Laughing like a Colombian: 'We're in a bad mood because we laugh at each other's 'fucking' / 'The other side'

The first Sunday in May is World Laughter Day. The brainchild of Dr. Kataria, founder of the Laughter Yoga movement, it began in 1998.

It's celebrated that laughter is very healthy and vital, as it helps reduce anxiety and depression and improves sleep quality. When we laugh, our muscles relax, blood flows more rapidly to the brain, and it's said that laughter improves memory, concentration, learning, and stimulates creativity. It also makes us more sociable, strengthens bonds, and improves communication. In other words, it improves people's quality of life.

They say we look ugly when we laugh. Take a picture of yourself actually laughing, without posing, and you'll see how ugly we look. In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose , he says that those who laugh look demonic. Clement of Alexandria asks good Christians to "banish from our lives people who make us laugh." Saint Leander proscribes "the rudeness of laughter." They claim that there is no laughter in the Bible.

The Colombian master of humor, Daniel Samper Pizano, told us on February 27, 2015, that good humor is a cultural practice for sharing and a form of political and critical expression by the weak and the popular against the power, arrogance, solemnity, and fanaticism of authoritarians, politicians, religious figures, progressives, and the righteous. And that one cannot survive without humor.

The criterion of good humor is whether we laugh at power. In Colombia, on the other hand, we laugh at/mock the poor and the weak. We laugh a lot, but do we have good humor on television, radio, and stand-up comedy? Do we have good humor on the joke tellers of "Sábados Felices," Tropicana, Olímpica, Candela, La Luciérnaga, social media, or sports programs?

The answer is no. We have a bad mood because we laugh at each other, we make sexual, crude, and grotesque jokes. We expose our machismo, sexism, racism, classism, and xenophobia in jokes. We have a bad mood because we don't like self-criticism (which is the key to good humor), and politicians and powerful people have no humor.

Is it possible to create humor without racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism? Yes, it is possible, but to do so, you must be willing to laugh at the powerful, to use the wit of language, to practice irony, and to have a cultural repertoire beyond the sexual and grotesque.

In Colombia, there's great humor in everyday life, in everyday conversations between friends, in soap operas that always make us laugh, thanks to the use of language, the situations, and the characters. Better yet, to laugh, you have to go to series and soap operas.

Maybe we have a bad mood due to a lack of self-criticism and because we resolve everything with violence. In any case, this humor of ours serves as a catharsis to keep us from taking problems seriously.