Germans getting O.K. to lighten up

MUNICH In an old farmhouse on the outskirts of this Bavarian capital, a group of 20 Germans are flapping their arms up and down and clucking hysterically like chickens.
"Come on, you chickens, let me hear you cluck, cluck, cluck, and bock, bock, bock, and flap your wings like you mean it," commanded Heiner Uber, a giddy 45-year-old professor of laughter, doing his own best chicken imitation and sending the group into fits of raucous cackling.
Helmut Kohl, a former chancellor of Germany, once said that Germans were so afraid to laugh that they would hide in the basement to do it. But Uber is determined to change that. The founder of a new chain of German laughing schools, Uber wants to help Germans grapple with 12 percent unemployment, dreary weather and a difficult history by teaching them how to have a good guffaw.
"For decades, we Germans have been the grandmasters of depression," said Uber, whose favorite pastime is to go to national monuments in authoritarian countries and try to make stone-faced guards giggle by staring at them. "The new generation of Germans are ready to smile again," he added.
Germans are not alone in their desire to learn how to laugh, which researchers say relieves stress, increases disease-fighting hormones and emboldens the immunity system. Interest in laughing as a coping technique has become such a global phenomenon that settlers in the West Bank are using laughter to relieve stress, while the Pentagon has a laughing club for the families of soldiers sent to Iraq.
Uber perfected his technique under Madan Kataria, an Indian doctor known as the Giggling Guru, who pioneered a method of combining funny movements with yogalike breathing.
At Uber's laughing class in Munich, the session began with participants sitting in a circle and stretching, before moving on to the laughs. Uber instructed the students to clap their hands and breathe deeply to get the blood circulating. Then he told them to march in circles around the room chanting "ho-ho-ha-ha-ha-ha" while staring into each other's eyes, because eye contact tends to accentuate the hysteria.
"We look like a bunch of crazy people," laughed Theresa Inzenhofer, a nurse, before squealing uproariously.
The students were presented with dozens of laughs, including the lion laugh, tongue stuck out, hands posed like lion claws and a roaring laugh; and the mobile phone laugh, a hand held to the ear as if holding a phone and then a ringing laugh.
Uber emphasized that wannabe gigglers could train their bodies to laugh long and hard without having to resort to telling jokes. To prove his point, he instructed the group to lie down on mats, close their eyes, and imagine a funny scene from their childhoods. Suddenly, the silence was interrupted by an uproarious "Ho, ho, ho!" laugh from a portly student with a walrus mustache. This gave several other students a case of the giggles. Within seconds, the entire group was laughing in rising and ebbing cackles, gurgles and roars that lasted for an hour and 15 minutes.
"We Germans seldom laugh without a reason," said Annette Borchard, a 39-year-old biology teacher from Munich, as she lay on the mat, shaking in a fit of hysteria. "It is so liberating just to be able to laugh for the sake of laughing."
Laughing has been a lifelong vocation for Uber, who grew up in postwar Munich in a household where his father, a former Nazi soldier, forbade his children to laugh at the dinner table. When his mother warned him at age 5 that "only stupid people laugh," Uber said he decided to rebel and make laughing his lifelong ambition. "Some people think that a German who teaches people how to laugh is the equivalent of an American general joining the Vietcong, but I never wanted to do anything else," he said.
Uber's students, who pay E260, or $300, for a two-day session, include elderly women, banking executives and hairdressers. Adi Frohle, 39, a garage-door maker from Stuttgart, said he decided to attend when he was driving in his car and heard Uber imitating a wild hyena on a radio program. Frohle said he laughed so hard he had to pull over to the side of the road.
Now, Frohle, who has Lyme disease, an ailment transmitted by ticks whose symptoms can include temporary blindness, headaches and skin rashes, laughs in bed for an hour each morning, a ritual he says diminishes the symptoms. "Laughing has helped me to get outside my head and to keep my fear under control," he said.
Scientists say that the curative benefits of laughter are extensive. A raucous giggle can decrease stress and help alleviate depression because laughter spurs the brain to activate pain-reducing endorphins and neurotransmitters known as dopamine that create a feeling of euphoria. Research by Lee Berk, a laughter expert and professor of medicine at Loma Linda University in California, found that laughter lowers blood pressure and produces so-called "killer cells" that gather in the blood and destroy bacteria.
Berk concluded that laughter could act as a drug on the body's immune system after testing the hormone levels of patients as they watched Charlie Chaplin comedies. "The physical benefits of laughter are serious stuff," he said. "If you could encapsulate laughter in a pill form, it would be in every medicine cabinet in America."
Laughing was considered a remedy as early as the 13th century, when surgeons used humor to distract patients from the pain of surgery. But laughter has since become less prevalent, researchers say. In the 1950s, people laughed an average of 18 times a day. Now, they laugh only six times a day.
After studying philosophy and working as a journalist, Uber began studying global laughing rituals. His first book, "Countries of Laughter," took him to the Arctic Circle, where he learned to imitate animal laughs from the Inuit, to a clown school in Hannover, Germany, and to a laughter festival in the Japanese town of Gobo, south of Osaka, where people spend days in a laughing-induced trance.
On a recent trip to Shanghai, his quest reached its high point, he said, when he managed to induce laughter in a dour Chinese soldier. "I just kept looking at him and staring with as big a smile as I could muster and then suddenly after several minutes his lips began to turn upward in the beginning of a laugh - it was a triumph," he says.
Uber travels the world giving his laughing classes. He wants to open laughing schools in the United States.
But in the immediate future, he said, his next project is to convince the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a former scientist from the former East Germany, to attend one of his schools.
"Give me two weeks with Angie and I'll have her rolling on the floor like a little giggling girl," he said.
In the meantime, laughing schools may soon have some competition. In Nanjing, China, a local entrepreneur has opened the "cry bar" where people can pay E7 to have a good bawl, even providing onions to induce tears.