Before reading any further, please get a pencil to hand (a pen or chopstick will do).
First put one end between your lips but not teeth: you should frown. Now take the ‘pencil’ and hold it horizontally between your teeth. Smiling now? Grimly, perhaps, but smiling.
For four decades scientists have conducted variations on this experiment, showing if people are forced to smile they find cartoons funnier. The conclusion: if you fake happiness you can make it happen.
This theory runs through an unexpected but successful strand of the work of the charity Star Wards – one of nine mental health charities making up the Guardian’s Christmas Appeal this year.
Star Wards founder Marion Janner built the charity out of a list she wrote after she was discharged from her first stay on a hospital mental health ward. Regular comedy evenings was number 14 of the 75 ideas, which were intended to be practical and relatively simple improvements, from more attractive presentation of food to a culture of saying “thank you”.
The easiest way to do this remains renting a funny dvd and buying in some popcorn, says Janner. But advice and examples offered on Star Ward’s Wardipedia list under “Funny stuff” include up-and-coming stand up comedians doing gigs on wards; a hospital which has a comedy cart pushed about by a clown and a comedy room full of games, toys and other props; Abba and Elvis nights; joke books for patients to read; making quirky designs on pizzas or cakes; and information about laughter clubs and laughter therapy.
John Cleese was a particular inspiration, says Janner: “I loved Monty Python as a kid, and friends and I would recite sketches over and over, with no diminishing of the hilarity.” One video she recommends shows a trip that Cleese made to visit a doctor who runs laughter therapy classes every morning in India.
“You can’t really reduce the trauma, it’s inherently traumatic, but you can include into it some really great experiences,” she says.
An inevitable problem with comedy is the risk of offence: something the charity recognises “is one of the main constraints on the ward experience of humour – and conversation”.
Their website offers advice on what is acceptable and what not. The truth is, though, that aside from extreme examples of offence - recently Frankie Boyle’s joke that Jordan or her ex husband Peter Andre would eventually lose their custody battle and have to take care of her 8-year-old disabled son – “funny” is very subjective. For that reason, Janner suggests comedians performing on mental health wards or in care homes would be better to avoid the subject altogether. When they do talk about mental health, context and intention are all important she says: Boyle wasn’t funny, The Simpsons TV show is.
But among patients and staff, as long as people are not ridiculing others, she wants to encourage more of the dark humour that can thrive in such intense circumstances. Laughing staff are more happy, motivated workers, suggests the charity. And there are plenty of references to academic research on the evident effect laughing can have on patients: reducing stress, helping people challenge unhelpfully rigid thinking, sharing an experience with others, even boosting pain tolerance and immunity.
But the experience of patients is the heart of the charity: “Because of the surreal nature of some mental illnesses, the intimacy and the camaraderie of being together – and because some very, very wonderful and funny people end up in hospital,” says Janner.
• This article was amended on 17 December 2014 to change a phrase to that intended by the interviewee.
