Jesal Kapadia

The Laughing Club

The laughing clubs, also known as laughter yoga, have become a popular phenomenon both in the West and in India, where they originated. Based on laughter’s therapeutic effect on the body as well as inspired by the Reader’s Digest quote, “Laughter is the best Medicine,” these clubs are largely urban entities. This video visits one such club in a park in south Mumbai, a “global city” set uneasily at the juncture of regional, national, and transnational processes. Laughter is explored as an ambivalent phenomenon in which technologies of the self and spontaneous affect become undecideable, registering post-colonial urban anxiety as much as a “natural” human propensity.