Evidence base required for laughter

[Louise Pembroke]

This just came in from a friend, I practically wet myself
laughing;

"David Oaks was told in Dresden [at the World Psychiatric Association
conference on coercion) that his clown nose was "dangerous." The reps from
the drug companies told the organizers that if David put on his clown nose
they would withdraw their funding from the conference! The rationale was..
that this was a supposedly scientific conference and humour was
unscientific!"

[GarethB]

They obveously have never been to a confrence with me and I have presented a few scientific things, considering that is my job!

[Louise Pembroke]

A friend owns a book called, 'scientific study of laughter', it's so ironic. I can imagine what Patch Adams would say!
I'd probably be assassinated if I did to them what I did many years ago to drug reps at a conference. Whilst they were out to lunch a few of us defaced their psychiatric drug posters in a universal language as there were too many languages spoken at the conference to write it up. We did nice pictures of hyperdermics with an arrow to the brain with an arrow to a skull and crossbones. They went mad and called the police. We sat there with puppy eyes and claimed the voices told us to do it!

[Andrew MacLean]

For a moment I found myself back in the 70's, in a coffee bar having an earnest conversation with others approaching degree finals about what we would do next.

I already had a place to which to go. One of my friends had a quota place for a PhD in Social Science (he is now professor of Social Science at one of the UK's most prestigeous univrsities.

Some of the others went into Politics and form part of the current cabinet. One earnest young woman was going to do some Psych evaluation of humour. She had found Freud's little treatise on humour and was going to try to develop his assertion that all humour is based on familiarity.

I wonder what she is doing now? Probably cracking them up at Psych conferences with her re-telling of the "essential joke".

By the way, when I was a University Chaplain, Ed Byrne was one of our undergraduates.

Andrew