also appeared at this year’s conference of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor. Gibson says she first began using humor in fourth grade. Heavyset, she was mercilessly teased by other kids. She’d take refuge in the shop of a shoe repairman, who “had cartoons, riddles plastered all over his cash register.”          
     She remembers the shopkeeper telling her: If you can get the kids to laugh with you, they won’t laugh at you. “I started to get the kids to laugh, and they accepted me. I became the class clown – I did magic tricks, told riddles, brought an alarm clock that went off in the middle of geometry class. I learned how powerful humor can be.”
     From then on, humor was her calling card. She used it as a camp counselor in high school; in nursing school, she’d post cartoons in the lunchroom and carry a little sheet of jokes and riddles in her pocket. (Example: What do you call a nun who walks in her sleep? A roamin’ Catholic.)
     As a nurse, she witnessed the transformational power of humor firsthand when she was called to assist with an elderly woman who was hitting and biting the nursing-home staff. The woman, who was in her 90s, had fallen and fractured her hip. She was legally blind and deaf without her hearing aid. As a last resort, Gibson was asked to try to calm her down with humor.
     “We put two hearing aids in her ears and gave her a Sony Walkman with a tape of George Burns and Gracie Allen,” Gibson recalls. “Her face transformed from a tight, mad, sad, angry look to laughing out loud as she recognized Gracie Allen’s voice from the days of radio. She started repeating the lines. I got really turned on when I saw that transition. How many people are kicked out of nursing homes when they’re violent or are given more drugs? Humor can help.”
     Not long after the incident, Gibson attended her first Humor Project conference. She came away with a $1,000 grant to use as seed money for a hospital comedy-cart program. The rationale is simple, Gibson explains. “When you are a patient, you lose all your rights. You can’t wear your clothing, can’t choose your food.” Being able to pick out gag gifts, puzzle books, cartoon books, word searches, decks of cards or a funny video gives patients a pleasant diversion and some measure of control. And it’s convenient, with volunteers bringing the cart to the patient’s bedside.
     She started the Comedy Connection program in one unit at Morton Plant Hospital, an 800-bed facility in Clearwater, Florida. There are now 20 comedy carts at that institution as well as two carts in each of three other hospitals in the system.
     Founded in 1988, Comedy Connection is probably the longest-running humor program in the world, Gibson says. At present, 100 trained volunteers go on “clown rounds” at the four hospitals. Patch Adams, the clown-nose-wearing doctor whose work was chronicled in the 1998 Robin Williams movie bearing Adams’ name, is a friend of Gibson’s. He lists Comedy Connection as a reference in his book, Gesundheit!
     Gibson and other volunteers have taken visitors from as far away as Sweden on the clown rounds; they’ve also helped other hospitals with plans to institute similar programs. People have expressed amazement, Gibson says. “ 'Humor in hospitals? Hospitals are serious places!'” 
     Gibson, who works as a visiting nurse for Hospice of the Florida Sun Coast, serves as a volunteer with the program she started. She spends a lot of time at the hospital and has found humor emerging from even the most tragic cases. She remembers, for instance, a young man rendered quadriplegic by a diving accident. He had asked to meet the founder of Comedy Connection, and when Gibson walked into his room, she found him wearing Groucho glasses. She recalls him saying, “If you can’t be good in bed, at least be funny.”
     In her talks around the country, Gibson advocates that health-care professionals “prescribe” humor to patients by giving them recycled prescription bottles filled with a month’s supply of jokes and riddles. After speaking on the subject to the American Cancer Society, Gibson heard from one of the attendees who tried out the idea and concluded that humor did indeed lighten the patients’ load.
     “You would think that we were sitting in a comedy club,” the cancer center supervisor told Gibson. “That’s the healing power of humor.”

Kathryn DeLong is a Hudson, Ohio-based writer and editor, who has worked at publications in Washington, Michigan and Ohio. This article reprinted with permission of Imagine Magazine (www.imaginemagazine.net)