THE COMEDIAN'S LAMENT OR GRAVITAS IS NOT A MEXICAN DISH Reaching an advanced age still averse to speaking a serious sentence is nothing to laugh about. Facetiousness has not yet been faced as a national problem, like drink, drugs and obesity. We celebrate it in phrases like, "Laughter is the Best Medicine." But walking among you, dear readers, are a vast tribe of desperate laffaholics like me. To avoid us, you must learn the signs. You can keep your smiles -it's laughter we need, like Placido Domingo needs music. We have little tolerance for sober, uninterrupted expressions of thought, or the respectful pause that follows. We get restless at the sound of a sentence marching stolidly forward, dispensing nothing but information and opinion, with nary a giggle, chuckle, laugh or guffaw. We are insufferable at meetings. We should never be assigned to missile silos or nuclear submarines. If we hear more than two boring sentences strung together, with no chance for forced entry through farcical interpolation or antic invention, something inside us dies a little. Our body language begins to approximate that of a child who needs to go to the bathroom. In every word, every thought, laughter beckons. If you are among the afflicted, you know the unending, unrestrainable urge to go for the jocular. That's a sense of humor, unleashed. Most people with a sense of humor usually get through the day without making someone fall down laughing. Most do not measure the success of a day by how many of their fellow human beings they have rendered helpless by nightfall, gasping for breath, on the point of tears, shaking their heads as if to say, no more. No more. This aggression of the hyper-comic was first noted by Freud. Society tolerates and even rewards clowns, cartoonists, comedy writers and stand-up comics, considering them entertaining, instructive in life's possibilities and socially useful as vicarious outlets for rage and discontent. In that sense, their own danger to society is contained, too, like animals in a zoo. It's the ones roaming at large, like me, that I worry about. You could find yourself sitting next to one at a dinner party. We have provided a rich field for psychologists. Scholars search for roots and causes of the disease, just as they try to understand creativity, of which laffaholism is, of course, a bizarre branch. If I were to make fun of my own hearing impairment, saying, "Putting a Martian on every plane is not going to make me feel better," I have certainly created something that did not exist before, although its technique is not new. What we have called Malapropism since the 18th century is one of the earliest forms of humor. It began when smart little toddlers first noticed the amusement of big people whenever they got a new word wrong. Some of us remember that laughter, mistake it for approval, cherish it deeply, and try for the rest of our lives to repeat the experience. That is one of the more plausible, or 5-and-dime, explanations for facetiousness. We know that we can sometimes be a trial to others. We are trying to police ourselves, expelling from our number all purveyors of leaden, groan-provoking, one-dimensional puns. But if you have some health issue that has not responded to the best treatment science can offer, we are available for house calls. Laughter is the best medicine. © Russell Connor