Laughter

Plato wanted it tightly regulated in his Republic. Socrates thought it should be used sparingly - like salt. Pythagoras swore it off entirely and forbid his followers to indulge. For the ancient Greeks, laughter was serious stuff. Some, like Plato, thought it could incite violence and disrupt the social order. Others, like Aristotle, thought it was what distinguished men from beasts. Such notions may sound laughable to modern ears. But the Greeks' assumption - there is nothing funny about laughter - turns out to be thoroughly up to date.

If it's Tuesday, it must be pickleball — at least for a fun-loving group of women who meet at the Churchville Recreation Center in Harford County. The group started about five years ago, and members play indoors during the school year and outdoors in the summer or whenever they can. We met them on a beautiful June morning to see just why the heck this thing called pickleball gets them so fired up. Pickleball? It's a little like tennis and pingpong and a lot like badminton.

Laugh yourself well.Sounds crazy, doesn't it?But medical professionals, buoyed by research suggesting humor may contribute to good health, are now examining the lighter side of being sick. After years of making merry only in pediatrics, nurses and doctors are beginning to believe what's good for the child may be good for the adult.Consequently, humor is turning up in some unlikely places:* In April, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article titled "The Physiologic Effects of Humor, Mirth and Laughter."

The program at Goucher College's 121st commencement ceremony Friday listed speaker Ira Glass' main connection to the Towson college: His grandmother was a member of its Class of 1931. In the public radio host's remarks, he added that college President Sanford J. Ungar was his former colleague at NPR and had coaxed him into appearing. But Glass shared another connection that only a college student could best appreciate - that he lost his virginity in one of the campus dorm rooms.

The man was almost embarrassed out of his job.Joe DiNucci had just been named new sales manager of Digital Equipment Corporation and was the guest of honor at a dinner with Digital's senior research staff. During the dinner, one staff member said Digital would produce the world's best computer workstations in three years.Unimpressed, Mr. DiNucci said, "If we don't do it in two years, it will be too late."The staff member, who didn't like being upstaged by a newcomer, replied, "You know, you're really full of s - - -."

Bowie Community Theatre president Janice Coffey says this season is "all about laughter," and the troupe drew plenty of it last weekend with Larry Shue's The Nerd. Shue died in 1985 at age 39 in a commuter plane crash in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. His sitcom-style play opened on Broadway two years later, mixing a fun plot filled with colorful characters and physical and verbal comedy. As a bonus, it has a surprise ending. Bob Kauffman, former Anne Arundel Community College theater department chairman, recalled meeting Shue while taking students on a 1985 New York theater tour, which included seeing Shue's off-Broadway hit The Foreigner.

The Baltimore Opera Company's opening performance of Verdi's darkly beautiful La forza del destino was nearly ruined for me by a sound not typically associated with this work - laughter. No, I'm not talking about the mild comic relief Verdi intended, a la Shakespeare, in a couple of scenes involving an out-of-sorts friar. The giggles and guffaws came instead in the midst of deadly serious business. No doubt, the primary culprit was the supertitles, those now de rigueur translations of an opera's libretto projected above the stage.

It's an ancient instinct. Dictators and schoolteachers have tried to control it, fearing its contagious power to undermine authority. When it erupts at the wrong moment, it can signal severe illness.Still, most people can't talk about it without cracking a smile.It's laughter. And for Professor Robert E. Provine, who has spent the past six years studying chortles, titters, brays, giggles and guffaws, it's a very serious subject."We spend a lot of time looking at the vocalization of other animals, such as bird sounds and animal calls," says Dr. Provine, 52, a psychologist at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.

NEW YORK -- In the backroom of a chi-chi sushi restaurant situated near ground zero, surrounded by police blockades and groups of tired firefighters walking the streets, a panel of high-profile Gen-X jokesters genuinely discussed the state of funny in a country that's forever changed. "No Laughing Matter: Comedy Writing in Unfunny Times" was dreamed up by journalism job and community Web site mediabistro.com. And as the evening of audacious questions, answers and the occasional anthrax joke unfolded last Tuesday, there was no question that laughter is still the best medicine -- with a few exceptions.

