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Laughter 101
Interested students need to be comfortable
with large groups of people in dark,
air-conditioned rooms and one silver screen
directly linked to the emotional controls
of everyone present.
The curriculum is based
on control of those emotions.
The aspiring Laughers attend classes
in a warehouse basement in Hollywood.
They learn the difference between a guffaw
and a horselaugh; a ropple and a bellow.
They learn how to augment their larynx
(“Like laughing into a megaphone.”)
A ropple is a roaring laugh that ripples
through an audience.
Upon completion of the course, certificates congratulate
the recipients for having a “Welcome Social Disease”
because professional laughter is highly contagious.
It infects everyone within its radius.
It shills into the brains of entire audiences
and resoundingly echoes out of their mouths.
Licensed to laugh, the “graduates” are then flown
to every cineplex in America.
Their effect is to eclipse the cause.
The professional Laugher must have a laugh
that is funnier than a poorly scripted scene
on the movie screen.
But those infected by the rippling, rollicking,
thigh-slapping laughter that permeates its way
around the theater will walk out
stumble-drunk with hilarity.
Not because they had intercourse with a professional
Laugher but because of a hysterically funny movie,
so they think.
Then the film will be enthusiastically recommended
to friends and described in a manner superior
to how the movie had originally been written.
Then the friends repeat this process...And then their friends
tell other movie-going people...and you have
another rippling effect that puts
the boffo in the box-office.
Professional Laughers are future candidates
for Weight Watchers of America: they are all fat.
As a bonus for their sit-down labors, they receive
life-time supplies of buttered popcorn and Milk Duds.
And hot dogs and movie anecdotes.
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Footnotes
A COURSE OFFERING FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF SCAMOLOGY
is the copyrighted property of LCSoL.
It was originally written in 1997.
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