Product reviews for Laughology

It is too tempting to not say it -” go on, you're pulling my leg. Someone flogging a book about laughter! Tell me another one (all said of course in a Cockney accent preferably whilst wearing a John Bull bowler hat and quaffing manfully from a pint glass). How surprised was I to open the pages of this that you hold in your hand and find a deeply compassionate exploration of the human condition through the medium of Laughology -” the technique of life enhancement through laughter. This is too superficial a description however. Stephanie has taken one of the simplest and most generic of human emotional expressions -” the laugh -” and, with insight and intelligence, dug deep beneath its public face (my brain is playing old Frankie Howard footage as I write) to find explanations in surprising places. As a neurobiologist I am very aware of the effects of emotional states on the brain but Stephanie expands and develops on this in a beautifully constructed piece of work that is understandable to anyone. Ultimately life is about finding ways to reframe the bad, not to ignore it but to make it manageable, to allow your brain the space to deal with the crap. As Stephanie so brilliantly points out in this book -” actually that reframing can as easily be done with a smile or a laugh as with any over-earnest depth exploration of areas that you would rather leave alone. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Maybe (though there is so much political correctness out there now it's a bit hard sometimes to know when you can laugh), but you can certainly adopt Stephanie's approach -” laugh and your internal world may learn to laugh with you. That sounds like a good result.