CHICAGO - Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest. Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human traits. Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of excitement, their version of "ha-ha-ha" limited only by their anatomy and lack of breath control, researchers contend. Dogs have their specific sound that spurs other dogs to play, and recordings of the sound can drastically reduce stress levels in shelters and kennels, according to the scientist who discovered it. Even laboratory rats have been shown to chirp delightedly above the range of human hearing when wrestling with each other or being tickled by a keeper - the same vocalizations they make before receiving morphine or having sex. Studying such sounds of joy may help us understand the evolution of human emotions and the brain chemistry underlying such emotional problems as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders, said Jaak Panksepp, a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered rat laughter.

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND TOWN HALL Ritchie Coliseum University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 11:04 A.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Maryland! (Applause.) Hello! Nice to see you. Thank you so much. (Applause.) Everybody, please have a seat. I see some smart folks up there wore shorts. (Laughter.) My team said I should not wear shorts. (Laughter.) My legs aren't good enough to wear shorts. AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible.) (Laughter.) THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. I'll tell Michelle you said so. (Laughter.)

Dr. Frederick Joseph Hatem, a retired Havre de Grace obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies in Harford and Cecil counties during his four-decade career, including baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr. , died June 6 of heart failure at Harford Memorial Hospital. He was 84. Dr. Hatem, whose parents owned and operated a general store, was born in Havre de Grace, where he spent his entire life. He was a 1942 graduate of Havre de Grace High School and served in the Army as an administrative assistant stateside to a colonel, until being discharged in 1946.

Human relations seemed so straightforward and basically workable before Edward Albee started looking into them. In 1961, the playwright dug so deeply beneath the skin to expose gnawing marital complexities in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" that audiences felt as naked and wounded as the characters by the end. Four decades later, Albee peeled away still more layers and, if anything, revealed even more uncomfortable relationships in "The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?" It wouldn't be surprising to see people with dazed looks stumbling out of Howard Community College's Studio Theatre after performances of Rep Stage's first-rate production of the Tony Award-winning "The Goat."

"A joyful heart is the health of the body, but a depressed spirit dries up the bones." W ho knew that the Old Testament sages who wrote the Book of Proverbs were medical researchers in disguise? It seems that laughter really is the best medicine. n Roughly every day, another study is released trumpeting yet another of the health benefits of happiness: Watching funny movies or listening to enjoyable music is good for our hearts. Those who are chipper and upbeat are less likely to catch colds, even after they're exposed to a virus.

In 1992, David Sedaris rose - almost elf-like, you might say - into the spotlight by reading from his essay "The Santaland Diaries" on NPR's Morning Edition. With his soft-grained voice and disarmingly understated style of delivery, Sedaris broke a lot of people up recounting his experiences at Macy's in New York, dressed as one of Santa's helpers, guiding kids and their control-freaky parents toward the place where Christmas gift wishes could be expressed and, at least theoretically, granted.

In 1992, David Sedaris rose - almost elf-like, you might say - into the spotlight by reading from his essay "The Santaland Diaries" on NPR's Morning Edition. With his soft-grained voice and disarmingly understated style of delivery, Sedaris broke a lot of people up recounting his experiences at Macy's in New York, dressed as one of Santa's helpers, guiding kids and their control-freaky parents toward the place where Christmas gift wishes could be expressed and, at least theoretically, granted.

Q: Why did Norman Cousins cross the road?L A: To go to the Marx Brothers movie shown on the other side.Not a very funny joke, perhaps, but a guy like Norman Cousins could manage a chuckle or two. Cousins eked out enough giggles and guffaws to find his way back to health after being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness in 1964.Cousins, former owner and editor of the prestigious intellectual magazine Saturday Review, imported copies of the Marx Brothers' movies and reruns of "Candid Camera."

LANI GUINIER is the University of Pennsylvania law professor who was nominated by President Clinton to be assistant attorney general for civil rights, then un-nominated when criticism of her views mounted.Her travail followed that of Zoe Baird, who had previously been nominated to be attorney general but had to withdraw.Ms. Guinier spoke to the National Press Club in Washington recently. She began this way:"Thank you very much. As you can all imagine, this has been a most interesting year and a half for me. I have gone from relative obscurity to being someone that people stop in the street and introduce themselves to."

This world belongs to the young and the daring, the avid, the adventurous, and that's why one follows the saga of corporate bailouts with a certain trepidation. We're mortgaging the future and we are rescuing the stubborn and stupid. The cost of a good college education for the young and daring is stupefying; meanwhile the federal deficit yawns, tax increases lie ahead, job losses per month are like a major city getting wiped out, and India and China are doing what we used to do better.