MOST THINGS CONSIDERED by Minx McCloud: Laughter the best medicine? Minx wants to up her dosage

A sense of humor is a gift to keep through life

By: Minx McCloud
   When was the last time you laughed so hard you got the hiccups?
   Or, the last time you held your hand over your mouth to stifle a guffaw and milk squirted out of your nose? (That may seem gross, but I’ll bet when you were a kid you did it … at least once.)
   Now that you’re getting older, you may even be afraid to laugh because you don’t trust your bladder.
   Well, dear readers, that’s why God invented Depends. Buy some and enjoy life!
   As we get older, I guess there are many things that can take away our humor, especially the old favorites that have always plagued humanity: War, pestilence, racism, people starving, high taxes .. . but, this column has a word limit, so I must end this list.
   Steeped in nostalgia about a year ago, I realized if I could pick a single thing I miss from my childhood, it would be the laughter — the ability to roll around the floor, cackling with wild abandon over some hysterical joke.
   I tried one of these old chestnuts on my husband at breakfast one day. He was drinking his coffee, and I said, "Did you hear about the guy who said to his doctor, ‘Every time I drink my coffee, I get a sharp pain in my eye.’ The doctor says, ‘Try taking the spoon out of your cup.’"
   He frowned at me and said, "I always take the spoon out of my cup before I drink from it."
   Have I mentioned that Jim and I are opposites?
   There was not much laughter in his family pre-1974. He now has a sense of humor, thanks to me.
   However, sometimes he just doesn’t get it.
   I often search for clean jokes on the Internet. It’s fun to put "clean jokes" in the search engine and see what young kids find funny nowadays.
   You’d be surprised but some of the jokes are real howlers, and you can tell them at the dinner table when Grammy’s visiting.
   Regarding unbridled laughter, well, we know it’s good for the soul, as is regressing back to childhood and playing games. Scientists have proved that it releases stress.
   Last year, I found out that one of my former co-workers was moving on to another job in a different state. He and I, along with another friend, had become close friends and we often lunched together.
   Sometimes they came to my house to swim or just to sit around, talking. I was sad at the thought of his leaving.
   We took him to lunch, chatted and reminisced about the good times, the bad times, and kept saying, to each other, "I can’t believe (you) won’t be here anymore."
   Driving back from lunch, I made some kind of a wickedly funny joke, and suddenly, the three of us were in the throes of uncontrollable laughter.
   One comment led to another, and soon I was laughing so hard I could hardly steer the car. I had to pull over.
   It felt so darn good. We recovered before we arrived back to my house, but spent the rest of the afternoon in chuckling camaraderie. It was a nice "last day" together.
   It got me thinking, though — when had I become so serious? Where was the rollicking mirth I was known for in college?
   It must have happened gradually, because I never noticed how "reserved" (relatively) I was getting.
   Of course, my friends and readers knew that I haven’t really lost my sense of humor completely.
   However, in the ’70s, I was a Red Skelton/PeeWee Herman-ish type.
   Now I was more of a "Roseanne," with an often crueler, more sarcastic sense of humor. It’s not a quality I liked in myself, so I tried to tone it down, and I missed the old Minx.
   The "old Minx" would have found laughter in everything from an episode of "Bewitched," to a cat’s antics with a ball of yarn. Life was just so much fun.
   Every day opened new possibilities. But, somewhere along the way, I had stopped laughing as much and started taking things too seriously.
   All of a sudden, life wasn’t as much fun.
   A few summers ago, we had friends over. One couple brought the wife’s 20-year-old brother and his fiancee. It was a hot day, so naturally we spent most of the day in the pool.
   Usually we bob around sipping drinks and chatting, but "the youngsters" had brought a "water Frisbee" and started to play with it.
   We all joined in, playing a rip-roaring version of keep away, monkey-in-the-middle, and water tag that lasted about two hours.
   We laughed so hard, we almost drowned. It was very therapeutic. I spent the following week in a boisterously good mood, snickering occasionally at absolutely nothing.
   Those I encountered thought me daft, but basically harmless.
    Hey, when was the last time you played? Not killer racquetball or competitively on a team, but like a child, tumbling in a free#-#for#-#all, perhaps with your kids, grandkids, dog or spouse (not necessarily in that order)? It’s so much fun.I remember a cartoon from the ’50s in The New Yorker magazine. Seemingly dignified men in tuxedos and women are standing there in a row, and one woman is saying, "Rover, Red Rover, let Professor Sturgess come over." How many even remember that game?
   When I saw it in a compilation, it tickled me because I wanted to be like that when I grew up.
   Therefore, I am moving back into that comfort zone I used to occupy. I am beginning to laugh at things again without being cruel (well, not AS cruel), and I’m learning to "play" again.
   If you still don’t know what I mean, come on over to my house. I’ll be the one in the front yard, making faces at the cat through the picture window.
   She laughs. Really. She does.
Minx McCloud is a freelance writer who writes about life in New Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected]