Weeling told me that she caught a documentary on TV mobile today. It featured the laughter therapy given to Japanese working class. It aims at stress relief by teaching the patients how to laugh. Part of the therapy includes getting artists to do portraits of the patients, with an artist's impressions of each patient laughing. And the patients have to bring home a cassette tape of laughter and religiously listen to it.

I found it disturbing. Just as I found the report on adolescents in Hong Kong preferring money to parents, because they can have fun and buy computer games with money. They actually told the press that time with parents are unimportant, since they have nothing to say to them.

Yet, going back to the Japanese, the loss of spontaniety and the loss of humour are certainly reasons to mourn. Laughter is part of communication, an informal but indispensable component of social exchange. It signifies the ability of human beings to creatively express themselves and understand the world. If one loses one's ability to laugh, it is to lose the ability to creatively assess the world and to lose part of one's ability to communicate with and respond to the world. One becomes to a degree, sociopathic.

It seems that what we deemed as natural, uncontrollable, spontaneous can actually be suppressed, controlled and denied. I am not sure how relevant laughter and humour are to each of us, but personally I sure find laughter fun and enjoyable. I happen to like my own voice.

Without spontaniety and creativity, life for me, is unthinkable.

Weeling asked me to teach her to laugh should she forgot. How can I refuse?