Newtown Laughter Club Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Newtown Laughter Club celebrated its tenth anniversary on Saturday May 21st 2011. Yes, for the past ten solid years, without a break, Newtown’s laughter club at Camperdown Memorial Park at the corner of Federation and Australia Street has been meeting almost every Saturday at 10am in the morning for giggles and guffaws.

I spoke to the founder of the club, Rowena, to ask her how it all came about. What gave her the idea of starting a “laughter club”. Because although laughter clubs are more well known nowadays, ten years ago they were a completely unknown entity and a novelty. The idea of a bunch of people getting together to, err, laugh. That was a funny concept in itself which sounded almost implausible.

Rowena recalled that in the late 1990s she saw a documentary on ABC Australian television called “Race Around The World” which featured laughter clubs during the contestants’ travels in India. That planted the seeds in Rowena’s mind and she would not forget. (The program aired in 1997 and 1998.) Fast foward to October 1999 and Rowena was attending a four day mediation workshop. At the workshop there was a gentleman from Mumbai and the subject of laughter clubs popped up.  The Indian gentleman had experience with them so he volunteered to lead a laughter club session with the group, which was Rowena’s first experience of laughter clubs. Being so much fun, it reinforced Rowena’s idea to start a laughter locally.

Probably around the early months of 2001 the Chauvel theatre in Paddington had a showing of  renown film maker Mira Nair’s documentary entitled “The Laughter Clubs of India”. Rowena decided to go to the showing to find if there were others in Sydney who would also be interested in starting a club. She mentioned to her yoga friends at breakfast after her regular yoga that she was was seeing the movie and, being intrigued, they wanted her to demonstrate the laughs. They thought it was hilarious and promised they’d come if she started it. At the show Rowena met Shirley Hicks, who coincidentally had seen the same ABC documentary “Race Around The World” and who was organizing to create an umbrella laughter club organization called “Laughter Clubs of New South Wales”. Shirley, in fact, started her own laughter club, Hunters Hill laughter club, just a couple of weeks before Rowena started hers. So it could be said Newtown is almost the oldest laughter club in Sydney, Hunters Hill being the very first, but just.

So on Saturday May 19th 2001, Newtown Laughter Club was born. Rowena led a bunch of folks to a corner of Camperdown Memorial Park in Newtown, got them standing around in a circle and, well, started exercises that created laughter. An idea that had been brewing for months, even years,  eventually maturated and came to fruition. (For anyone interested in starting a laughter club, that’s all it takes, just go to the park, have other folks join and, well, laugh. That’s it, no fanfare.) My hat off to Rowena because for someone with no “training” in leading a laughter club, it was a leap of faith. I know that when Shirley started her laughter club at Hunters Hill, she had the benefit of training from Peter Salerno, who learned directly from Dr Madan Kataria, whom he invited to Australia in the latter part of the 1990s.

When I first attended Newtown Laughter Club in January 2003, Rowena was still leading every week, although in the months to follow Simon began to share the leadership more and more until he took over as the regular laughter leader in 2004.

Rowena recalls that in the early years, it was passersby who joined in and who contributed greatly to the laughs that the club did. An Indian gentleman contributed the balloon laugh, whilst others suggested the juggling and secret whisper laughs, amongst others.

In late 2004 Rada took over laughter leadership of the club, a role which she maintained till only this year, when she relocated outside Sydney. Now the leadership rotates amongst members from week to week.

Happy anniversary, Newtown Laughter Club! Wishing you and all its members lots of laughter for the next ten years, and well beyond.

Newtown Laughter Club Tenth Anniversary