Why Does Laughter Heal?
There's a kind of laughter that isn't really about the joke at all. It's the kind that comes up from somewhere lower than the throat, in the belly, that catches us off guard and loosens something we didn't know was clenched. We've all felt it — the moment when a heavy day cracks open, just for a second, and something lighter gets in.
That's the conversation we wanted to have on Earth Tribe Radio, with Craig Shoemaker.
I met Craig through my husband Bob, who's spent his life in the entertainment world. Craig was already a well-known comedian by the time the two of them crossed paths — and they hit it off the moment they met, the way people sometimes do when they recognize something in each other right away. Craig's spent decades since then making rooms full of strangers laugh together, touring the country, doing the work of finding exactly the thing that makes people exhale. But this conversation wasn't about the craft of comedy. It was about something underneath it — laughter not as entertainment, but as medicine. He established Laughter Heals and other programs to guide individuals to discover healing and peace through laughter.
We talked about Norman Cousins, the writer who was told by his doctors that he had almost no chance of recovering from a crippling illness. Instead of despair, he chose Marx Brothers films — hours of them — and documented what happened in his body as he laughed his way through the pain. It sounds almost too simple to be true. And yet it worked. His story has become one of the most quoted examples of the mind's power over the body, and it's proof of something we sense but rarely name: that laughter isn't a break from healing. It can be part of it.
What Craig and I kept circling back to is that laughter is a way back into the body, balance, and inner connection when life feels too heavy to carry. When we're deep in grief, or stress, or fear, we tend to leave our bodies — we live in our heads, in the loop of the problem. A real laugh pulls us back down. It's physical. It's immediate. And for a moment, it reminds us that we're still here, still alive, still capable of lightness even in the middle of something hard.
This isn't about bypassing pain or pretending things are fine. It's about remembering that we're allowed to set the weight down every once in a while — even briefly, even involuntarily — and that doing so doesn't make the weight less real. It just makes us more able to carry it. That when we do, we can find a place within that brings us natural peace and joy, which is the core of who we are.
If you've been holding something heavy lately, this episode might be exactly what you need. Come listen in, and let yourself laugh a little on purpose.
Listen to "Why Does Laughter Heal?" with Craig Shoemaker on Earth Tribe Radio.
Check out more of Craig's work at www.craigshoemaker.com.