Olaoluwa Emmanuel

You’re a Nigerian student. You rouse yourself from sleep almost self-begrudgingly by 6:00am to prepare for the long day of back to back classes ahead. Within the hectic hours are those precious little moments of inactivity. Sadly, you have to eat, read for a test or prepare for a class presentation. You cannot afford to rest or unwind. 

As the school closes at eventime, all your energy’s spent. And you plod wearily back to your residential abode beneath the less-severe, yet still severe, evening sun to repeat the same cycle throughout the remaining weekdays.

The life of a Nigerian student briefly sketched in the foregoing is microcosmic of the larger Nigerian society. Whether you are a driver, a civil servant, an entrepreneur to name a few, the struggle for survival seems to escalate each day but often with diminishing returns. Despite the life-draining, nerve-wracking workaday experiences of most individuals however, there is still a lingering glint of excitement and contagious happiness that seem to be never lost.

Although Nigerians are naturally happy people, I postulate that humor therapy has been largely instrumental in the preservation of that happiness. Like a fuelled generator which initially powers a building but needs constant refueling to prevent a burnout, humor therapy has maintained the happiness intrinsic in the Nigerian spirit untouched by the bothers of political misrule and grim social realities.

What exactly is humor therapy? Sometimes called therapeutic humor, humor therapy conceptualizes the healing effects of smiles and laughter. The relevance of humour therapy is well corroborated by psychoneuroimmunology, a field that studies the relationship between the mind and the body, where laughter is said to change brain chemistry and may boost the immune system. 

Although humor therapy is solely aimed at improving the health of recuperating individuals, on a meta level, I posit that it is that very antidote that has been stymieing our ailing country from regressing into the depth of incurable madness. Besides the banters and light-hearted jests among cliques of friends and people affined in other ways, Nigerians largely get their humor therapy from the wealth of comic materials on the internet. Thanks to the creative genius of content creators such as Twyse Ereme, Lasisi Elenu, Mr Funny (fondly regarded as Sabinus), Samspedy and a host of others, we can now spend our free time chuckling and laughing away at hilarious, sometimes, utterly ‘stupid’ contents that do not fail to tickle nonetheless.

Are you having a bad day at work or you are stalled with your final year thesis? Are you aggrieved by someone or something, or you are just moody for no reason in particular? Find yourself a good skit to watch, a good meme to read. Let the laughter reel out at every funny bit and allow the feel-good hormones to ripple through your body. The impact of this humor therapy is not merely momentary or short-lived. You are revitalised and reanimated by the feel-good hormones. You start life anew.