Best medicine

Monday, February 1st., Chiltern Court, London.

"Laughter is the best medicine". So my mother often used to say. And she was right.

Like most professional humourists, I rarely laugh, even at what I think is funny. There are two sorts of humour, the sort that makes you laugh audibly, and the sort that makes you laugh subterraneanly, and noiselessly, somewhere down in your solar plexus. Some people hold that the second is better than the first. I am not of this opinion. I would give the two sorts equal marks, but the first or loud sort holds a clear advantage over the second in that it has a positive ameliorating influence on bodily health.

I shall never forget a supper, a long time ago, in my dyspeptic days at which Frederic Norton, celebrated as author of the music for Chu Chin Chow, told stories. Mr. Norton is the finest and most elaborate raconteur in my experience. Now the supper consisted of lobster, steak-and-kidney pudding and beer. What a combination! I quailed at the prospect as any one of these items taken at night ought to have incapacitated me for at least three days. Yet the next morning I awoke in the sublime perfection of health. The reason was that throughout the meal and after it I had laughed, as they say, 'consumedly'. I laughed indeed more than I have ever laughed before or since. Now I maintain that a man who can by speech or writing make you laugh in this fashion is a doctor in addition to being a humourist. He is a benefactor of mankind.

Nowadays I do not laugh enough. I admit it. It seems that I simply do not find things as funny as I used to. I am often amused, but it is a quiet, contained sort of amusement. I honestly cannot remember when I last had a proper 'belly-laugh'. This is a great pity and I feel I am the poorer for it, but laughing is not one of those things one can develop by taking thought, quite the opposite in fact. Perhaps a decine in the inclination to laugh out loud is a natural concomitant of growing old, like going grey? I must investigate this with some of my contemporaries.