• The audience card of the game show LOL: Who laughs, comes out! raises the question of the difficulty of not laughing. And this, while an exhibition on laughter opens at the Espace des sciences, in Rennes, to try to explain the complex mechanism of laughter.
  • Scientific studies all show that it is good for your health to laugh several times a day.
  • But, then, how does it feel to refrain from laughing? But is it really a good idea? Can we say that it is dangerous? 20 Minutes put the question to experts.

It's a real audience cardboard. Led by a crazy cast, the game show LOL: Who laughs, comes out! has made many of its viewers laugh since the release of season 3, in March. Broadcast by Amazon Prime, the game consists of locking ten comedians for six hours in a loft with a simple rule: it is forbidden to laugh. But when you have Pierre Niney, Jonathan Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Géraldine Nakache, François Damiens or Gad Elmaleh in the cast, the effort becomes at the limit of the impossible.

During the show, we gradually discover the "tricks" of the candidates to refrain from puffing. By eating, biting their lips, screaming or running, they manage to avoid laughter. But is it really a good idea? Can we say that it is dangerous? 20 Minutes put the question to experts.

More than 400 muscles activated?

When you trigger a laugh, you activate several dozen muscles. Some speak of a hundred, others of nearly 200, when the most Marseillais of the band estimate that more than 400 muscles are activated for a simple laugh between friends. We can mention the famous zygomatics, but also the diaphragm, the chest muscles and obviously the abdominal belt, which hurts us so much after a laugh. "When you laugh a lot, sometimes you feel like you're losing your breath. This is because our diaphragm has lost its usual rhythm to fill and empty our lungs. Our heart beats faster and it trains. Laughter is very captivating," explains William Le Jonny, mediator of the Espace des sciences. In recent days, the structure based in Rennes has been hosting a major exhibition on the theme of laughter with the delicate mission of "explaining" why man and several animal species are able to laugh. But how many are able to restrain it?


At the end of the filming of the show LOL, 20 Minutes had questioned the participants to know their feelings on this prohibition to laugh. "Restraining yourself from laughing, there are worse but it's weird. What is difficult is to cut yourself off from people. Provoking laughter in people is not just something that relies on humor, hilarity, laughter. It's ultimately so human to make people laugh and it's so much a connection to people that someone who doesn't laugh and forces themselves not to laugh, they cut themselves off from you and you feel totally abandoned," explained Gad Elmaleh.

In the show, the comedian is deprived of one of his best weapons. By laughing even before his floodgates, the Moroccan actor often puts the audience in condition. "Laughter is contagious because it is spontaneous. It's an emotion that must be shared," Jacques Roux, curator of the Rennes exhibition, told 20 Minutes.

"I felt it really hurt my nervous system"

While he is one of the detonators of season 3, the actor Pierre Niney conceded that refraining from laughing had been for him a torment: "I had the impression that I was missing a member when we were shooting the show, I was wobbly. Besides, I didn't dare to laugh for two three days later, I had nightmares where I tried to stop myself from being natural, I was really not well. I felt that it really hurt my nervous system, it was not good at all. I do not advise at home. »


Actress Virginie Efira made the same observation: "It was very frustrating. At one point, I coveted the idea of losing to at least be spontaneous, to stop suffering. »


I'm too good an audience myself, I could never fit in "Lol qui rit, sort" 😅

— Alyyy✨ (@AlyssaMesmin) April 3, 2023

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If it is so difficult not to laugh, it is because the mechanism is essential to our lives. It can even offer a small feeling of ecstasy, right after, like a small orgasm that would have drained you of all your energy. "After our sessions, the vast majority of our participants say they feel relaxed, others are in great shape. But we also have people who say they are tired, because there are no longer the nerves to hold us. It's a different state, we sometimes feel a little drained, "says Fabrice Loizeau.

Letting laughter out is good for your health

The man is a bit like the French master of laughter yoga, an anti-stress technique in which he trained nearly twenty years ago. Its activity is the opposite of the concept advocated by the program broadcast on the private channel: "We, laughter, we let it come. There is no question of blocking it, on the contrary, we release it, we let it out of our body. This is where you get a total letting go, a total mental disconnection. »

By restraining themselves from puffing, the actors of LOL had to enter into extreme concentration in order to avoid letting go and losing everything. "You have to be vigilant all the time so you have no spontaneity," Virginie Efira conceded after the broadcast of the program. It seems that holding back laughter is not a great idea. So you might as well not deprive yourself.

  • Entertainment
  • Television
  • Rennes
  • Brittany
  • Pierre Niney
  • Gad elmaleh
  • Jonathan Cohen
  • Virginie Efira
  • Sciences
  • Laughing out loud
  • Exhibition
  • Health
  • Humor
  • Humorist