ONE AFTERNOON LAST month, Loretta LaRoche sauntered into a conference room at the Longwood Medical Center. There, 40 physicians, nurses, and psychiatrists were waiting, poring over manuals, fingering flutes of Evian, crossing and recrossing khaki-clad legs. LaRoche, short and robust, dressed in a practical, loose purple velvet button-down, scanned the serious crew with slanted eyes. Under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, things looked fairly ominous.

“Well,” the nationally acclaimed stress-management consultant drawled as she started pacing with a mike, “this is the part where they bring in the clown. And it’s me.” She erupted into infectious, whole-body laughter. A few people generously grinned, but she hardly got the guffaws she’d hoped for.

Fifteen minutes later the various health professionals were jumping on chairs, sticking out tongues, rolling back eyes, tugging cheeks, and flapping arms, funky-chicken style. And laughing, yes. Laughing really hard.

LaRoche surveyed the silliness with visible satisfaction. Those giggles, snickers, and chuckles are the latest technique in stress management: laughter therapy. “Laughter is serious business,” says the 61-year-old Plymouth resident, whose seminar was part of a four-day conference on optimism, humor, and “cognitive restructuring” put on by the Harvard-affiliated Mind/Body Medical Institute as part of Harvard Medical School’s Division of Continuing Education. Getting the strait-laced professionals to laugh was only the first step. The next is for them to help patients do the same. “Humor is one of the most elegant coping mechanisms humans have,” LaRoche says soberly.

SINCE THE 1970s, a growing pile of research has pointed to the link between humor and healing. In his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness, former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins recounted his discovery that, after he was diagnosed with a particularly devastating form of arthritis, 10 minutes of gut laughter prompted by silly videos meant he could put off popping pain medication for two hours. More recently, researchers at Loma Linda University in California saw significant increases in natural killer-cell activity in the blood of 52 healthy men they planted in front of funny movies. A rise in killer white blood cells helps fight off illness; meanwhile, laughing also reduces stress (through drops in the stress hormone cortisol) and serves as what Norman Cousins dubbed “internal jogging,” an aerobic workout for the belly. LaRoche herself has jokingly proposed a diet book called Laugh Your Ass Off.

Today, several hospitals across the country employ clowns to bring a little levity into children’s wards. Children’s Hospital Boston has instituted “clown rounds” three days a week, in which visitors from the Big Apple Circus bring bubbles, red noses, and rubber chickens instead of stethoscopes and charts. And the Mind/Body Medical Institute, led by Harvard professor Herbert Benson at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, uses humor to elicit the “relaxation response” and counteract stress.

Supported by a number of studies on the salubrious effects of laughter, Loretta LaRoche has taken her health-promoting ha-has on the road, dining out on her blend of stand-up and science. With PBS specials, radio appearances, books, videos, a Web site (Stressed.com), and her own consulting company (The Humor Potential, Inc.), LaRoche has made it her mission to make people laugh, mostly at themselves. Her video The Joy of Stress has sold 90,000 copies since its 1995 release. Her 1998 book, Relax — You May Only Have a Few Minutes Left: How To Use the Power of Humor To Defeat Stress in Your Life and Work (Hyperion), has sold 60,000 copies, and her second book, Life Is Not a Stress Rehearsal: Bringing Yesterday’s Sane Lifestyle into Today’s Insane World (Broadway Books), is coming out this month; a book tour will bring her to Berklee Performance Center for a stand-up show on April 21.

Although the Longwood conference was aimed at health professionals, her messages apply to everyone. Whether she’s lecturing employees at the IRS, the FAA, Reebok, or NASA (all former clients), LaRoche finds out why people are freaking out and prods them into recognizing that it’s just not that big a deal. “I have an observational sense of humor,” says LaRoche. “I can zero in on the total absurdity of how we behave and how we think.” She exaggerates obsessions to ridiculous extremes, which forces people to laugh at themselves and, ultimately, to put things in perspective.

Gail McMeekin, a local personal coach, has profiled LaRoche in her book The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women: A Portable Mentor (Conari Press, 2000). “I have some of her audio tapes that I keep in the car,” McMeekin says. “When there’s a bad situation — say, snow and ice on 128 — I say, all right, let’s just put Loretta on and calm down. I always say, with stress we can avoid it, change it, or cope with it. We act like it’s a life-or death thing, but it’s just” — she interrupts herself with a laughing sneer — “traffic.”

