Should we be spending more time crying?

You know how they say "Children laugh 400 times a day, while adults laugh only 15"? Apparently, that started with Norman Cousins, whose book, Anatomy of an Illness was a most convincing journey into the healing powers of laughter and play.

According to Allen Klein, widely recognized humor maven, maybe the child's daily laugh count is not actually 400 times a day. But it's still a lot more than adults. Which is why we have people who are professionally helping us to laugh more. Even when we don't particularly feel like it. Even when we can't really find anything to laugh about. Just because it's healthy.

After much serious contemplation, I've come up with yet another irreverently relevant observation. Not only do children laugh more than adults, they also cry more.

So I'm postulating here that maybe the implications for a healthier adulthood are not just that it's better for us to laugh more, but also maybe even to cry more. Surely we can make ourselves cry almost as easily as we can make ourselves laugh. And, as long as we're the only one's that are making ourselves do it, maybe it's just as healing, making ourselves cry more, as it is making ourselves laugh more.

I don't know. I'm more of a postulator than a researcher. But I have personally and repeatedly observed that sometimes crying, like at the movies, or with someone I love, feels kind of delicious. Kind of healing. Kind of, even, fun.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Cheating for fun

It's been a long time since I sat down with a deck of cards and played solitaire. So used to the well-ordered clarity and immediacy of computer solitaire games have I become that I had almost completely forgotten about the many charms and "affordances" of a physical deck of actual playing cards. Aside from the sensuous tactility of the cards, their perfected flexibility and functional stiffness, the elegance and visual clarity of their design, the autonomic joys of shuffling and laying out a new game, there's the compelling opportunity to engage in what one might call "the inner-dialogue surrounding the pros and cons of," well, "cheating."

You can't really cheat at computerized solitaire. And it's a shame.

The almost lost art of cheating at solitaire, I rediscovered, can lead one to a self-exploration of the highest order and deepest discovery. So you're playing, say, Canfield, and you've dutifully gone through the "stock," three cards at a time, and have reached that soul-encountering point that accompanies the realization that you have lost the game. So you go through the stock one, nay, two more times, and everso clearly reached the point at which the only thing left to acknowledge is defeat.

You now have two choices: 1) admit defeat, shuffle, and start the game over, or 2) explore, just for the sheer educational value, what would happen if you, say, put the top card of the stock on the bottom. In fact, now that you think about it, there could be a veritable voyage of discovery awaiting you. You could investigate the impact of turning over every two cards instead of every three, or perhaps arbitrarily selecting a card from the middle of the deck and placing it on the bottom, or even contemplate adding a fifth column to the proverbial tableau. A panoply, a conceptual cornucopia of what one might call "alternative rules" if one had lost cognizance of the fact that: a) the game was already lost, and 2) one was in fact cheating.

Odd, though, now that we think of it, how much more there is to play with when cheating becomes an option.

Which brings me to the text of today's sermon - the text of which can be found in Chapter 4 of The Well-Played Game, pages 30-32, which is just now conveniently and freely available to you, my personal public, in this PDF file.

We found that there was a kind of cheating which — even though it can be considered unfair, even though it helps somebody win or keeps somebody from losing — was good, was right, which led us all to a game we could play well together.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

The Art of Gibberish

Alex Sternik "Mentor and Enterprenuer, Initiator of Laughter Yoga Clubs in Israel" (site is in Hebrew, Google translation here) is, among many other things, a master of the art of gibberish. Last year, he was invited by Laughter Yoga Leaders and Participants in Berlin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam to train and share his knowledge of Gibberish Improvisation in his "Playing with the Nonsense" workshops.He is hoping to make his mastery available to laughter yoga practitioners in the States. To learn more about Alex and his theories, start with this article from the Jerusalem Post. Then watch his interview for Dutch TV (it's in Dutch, a little in English, but it's also in gibberish, and even if you can't tell the difference, you'll get a good idea of Alex and his gifts of laughter. If that's not fun enough, here's Alex explaining "gibberish therapy," in gibberish and English. And here's is Alex (click on all the pictures to reveal the video) in Germany.

Last year, during our Laughter Games Workshop, Alex gave a most impressive demonstration of how it is more or less possible to teach an entirely new game, completely in gibberish - a challenge I recommend only to my most advanced students.

As to the rationale for learning the art of gibberish, one would do well to explore its impact on brain development. Perhaps no one can explain it more cogently than John Cleese in the appended clip (via Boing Boing)

See also the "See Also" section of this Wikipedia article, and, of course, Estray Bonajour.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

Drawing together

Rick Hamrick sends us a cooperative drawing game of his invention. Actually, he sent it to me, and I asked if he'd mind sharing it with all you very deep funsters. I took the liberty of giving it a name. He took the time to give us the game:

The game is simple: start with a blank piece of paper on a flat surface and two people on opposite sides of the paper. Each is given a pen and instructed to start drawing a picture on the half of the page closest to them. Each person is to draw only on their side. The challenge is to adjust the image you are seeking to create so that it is complemented somehow by the image the other person is creating on the other half of the piece of paper.

So, of course, each player is seeking to incorporate the others art even as it is being created. A moving target!

Only one rule: no talking about the art in progress. Conversation is welcome, but it cannot be about the game or what each is drawing.

When one of the two players decides that the work is done, the other person has a brief time to complete the bit they are drawing, then the game concludes with each person describing their work. An added twist would be for each to guess what the other had in mind prior to the person describing it. Emphasis is on how they incorporated the other person's work into their own and telling a good story about it.

No winner or loser, only time spent in a cooperative task where cooperation is made a challenge because you cannot talk about it. And, the story-telling part at the end can be outrageous and laughter-inducing.

I see many implications. Many applications. Many variations. Three people? Online perhaps? O, the fun, the drawing together.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith

One-handed half frog

One-handed half-frog

Originated by Julie DeKoven, the one-handed half-frog (frogus-hemi-enlightenupmentus) allows those of us with two hands to engage in the frequently entertaining and rarely profound two half-frog dialog.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith