A Laughing Club For When Life Just Isn’t Funny
Acting teacher Gabe Levey of Northampton, Mass., during his Zoom laughing club. (Screen Shot/Karen Brown/NEPR)
It’s not easy to find levity in today’s world.
That’s why Northampton, Massachusetts, acting teacher Gabe Levey created the Pioneer Valley Laughing Club.
It’s a chance to act like things are funny, even when they’re not.
At the first Zoom meeting of the laughing club — pandemic edition — Levey hosted about two dozen people for an hour on a Saturday, to help them attain the lightheartedness they craved.
“My name is Gabe. I’m in Northampton, in my parents’ attic,” Levey began, and then he laughed heartily.
This is not a comedy class. It’s really all about the laugh, even a forced one — and many of them throughout the hour were.
To get things rolling, Levey asked each person to introduce themselves, describe their biggest problem, and laugh.
The problems included the fairly mundane (“It’s too cold to paint the mudroom.”) and daily frustrations (“My problem is shopping for food.”).
But they also ramped up to poignant and alarming – from a woman who lost out on an eight-week engagement at the Metropolitan Opera because of the COVID-19 shutdown, to a man who had to close his production of Angels in America, to a woman who got at the very heart of why there were all there:
“I’m just not feeling well for eight weeks now with the coronavirus.”
And after every sad telling, the group guffawed loudly, as requested.
Read the rest of this story at NEPM’s website.