LaRoche adds another example: “I talked to 2500 Domino’s Pizza guys. I was a little queasy about it, them being Generation Xers and all. It was a workshop. I asked them, ‘What is it that disturbs you?’ I said, ‘Basically, you’re making and selling pizza. Hello! I know there’s a certain amount of stress in making it and doing it, but come on.’”

It doesn’t take LaRoche long to train her sights on this reporter, either. “The thinking that people have most of the time is crisis-driven,” she says. “ ‘I have a deadline, I have a deadline.’ Listen to the way it sounds. Dead. Line. You weren’t told you have a terminal illness. You were told you had a deadline. Come on.” Really, it’s a simple technique, the prodding and teasing, but it works, especially in the lilting delivery of this deadpan grandma, who likens herself to Erma Bombeck or Jackie Mason.

With only a master’s degree in speech therapy on her academic résumé, LaRoche can’t exactly claim to be a health expert, though she can spew citations and studies in an avalanche of anecdotes. Having gotten her start in the fitness field, she is hard to classify, and she admits that this has been something of an impediment. Recently, a high-profile gig on a morning talk show fell through because the producers found her too funny.

But her messages apparently tickle the funny bones of many. Though you might expect a woman who fancies herself the “Martha Stewart of stress management” to speak mostly to stay-at-home moms, her approach seems to have broad appeal. She remarks incredulously: “All kinds of people tell me they can’t even stand it. They’re collapsing. I even have kids emailing me. There will be kids sitting in the audience with my props. They love it, because in some ways, I’m poking fun at their parents.”

Sure enough, it’s hard not to laugh when you’re listening to LaRoche. She follows her own example, giving herself wholly to belly chuckles; laughter takes over, interrupts her thoughts, cascades through her sentences, punctuates her points. “I’m in the category of the four-year-old,” LaRoche says. “Four-year-olds laugh 400 times a day. Adults average 15 times a day. Adults have to put it on their list. ‘I’ll laugh later ... when I’m done,’” she says, mocking typical adult thinking. “But when are you going to be done? When you’re dead.”

LAROCHE’S FAVORITE punch line relates to just that: death. “I think that once you come in contact with the fact that you’re going to croak, you start to live,” she explains. “I tell people, ‘You’re here to distract yourself until you die. You can distract yourself in a fun way or you can make your life a misery and a hell every day.’” Joking about croaking can be risky, but LaRoche is improbably sensitive as she applies her de-stressing strategies to those battling diseases as serious as cancer and AIDS. Still, the message she conveys to doctors who treat the terminally ill is essentially the same message she uses when she mocks Domino’s employees to get them to see the humor in their “catastrophizing.” “Basically, it’s all the same, as far as how we disturb ourselves,” she explains. “But when I talk to medical people, I teach in a slightly different format: more research; we identify specifically what’s going on.”

Ultimately, while any Joe can summon up some giggles with cheap jokes, LaRoche helps people think while they’re laughing and calm down about what’s stressing them, a technique called “cognitive restructuring.” Marilyn Wilcher, the senior vice-president at the Mind/Body Medical Institute, where LaRoche has taught classes to medical professionals for the past nine years, says LaRoche’s method is not only popular, but successful. “It’s amazing,” she says. “We see people with no quality of life, who haven’t been able to work for a year, getting their lives together. We’ve seen AIDS patients turn their lives around. We see it with all kinds of patients.” Part of the secret is that the physical act of laughing releases stress-reducing endorphins. But what’s different about LaRoche, Wilcher attests, is her ability to get people to see the best in the worst. “We’ve trained tens of thousands of health professionals in the past 10 to 15 years. All of our clinicians are trained in [cognitive restructuring],” she says. “But none of them are experts the way Loretta is.”

LaRoche’s technique has inspired others to use humor to deal with tragedy. Steve Smith, a hospital chaplain from Kansas City who came to town for last month’s conference, describes his job as “dealing with a bunch of crap, a bunch of bad issues.” But he says launching bubbles onto people on the brink of death is one of his favorite tricks to lighten the mood. “I’m forever blowing bubbles,” says the soft-spoken, grandfatherly man with a grin. “The first word of funeral is fun, so we can look at anything with a very good look.”

And once death is lightened up, it’s hard to take anything all that seriously — even when it comes to LaRoche’s own career. After peddling her laugh therapy successfully for 30 years and starting work on her fifth PBS special, she’s asked, when will she feel that she’s made it? “Pierce Brosnan,” she says without missing a beat. Um, what about him — meeting him, working with him? “Looking at him for an hour, feeling his arms or something,” she deadpans, before finally busting up.

Nina Willdorf can be reached at nwilldorf[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001