Saturday, April 25, 2026

Nude Laughter at the MFA Boston

MFA is all over it: Nude Laughter at Museum of Fine Arts, just in time for World Laughter Day.

https://www.mfa.org/event/performance-art/xandra-ibarra-nude-laughing

Friday, April 24, 2026

World Laughter Library is online

See the Page "World Laughter Library" online from the blog landing page, or at

https://dialalaugh.com/wll/ or from the bottom of the Dial a Laugh app page.

Thanks for donating your laughter to the World Laughter Library !

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

May 3, 2026 is World Laughter Day

Celebrated on the first Sunday in May, in 2026 it is May 3rd. Hava a laugh with your friends and enemies alike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Laughter_Day .

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Dial A Laugh web app launched!

April first, 2026. Yes it's April Fool's Day, rabbit rabbit.

My new friend Claude (not the original Claude Shannon, but his namesake) helped me make an online app that looks like the dialpad of a phone, and models the behavior of a telephone system that anyone can call and get their laughter fix for the day.

If you find 10 seconds is not long enough for the laugh you wish to submit to the World Laughter Library (via option 9) record it and email it to me at haha@dialalaugh.com

The web app is available at https://dialalaugh.com/ and there is a User Guide if you need it.

If you happen to use Safari, you can select the "add to HomePage" to make a shortcut that you can put on your phone screen so it behaves like any other app. Just tap it to access DialALaugh.

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Laughter in the Time of Cholera

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/laughter-in-the-time-of-cholera (long form essay)

Essays

Laughter in the Time of Cholera

By Vlad Solomon

Political instability, popular unrest, and an impending pandemic? Welcome to France in the early 1830s. Vlad Solomon explores what made Parisians laugh in a moment of crisis through the prism of a vaudeville play.

Published

November 10, 2021

Detail from Honoré Daumier’s Croquis pris au théatre series, 1864 — Source.

The year 1832 in France still conjures up images of rebellion and barricades thanks to the enduring pathos of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. For the real-life Parisians, however, who inspired the novel’s iconic characters, it was not only a year of lost causes, bloody street battles, and political disillusionment. It was also, in the parlance of our times, a “pandemic year” during which thousands — more than 18,000 in Paris; 100,000 across France1 — succumbed to a wave of cholera that had been causing havoc throughout Asia, Russia, and parts of East Central