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....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 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.

...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....The students were presented with 300 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 moustache. This gave several other students a case of the giggles. Within seconds, the entire group was laughing in a rising and ebbing crescendo of cackles, gurgles and roars that lasted for an hour and 15 minutes.

At the risk of sounding humorless, I think the key is to integrate humor and laughter into the everyday routines of your life. I know whenever my wife works at home, and is talking to colleagues on the phone, she's ususally laughing uproriously before long. Must be something to do with the absurdities of various assignments and personalities with which she must contend. Myself, I find that the God-awful crap on television and in lifestyle magazines is enough to crack me up. Then there are my kids, and of course, the Washington state legislature.

I'll admit Germans DO need some help in the humor department: I see them here in Washington state on vacation and they are so grim and sober you almost want to mash a pie in their faces. Which would not be good for international relations. So if it takes lying in a large circle and manufacturing laughs which then become contagious, to get them into the practice of laughing, OK, I guess.

Careful about compartmentalizing humor, though, among other emotions. I suspect folks too uptight to laugh are rigid and closed off to much else besides laughter. The "taught" approach to laughter is rather inorganic. You might want to follow a recipe for spaghetti with meat sauce the first time around, but if you must use it again and again - face it; you're a stiff.

The latest thing that made me laugh? The news about German laughing classes.

TECHNORATI TAGS: GERMANY, GERMANS, LAUGHING CLASSES