Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (76 page)

Worse, “I didn’t cheat as much on my taxes as my partner.” “I just have a few drinks. I don’t take cocaine.” “I don’t pad my expense reports as much as others.”

This is completely wrong. Preserve and obey the absolutes as much as you can. If you never lie, cheat, or steal, you will never have to remember who you lied to, how you cheated, and what you stole.

There absolutely are absolute rights and wrongs.

RULE #1: Enjoy your family and friends before they are gone.

This is the most important hindsight. It doesn’t need much explanation. I’ll just repeat it: Enjoy your family and friends before they are gone. Nothing—not money, power, or fame—can replace your family and friends or bring them back once they are gone. Our greatest joy has been our baby, and I predict that children will bring you the greatest joy in your lives—especially if they graduate from college in four years.

And now, I’m going to give you one extra hindsight because I’ve probably cost your parents thousands of dollars today. It’s something that I hate to admit, too.

By and large, the older you get, the more you’re going to realize that your parents were right. More and more—until finally, you become your parents. I know you’re all saying, “Yeah, right.” Mark my words.

Remember these ten things: If just one of them helps just one of you, this speech will have been a success.

And you thought reading the funny stuff we put in the Bathroom Reader was just a way to kill time. Well, it’s not—while you’re giggling at Uncle John’s prose, you’re actually getting
some
exercise and improving your health. Don’t believe it? Here’s proof.

H
ARDEE HAR BAR

Even after centuries of scientific research, no one knows for sure why human beings (plus a few other primates, including chimpanzees, apes, and orangutans) laugh.

People have ideas, though.

“A 2-pound turkey and a 50-pound cranberry— that’s Thanksgiving dinner at Three Mile Island.”

—Johnny Carson

• Charles Darwin speculated that laughter, which begins in infants as young as three months old, served as an evolutionary “reward” to parental care-giving. Laughter in infants sounded and felt so different from crying, he believed, that even prehistoric parents must have interpreted it as a sign of well-being, kind of like the purring of a kitten. The parents enjoyed the laughter, which encouraged them to continue caring for the child.

• Sigmund Freud believed (of course) that laughter was closely intertwined with lust.

“[On old age:] First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.”

—Leo Rosenberg

• Contemporary theorists believe that laughter evolved as a means for primates to diffuse tension and reduce the likelihood of confrontation when meeting and interacting with others.

FUNNY BUSINESS

Even if scientists still don’t know why we laugh., they’ve learned a
lot about it. For example:

• You use 15 different muscles in your face to laugh.

• The
sound
of laughter is created when you inhale deeply and then release the air while your diaphragm moves in a series of short, spasmodic contractions.

• The typical laugh is made up of pulses of sound that are about 1/15th of a second long and l/5th of a second apart. When tape recorded and played backward, laughing sounds virtually the same as it does when it’s played forward.

• Hearty laughter produces physical effects similar to those resulting from moderate exercise: The pulse of the person laughing can double from 60 to 120, and the systolic blood pressure can increase from 120 to 200—about the same thing that happens when you exercise on a stationary bicycle. Stanford University researcher Dr. William Fry even refers to laughter as “a kind of stationary jogging.”

“I saw a TV commercial that said, ‘Kiss your hemorrhoids goodbye.’ Not even if I could.”

—John Mendoza

• When people stop laughing, just as when they stop exercising, the muscles in the body are more relaxed than they were before the laughing started. Heartbeat and blood pressure are also lower. This leads scientists to believe that laughing is a means of releasing stress and pent-up energy.

THE BEST MEDICINE

One of the most interesting things researchers have learned is the powerful healing effect of laughter.

Well, actually they’re
re
-learning it after centuries of neglect: In the Middle Ages, doctors “treated” their patients by telling them jokes, but modern medicine discounted the curative properties of laughing.

That began to change in 1979, when editor Norman Cousins wrote
Anatomy of an Illness,
in which he credited watching humorous videos with helping him reduce pain and recover from ankylosing spondylitis, a life-threatening degenerative spinal disease. The book inspired researchers to look into whether laughter really did aid in healing and recovery from illness.

THE LAUGH TEST

In 1995, two researchers at the Loma Linda University School of Medicine had 10 medical students watch a 60-minute videotape of Gallagher, a stand-up comedian famous for smashing watermelons and other objects with a sledgehammer.

The researchers found that after watching the video, there was a measurable decrease in stress hormones, including epinephrine and dopamine, in the students’ blood, plus an increase in endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. But the most changes were found in the students’ immune systems. These included:

Increased levels of gamma interferon, a hormone that “switches on” the immune system, and helps fight viruses and regulates cell growth

Increased numbers of “helper T-cells,” which help the body coordinate the immune system’s response to illness

More “Compliment 3,” a substance that helps antibodies destroy infected and damaged cells

An increase in the number and activity of “natural killer (NK) cells,” which the body uses to attack foreign cells, cancer cells, and cells infected by virus

Some of the levels even began to change
before
the students watched the video—just from the expectation that they were about to laugh. “Say you’re going to your favorite restaurant,” Dr. Berk explains. “You can visualize the food; you can almost taste it. You’re already experiencing the physiology of enjoying it. Your immune system [also] remembers….By using humor to combat stress, you can condition yourself to strengthen your immune system.”

“Everything is drive-through. In California they even have a burial service called Jump-in-the-Box.”

—Wil Shriner

GETTING THE JOKE

In 1995 Peter Derks, a psychologist at the College of William and Mary, tested how the brain stimulates laughter. He hooked research subjects up to an EEG (electroencephalogram) topographical brain mapper, then told the subjects jokes. His findings:

• At the start of the joke, the brain processes the information in the left lobe, the analytical side that processes language.

• As the joke progresses, the primary activity shifts to the frontal lobe, where emotions are processed.

• Just before the punch line is delivered, the right side of the brain, which controls the perception of spatial relationships, begins coordinating its activity with the left side of the brain. This is the point where the brain is trying to “get” the joke.

• “What humor is doing,” Derks says, “is getting the brain into unison so it can be more efficient in trying to find explanations for—in this case—the punch line. Laughter may also have long-term therapeutic effects.” Derks suspects that joke-telling may even help stroke victims and the elderly recover lost brain function.

“I date this girl for two years—and then the nagging starts: ‘I wanna know your name.’”

—Mike Binder

THE LAUGHTER GENDER GAP

Robert Provine, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, has studied the laughter that takes place in conversations between men and women. (How? He and his assistants eavesdropped on more than 1,200 conversations that took place on the street and in offices, shopping malls, cocktail parties, and other public places around Baltimore.)

“ My father’s a strange guy. He’s allergic to cotton. He has pills he can take, but he can’t get them out of the bottle.”

—Brian Kiley

His findings:

• “We found that far and away the most laughter takes place when males were talking and females were listening, and the least took place when females were talking and males were listening. Male-male and female-female conversations fell somewhere in between.” Provine believes that this is because females are better listeners and are more encouraging in conversation.

• Men are more likely to make jokes than women are, and women are more likely to laugh at them than men are. These differences, Provine says, are already apparent when children begin telling their first jokes, usually around the age of six.