Down the hall from quiet card games and serious meetings, one room at the Bain Center in Columbia is a riot of laughter. Last week, 10 people at the senior center laughed while they high-fived one another. They giggled and pointed at each other like they knew a secret. They howled while pretending to talk on a cell phone.
The Another Way to See It Laughter Club, which meets each Monday, seeks to improve people's physical and mental well-being by teaching them to laugh more easily and more often.
"Now," said Heather Wandell, who was leading the unusual exercises, "we're going to take the [imaginary] Visa bill out of the envelope and point and laugh at it like `I'm not really going to pay this.'"
The participants circled around, seeking each other out and bellowing, guffawing and cackling enthusiastically. They ended each activity with a rousing cheer - accompanied by clapping - that went "ho ho ha ha ha, yea."
"Laughter is good for us," said Inge Hyder of Columbia. "It helps your health, it helps your outlook on life. ... It's fun to do these crazy things, and why not?"
Wandell, who created her own business out of leading laughter activities, started the Bain Center club a year ago. The group doesn't use jokes because they can be subject to different tastes and possibly offend. Members just practice the laughter itself.
"It is kind of a forced laughter at first," Wandell said, "But like anything, with practice, it started to become second nature to us. You become more aware of really it being a real laugh."
Plus she said, when you practice laughing in a group, "you can catch on to somebody, and it's a release for them. It just brings out real laughter."
Wandell is one of more than 2,000 laughter leaders - including 14 in Maryland - certified by the World Laughter Tour, which seeks to promote laughter workshops and clubs across the United States.
That organization got started when Steve Wilson, a proponent of therapeutic laughter, was on a 1998 tour of India and became inspired by a laughter club in Mumbai.
He started a U.S. lecture tour about how to practice laughter, which evolved into a nonprofit organization that today acts as a clearinghouse on the topic for people around the world.
Proponents of therapeutic laughter believe that sustained laughter - even when it is forced - reduces blood pressure, boosts the immune system, decreases stress, releases endorphins that ease pain and gives the heart a workout.
