Time to draw laughter lines in the battle against our culture of complaint

LADS - and that includes you, Minister Hanafin - ye looked lovely in your garlands. Or leis. Or feather boas.

Or whatever they call those oversized necklace things they slung around your necks out in India. Orange for ministers and multi-coloured for the Taoiseach, indicating VIP and Serious VIP, respectively. Hope you brought yours home for the kids, Micheál.

No disrespect to any of you, but what was most interesting, in the photographs at that Christian Brothers' school, was the laughter and delight on the faces of the kids surrounding you. No self-conscious, eyes-sliding right and left to check how the pupil on either side is behaving. Those kids were just having fun. Now, the Christian Brothers have their points, but they never had a great reputation as witty, positive, laughter-inducers. They're better known for bruising grim determination (through the medium of Irish). It may be the country of origin, therefore, rather than the CBs, that should get the credit for the laughing children.

Indeed, according to one expatriate Indian working in Leipzig, that's one of the significant differences between Europeans and Indians. Indians are more positive. Europeans whinge about the train being late. Indians are delighted when the train arrives at all.

The Indian was commenting about the introduction by a Leipzig company of a no-whinge policy. Their boss says: "If you want to have fun in your company and reach big targets, you will not do it with employees who are angry."

The Leipzig computer company made complaining a fireable offence and included in its employment contract a ban on moaning and whingeing, unless a constructive suggestion was attached. Bizarre approach to management? Undoubtedly. It looks less bizarre, however, when it's revealed that productivity doubled in the year following its introduction.

Despite the increased productivity, not a lot of Irish companies will follow the example, and prioritise positivity. Our culture prefers complaint over creativity, condemnation over encouragement. We believe that to be cheerful and optimistic is to be trivial and shallow. Anybody who gets a charge out of life must not grasp the dire gravity of it all. Anybody who has faith in other people must be thick as a bag of rocks. It's just about acceptable to be cheery if you've had cancer or a bad car crash, because it's assumed your cheeriness is really bravery and that when you go home, you allow yourself to be properly miserable. But the smart money is on the slow sigh and the down-turned mouth.

Whole careers, particularly in journalism, have been built on condemnation and complaint.

Contrariwise, some careers can be queried by a demonstration of good humour. In politics, for example, it's OK to have Pat Rabbitte's particular brand of verbal kick-in-the-ghoolies wit, but when Enda Kenny's bubbling delighted mimicry of friend and foe alike, after he became Fine Gael leader, tended to be portrayed as indicating a lack of gravitas in the Mayo man.

On that note, coming up to the next general election, could someone please take gravitas out into the hills and shoot it? Gravitas is the personality equivalent of a mule: sour, dogged and infertile.

Politics, as a career, should carry a health warning: This job is not only impermanent and illusory, in that no politician ever has the amount of power everybody else thinks they have, but it is also characterised by customers who complain all day, every day, about everything from their sanitation to childcare.

You can fill them up with power jobs, new motorways, SSIAs, second homes in Spain, and skinny cappuccinos, and they still arrive at your clinic, on your mobile phone or opposite you on a radio programme carrying a metaphorical dead cat, demanding you do something about its deadness, and whimpering reproachfully that you haven't already dealt with its stink.

Given this reality, it's amazing that every townland in Ireland currently holds a brace of aspirant politicians, plotting to get themselves on a ticket to a job that will require them to spend their days feeling everybody's pain.

The Leipzig woman who declared her company a no-whinge zone is onto something. HR Divisions within companies in this country and elsewhere develop and implement policies to prevent bullying and harassment in the workplace. And rightly so. The really good ones install solid performance management systems to help workers develop and give them regular and clear feedback.

Show me the company that includes the creation of fun in any of their matrices and - when I recover from the shock - I'll show you it's exceptional, that company, if not unique.

The problem is that laughter and optimism look easy. They're not. They're hugely difficult to generate and sustain, yet hold immeasurable benefit, not just for people at work, but for people stricken by illness, too.

Because the ancient Greeks intuited that laughter had a profound curative function, they often built hospitals beside amphitheatres, so the bedridden could hear the show and gain from the comedy. The notion lay dormant for centuries until Norman Cousins, an eminent editor of America's Saturday Review, proved that the Greeks were right.

Cousins was a serious man. As a reporter, he had been present at, and written about some of the grimmest events of the Second World War.

After the Allies used the atomic bomb to bring Japan to its knees, he learned that some of the survivors, young girls exposed to the intense radiation of the blast, had developed "keloid" scarring on their faces: great reddened ropes of disfiguring skin which limited their facial mobility and isolated them from society. He used his magazine to raise funds to bring the girls, now grown-up and known as The Hiroshima Maidens, to America - where they benefited from extensive plastic surgery.

Much later, Cousins himself developed a disease of the connective tissues that hospitalised him, crippled him, threatened his life and made him reliant on heavy-duty painkillers.

Desperate to try anything that might improve his situation, he persuaded nurses at the hospital to read funny books to him. Next step was to view again the films that he had found riotously funny in the past. The laughter seemed to improve his capacity to cope with pain and reduce the incapacitating symptoms of his illness. While his own doctor was impressed by the results of this off-beat, self-created therapy, the wider medical community scoffed after Cousins claimed that he had laughed himself out of a disease and wrote two books about it.

It took a couple of decades and a lot of research before the medical profession acknowledged that laughter floods the body with nature's own painkiller, the endorphin, and can boost the immune system. A sustained bout of laughter corresponds (as confirmed last week by new research) to a good workout in the way it gets the heart and blood circulation going.

Mark Twain said "the human race has only one really effective weapon, and that's laughter".

In politics and business, it's a grievously under-utilised weapon.