Humor helps, but it's not easy

So with countless hugs, and a few quips, the members of the group dedicated to "healthy humor" celebrated the return of the nurse who founded their organization in the spare bedroom of her Chicago-area townhouse and during its first years did everything, editing its newsletter, organizing its conferences and giving the speeches. Now the Assn. of Applied and Therapeutic Humor was 20 years old and they celebrated that too in their convention here on Florida's Gulf Coast.

"I'm its mommy," Crane explained at an early session for newcomers to the group, a mix of nurses, physicians, psychologists, public speakers, clergy and "caring clowns," some of those wandering about in red and blue rubber noses. "Then I went into hiding for about 17 years."

And that would be one through-line of their weekend, the discovery of what had happened to their founder during those "lost years" or "dark years," as she alternately called them, and why she'd say, "I couldn't be around an organization that's so positive and optimistic."

It was an ironic truth that many of the group's members also know too well -- that you can devote your career to caring for others in hospitals and nursing homes and hospices and preach to them about the benefits of laughter and mirth and yet sometimes, when illness and depression enter your own life, there's no way to laugh them off.

"Sometimes what's appropriate is to cry through your grief," Crane said, and during the next three days, other professional healers would speak too of their own brushes with death and despair and their personal attempts to find solace in the lighter side of the bleakest moments.

The modern "therapeutic humor" movement got its start in the 1970s when magazine editor Norman Cousins wrote a book crediting doses of Marx Brothers movies -- along with a new diet and vitamin C -- with helping him come back from a potentially fatal illness.

"Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient" helped spawn the use of clowns and "humor carts" in hospitals, studies attempting to document the physiological benefits of belly laughs and the formation of several national organizations, including the one that met here Feb. 16 to 18. By the end of his life, Cousins worried that some people were taking his idea too far, attributing too much power to laughter, as if "ha-ha" might help cure all problems.