Albert Nerenberg calls humour therapeutic, says it helps CEOs keep stress at bay

Serious CEOs, fake bodyguards and orgasms by hypnosis. Just a chat on routine matters with Canadian laughologist Albert Nerenberg.
Stand-up comedians in India face a peculiar problem. Most of them make their best money at corporate gigs. But the audience — generally a guarded bunch in suits — simply doesn’t laugh.

Albert Nerenberg, a Canadian laughologist, hypnotist and satirist, who was in New Delhi earlier this year, has had a similar experience with the business crowd. And he would like them, in fact, everyone, to laugh more. And not necessarily at a joke but to relieve tension, because that’s what laughology is.

The best medicine
“CEO types don’t laugh,” Nerenberg tells ETPanache at an event, fighting jet lag and waiting for his turn on the stage. “They are cerebral, they aren’t workshop people. We live in a society that is overly serious. We think seriousness is reality. But when you laugh you realise that seriousness is a kind of condition. The foundation of a good life is in laughing a lot.”

The Montreal resident’s pink, cherubic face belies his 56 years, though it is offset by white hair and goatee. A certified “laughter yoga leader”, Nerenberg’s message is that laughology is different from humour, and as therapeutic. It is something he saw first hand when his visit to Mumbai coincided with the 26/11 terrorist attacks.



Nerenberg travelled to Mumbai to interview Dr Madan Kataria, regarded as the founder of laughter yoga, for a documentary. But the city was breached and devastated. In the ensuing days, a wounded nation leaned a bit on laughter therapy to cope.

“It was forced laughter, but that helps too,” Nerenberg says. “One of the natures of optimism is the deliberate act of smiling or laughing.

“Everybody knows about jokes. Everybody knows about Charlie Chaplin. But that ’s humour. Laughter is a behaviour. There have been yogis in India who probably have done that [laughter yoga] for thousands of years.”

Making it by faking it
Nerenberg is no slouch with humour either. He once organised the World Stupidity Awards. On another occasion, he hired actors to pose as the bodyguards of the Canadian PM (“because they just wear earphones all the time”). He also created a fake movie star named Lance Banyan to crash a real movie premiere.

“When the police found out [about the bodyguards], there was a lot of trouble,” Nerenberg says. “The film festival people got mad [about Lance Banyan]. I did it to show the artificialness of movie stars. We rented a limo to go right up to the entrance and organised fake paparazzi. That was key. When Lance Banyan got out of the car, they screamed, ‘It’s Lance Banyan.’ It was to prove that movie stars are a bit arbitrary.”



Hypnotic effect
Hypnosis is a not her of Nerenberg’s skills, even though some have been sceptical about his claims. And they are some claims, as the following para will reveal.

“Hypnosis is the best system we have to understand unconscious behaviour,” says Neremberg. “A lot of people don’t understand their habits. People smoke, they don’t know why. People say the wrong things, they don’t know why. One of the things it (hypnosis) does is help people with trauma. It helps you relax. In America, 60 per cent of marriages are sexually dysfunctional. Hypnosis can cure that. I’m doing a documentary where you can hypnotise people in five minutes and they can have big orgasms. I don’t think we would be doing it here (at the event), though.”

If Nerenberg did broach the subject on stage, it would have been some tann ki baat on a forum that a few hours earlier had been graced by the Indian prime minister.