There is a sentence I still hear in my head: "You are taking laughter too seriously."

The person who said it was half-amused, half-exasperated, while I tried to explain a set of studies on stress hormones. I understood the reaction. We usually treat laughter as pleasant background noise, not something that belongs in conversations about mental health, loneliness or ageing.

We should rethink that. And tomorrow is a good day to start.

In 1995, an Indian physician, Dr Madan Kataria, brought five people together in a Mumbai park to do something that looked faintly ridiculous. They laughed on purpose, without jokes. His idea was simple. The body, he argued, does not distinguish between voluntary and spontaneous laughter. Physically, it responds in the same way. Lungs expand, the diaphragm works harder, muscles engage, breathing shifts, and so do hormones.

He turned out to be right. The science that follows is clearer than many people realise.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of laughter interventions found that they reduce cortisol, the body's primary stress hormone, by approximately one-third. In some studies, a single session produces a 36% drop. It does not really matter whether comedy films, group exercises, or jokes trigger the laughter. The pattern is the same. Something that costs nothing, requires no prescription, no specialist, and no equipment, consistently nudges the body away from stress and towards recovery.

If that outcome came in the form of a pill, health systems would not dismiss it as a joke.

I have spent more than 25 years working in global health, often in places where a functioning health system is still an aspiration for most of the people it is meant to serve. In those settings, dashboards track immunisation rates, antenatal visits, and stockouts of essential medicines. These numbers matter. Yet there is another pattern I see again and again that no dashboard records.

The communities that laugh together, in markets, in clinic waiting rooms, on the steps of temples, across fences and across differences, are the communities that feel more connected and resilient.

Laughter does not fix poverty, bad roads, or a shortage of medicines. It does something else. It binds people. It offers a brief rehearsal for coming back from the edge. Shared laughter is often the first signal that a nervous system braced for bad news is willing to relax, even for a moment.

Nepal is where I first saw this treated as a serious practice. In Kathmandu, I met the global laughter guru, Ravin Lama. Around the globe he gathers people in parks and corporate spaces and invites them to laugh out loud. At first, it looks like performance. People feel self-conscious. Then the sound shifts. It becomes easier, fuller, more contagious. What begins as an exercise ends as relief.

We often talk about gifts from the land of Lord Buddha in the language of meditation and mindfulness. The practice of shared, deliberate laughter belongs in that same lineage. It is a form of applied compassion. Research shows that laughter stimulates biological effects that help us better cope with stress, loneliness, and ageing, making laughter a valuable tool for community well-being.

All this intersects directly with three of the most serious challenges we face: mental health, loneliness, and ageing.

Globally, about one in eight people live with a diagnosable mental health condition. In many low and middle-income countries, more than 70 per cent of those who need care receive none. Even where services exist, they are often clustered in cities and hospitals, far from the communities that need them most.

Loneliness is its own quiet crisis. Older people feel it sharply, but they are not the only ones. Migrant workers, young people in unstable jobs, women who carry unpaid care work without support, many live surrounded by others and still feel profoundly alone. Loneliness increases the risk of depression, anxiety, cognitive decline and even early death.

Shared laughter is not a cure for any of this, but it is one of the fastest shortcuts to human connection that we have. A regular laughter group in a park will never replace a mental health clinic. Still, it can act as a counterweight to isolation.

As societies age, including here in South Asia, the question of how older adults will stay mentally well, socially connected, and physically resilient grows more urgent. Formal services alone cannot carry that responsibility. Families are changing. Migration is reshaping who lives with whom. Digital life may distract us, but it does not put a hand on our shoulder when we laugh so hard we are out of breath.

Laughter is not a substitute for antidepressants, counselling, or community psychiatric care. It cannot repair structural inequality or compensate for underfunded health budgets. It would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. It is also irresponsible to overlook something that costs nothing, needs no cold chain, no imported technology, and no specialist degree, and can be practised in any language by any age group with almost no risk, while strengthening social ties in the process.

World Laughter Day is celebrated on 3rd May. Instead of just forwarding a quote or a cartoon, it might be worth planning something more intentional. A short session in a school yard. A gathering in a park. A pause in a staff meeting where people agree to look a little foolish together for a few minutes and see what it shifts.

If even a small part of tomorrow is organised around shared laughter, that will not solve our mental health crisis or our loneliness epidemic. But it will be a quiet act of resistance against both, and a reminder that some of the tools we need most are already in our lungs, our muscles and our voices.

Dr Sunoor is an international expert in leadership & strategic communication and global health diplomacy. More on www.sunoor.net