Is laughter the best medicine?

The boundaries of humanistic research into comedy and mental health

Talk by Dr Dieter Declerq, University of Glasgow.

This talk proceeds from a series of investigations around the commonplace idea that laughter is the best medicine. I am interested in establishing the boundaries of research practices in the humanities that study the relationship between comedy and mental health. Humanities researchers are not psychologists, therapists, or clinicians. So what is the nature and scope of their contribution, as humanities researchers, to the study of comedy and mental health? I will propose that this contribution is a kind of helping work that has critical instead of clinical or therapeutic aspirations. My reflections are informed by three different projects, which I will refer to in my talk: 1) a theoretical examination of satire as ‘therapy’; 2) an interdisciplinary evaluation of stand-up comedy workshops for eating disorder recovery; and 3) a praxis of play workshops for wellbeing and creative thinking.

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