Laugh Loud and Long and Clear

I’d like to create a new fitness monitor. Instead of measuring pulse or steps, it would measure laughter. I’m not even talking laughter throughout the day, but the first time each day that you laugh out loud.

I know there are sometimes streaks of days where I don’t laugh or think about laughing. In New York, I went and saw Billy Crystal. The first time I laughed it felt foreign for just a moment before relief swept over me. It had been four days since I laughed out loud.

I am someone who thrives on laughter. It’s why I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Seinfeld and a nostalgic fondness for Popsicle stick jokes (this is made up).

Tangent: Does anyone remember Stick Stickly, the former Nick in the Afternoon summer host in the 90’s? He was a popsicle stick, and his big gag was being dipped in an unknown substance with a blindfold on. One time they had a special where he found his long-lost brother, who could have been Chris Elliot, but turned out to be another Popsicle stick. They had a thing with oddly formed people between Hey Arnold and the giant Face that hosted Nick Jr…Okay, back to words on laughter.

The internet, it seems, has been created for the entire purpose of mining laughs. Most internet content (tweets, memes, YouTube videos) is garbage, but every now and then it causes you to laugh out loud in the office when you’re supposed to be working.

We could all live a little lighter if we knew where our next laugh was coming from. We would be happier if we addressed misunderstandings with shared humor instead of anger—if laughter were praise, apology, greeting, romance and encouragement.

I am pretty good at laughing with others. I try to laugh at myself, but then people who don’t understand self-deprecating humor think I’m down on myself. In my best times, I see life with a tinted with laughs, never taking it too seriously.

I would like to create a podcast and the entire goal is to make the listener laugh out loud in the first ten minutes of his or her day. I think it would be more powerful than meditation and coffee. However, laughter is hard to capture and even harder to execute.

Have any ideas on where I can get my next laugh-fix? I mean my LOL fix (first time I’ve ever typed that in a piece).