Covid: laughter is the next best medicine after a vaccine

Animal magic: chimps laugh, as do dogs and rats and dolphins

The first laugh? Twenty years ago in my introduction to The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes I wondered how humour was born, speculating that laughter began with the ancient game of dads tossing babies into the air. As the littlie was launched aloft its eyes and mouth would open wide in alarm – and there was a percussive exhalation of breath, of relief, on being safely caught.

Wiser minds disagree. Studies of chimps and bonobos suggest similar vocalisations are triggered by the breathlessness of energetic play, that laugh-like panting signal “I’m only kidding” during rough and tumble. Aside from the humourless sound of the kookaburra – aka the laughing jackass – and the braying of an actual jackass, laughter has been identified in more than 60 species, mostly mammals.

Rats laugh. It’s described as “chirping”. Presumably mice do too – hence the deafening sound of mass mouse mirth during the plague. Scientists have tickled lab-rats and received a chirpy response. What did you do at the office today Daddy? I tickled a rat. Pretty funny.

Dogs laugh, too. Exposed to recordings of “dog laugh”, 120 responded with enthusiasm. Tail-wagging immediately increased. Which reminds me that I’ve always regretted that humans don’t have tails to wag, though they wouldn’t be wagging much in this woeful world. Don’t know about you but I don’t feel much like chasing my ball either.

Dolphins? Seems so. Swedish scientists detected “short bursts of pulses followed by whistles”. Apparently this ameliorates anger and leads to playfulness. I’m practising. Throb-toot-throb-toot. Try it, you’ll feel better.

My hopefully amusing musings have been triggered by Covid, for which laughter is the next best medicine after a vaccine. Humour has always provided some protection from pain and danger – as evidenced in Jewish humour. Millennia of abuse gave us the Jewish joke and the Jewish comedian. Mel Brooks, the Marx Bros, Woody Allen (though he’s not considered funny anymore), Jerry Seinfeld, Roy Rene, Jon Stewart, Joan Rivers, Sid Caesar, Larry David, George Burns, Sarah Silverman, Sacha Baron Cohen, Peter Sellers. The Jews may not run everything, as the anti-Semites insist, but they’ve damned near got a monopoly on comedy.

Just as the Trump pandemic triggered a tsunami of mockery from the likes of Randy Rainbow and Sarah Cooper (rendered difficult because the Donald was beyond satire), Covid has launched vast amounts of comic invention. Often the authors are unknown, but there are countless clever people out there displaying their ingenuity on social media and YouTube. Brilliantly repurposed film footage and doctored clips that we pass around to each other. The blackest of humour in these darkest of days, and so therapeutic that I seem to spend an hour a day seeking it out and passing it on.

Covid comedy helps fight the fear of infection, the claustrophobia of lockdown. And of course there’s accidental humour in the utterances of political leaders (sic), as when our beloved PM solemnly intoned that “for the lockdown to work it must work”. What a great example of Scott’s infectious infection humour.

Covid “pressers” are a form of stand-up with the hilarious repetition of such punchlines as “we’re all in this together”. And I’ve developed a fondness for the dark-clothed Auslan signers. So much so that I wish they’d do it solo. The silence would be a blessed relief. Covid mustn’t have the last laugh.