Laughter is the best medicine

Laughter is said to be the best medicine and aside from actual medicine then this might actually be true. A really good laugh makes the world seem like a better place which is probably why people go out of their way to experience this feeling. Intuitively you would not think that laughter is the sort of thing that could be forced but there are whole groups of people in America who meet for laughter therapy which consists of fake laughing ( or the charity laugh as I call it) until you actually end up laughing. I've read its fairly effective but really it's just incredibly strange. Only in America eh.
Personally I prefer my levels of amusement to go up naturally. Nothing like a chat with friends or a good bit of comedy to get you giggling your way to feeling better.

Last night in this effort to heal myself through comedy ( okay fine I just wanted to be entertained) I went to see David O'Doherty do some stand up live and it was well worth the money as my sides were hurting from laughing coming out of there. He's always been one of my favourite comedians so I had really been looking forward to the show and I wasn't let down. I really should make more of an effort to see stand up comedy because life is too short to spend every night in and hey I don't get any sort of hangover from seeing stand up. I imagine the fact I wasn't drinking would play a large part in that but that's only an educated guess.

Over the years I have probably missed more opportunities to see comedy than I have taken them up. I have not yet made it to the Kilkenny Cat laughs festival despite reading the line up year in and year out and thinking that looks brilliant, I would really like to see...(insert genius comic name here) and then saying maybe next year but it's always left too late or the tickets are too expensive or some other as yet unnamed excuse. I think actually most of the stand up I have seen was during the time my brother was in college and ran a comedy club in Limerick called Schnitzel comedy. The put on some pretty decent shows, with actual known comedians, in the basement of a bar they frequented, Yes the whole thing was pretty low budget with the folding chairs and no fancy lighting but it really worked and I remember countless nights there holding onto my chair I was laughing so hard. It didn't hurt things that for the cost of a bus ticket, and an hour helping to set up, I could watch the show for free. The only thing better than really good comedy is really good free comedy. It seems I haven't lost my penchant for the free.

I have been relatively lucky in that all the times I have parted money for laughter I have been justly rewarded and even many times when I was just a pretty freeloader in the crowd (family discount and all that) with one notable exception. While in college I heard that Jarlath Regan was going to be doing stand up in a bar in town and having heard really good stuff about him,I persuaded my friends to buy tickets and along we went. We were waiting about 15 minutes for the show to start when it was announced that due to the weather his flight had been delayed so they had called in another comedian as a back up. The decent thing to do would have been to refund us our ticket money but clearly that wasn't offered to us so we said sure we've already paid so we might as well give this guy a shot. I really wish we hadn't. No I don't know where they dragged this guy out of but his attempt at comedy was actually painful. I think there's a possibility he was a bar employee who was considered to be a bit of a laugh so he said he would give it a go. It was beyond awful, I think we might have experienced actual pain listening to him. The worst part was we couldn't escape because out of some mad desperation (due to all his jokes falling flat) he took to picking on the audience in a mean rather than funny way so god help the guy going to the toilet never mind two girls making a run for it so we had to bide our time to make our escape.

The lesson here is to ask for your money back if the act you've paid for is a no show and always balk at the words local comedian (okay maybe not always but most of the time)

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