Literature Review 1/4- Bupa Article

Laughter is healthly! This article from the global health and care organization, Bupa, who having been helping the public with their health from the 1940’s, demonstrates using statistics and facts that laughter might just be the best medicine. Laughter has many benefits to the human health such as faster blood flow through the circulatory system, reducing stress, lifting our moods to happiness, boost our immune system, helps our bodies become more tolerant to pain, and it even keeps diabetes under control!

In terms of how useful it is to answer my essay, as I am covering Q.3 (how does animation generate comedy?...), I feel that looking at laughter, the emotion that comedy generates to the audience, can allow me to explore the effects laughter has on the audience after being made to laugh. ‘Laughing is one of the first things we do when we are born along with crying. It is the most powerful form of communication and is the most basic universal language’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3075191.stm),

I feel I can use the topic of laughter and its effects on the audience to open my essay. For example,

(this paragraph could be used in my essay but it demonstrates how I could use this article to help construct my essay)

‘It is even advised by doctors that laughing is something that you should even make time for. ‘We could perhaps read something humorous or watch a funny video and try to find ways to take ourselves less seriously," lead researcher Dr. Miller’. Animations are ‘funny videos’ which contain a large range of comedy for all ages to enjoy. Examples of such comedy could be such as ‘Tom and Jerry’, which contains a large amount of slapstick humour (‘involving exaggerated physical violence or activities which exceed the boundaries of common sense’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick ) such as ‘Jerry slamming the window down on Tom who yells in pain’ or ‘Tom’s face turning into the shape of an iron after being by Jerry, who placed the iron in the pie’. It is the exaggerations of the physical violence which generates the comedy.’