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Irish couple got 'the chuckles' in video for daughter overseas. It's pure laughter therapy.

They couldn't keep it together in their baby shower message, even on their final attempt.

Representative photo credit: Canva

Sometimes you just can't keep it together.

Have you ever gotten the giggles at the most inopportune time, like when you're trying to do or say something serious? We've seen it happen to actors filming comedic scenes, news anchors during broadcasts, singers in church services, kids in spelling bees, and more. When the giggle bug bites, it bites hard, and keeping it together can sometimes feel like a superhuman feat.

That's what happened to a woman's parents in Ireland when they tried to make a heartfelt video greeting for her baby shower. The woman, Orla, was an expectant mother in Australia and her parents were creating a selfie video of love and encouragement as she got ready to welcome her little one. The problem was, neither of them could keep it together for longer than a few seconds at a time. And the best part is, it wasn't even their first try.

Her father said they'd spent 15 or 20 minutes trying to make the video and this was their final attempt. They weren't used to seeing themselves on video and it proved to be too funny to handle. But the best part is how the mom would say something heartfelt, like, "You're going to be wonderful parents," and then they'd both burst out laughing.

Watch:

People cannot get enough of their chuckles.

"Literally the best 2 min on the internet ever 😂😂😂. I love them so much. I’m so jealous of your baby for having the best grandparents on the planet. ❤️"

"And this is our final attempt that killed me. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣"

"It's the sincerely at the end for me. 😂"

"I don’t know how many time i have watched it today 😂😂. Maybe twenty 🤣🤣. Such lovely parents you have 😅😍."

"😂😂😂 love their laughter! You need to save this to show that baby some day!"

"If I had a video of my parents carrying on like this, I would cherish it forever!!"

Videos like this truly feel like laughter therapy, which is a legitimate thing. In fact, laughter therapy has been used by medical professionals in some form or another for centuries. According to the MayoClinic, laughter has the following short-term and long-term therapeutic benefits for both your mental and physical health:

In the short-term, laughter can:

  • Stimulate many organs. Laughter enhances your intake of oxygen-rich air, stimulates your heart, lungs and muscles, and increases the endorphins that are released by your brain.
  • Activate and relieve your stress response. A rollicking laugh fires up and then cools down your stress response, and it can increase and then decrease your heart rate and blood pressure. The result? A good, relaxed feeling.
  • Soothe tension. Laughter can also stimulate circulation and aid muscle relaxation, both of which can help reduce some of the physical symptoms of stress.

Long-term, laughter may:

  • Improve your immune system. Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. By contrast, positive thoughts can actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses.
  • Relieve pain. Laughter may ease pain by causing the body to produce its own natural painkillers.
  • Increase personal satisfaction. Laughter can also make it easier to cope with difficult situations. It also helps you connect with other people.
  • Improve your mood. Many people experience depression, sometimes due to chronic illnesses. Laughter can help lessen your stress, depression and anxiety and may make you feel happier. It can also improve your self-esteem.
So there you go. Viral videos that make you laugh aren't just a mindless time waster after all. Here's to loving parents, raucous chuckles, shared joy and that lucky baby of Orla's who has utterly delightful grandparents over in Ireland.
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A Golden Retriever mistook his owner's cherished coat for a toy and pure chaos ensued

"This is not how I want to go out, Grissom!"

@justttmakayla/Tiktok (via Upworthy Instagram)

Grissom was in ful-on tug-of-war mode.

Golden Retrievers have a reputation for being good-natured, friendly, reliable dogs, making them ideal family pets. But even the most affable of good doggos turns into a die-hard tug-of-war warrior when presented with a furry pull toy.

That's a bit of an issue when they mistake the fur lining of a coat hood for a toy—and even more of an issue when the coat is attached to a human.

Dog owner and TikTok user @justttmakayla shared a hilarious encounter with Grissom, her Golden Retriever, that was captured on her Ring camera. In the video, Grissom grabs hold of her coat hood, perhaps heroically saving her from the squirrel that was clearly attacking her, or perhaps assuming she was offering it to him as a toy (because why else would fur exist?). Once he had a hold of it, the tug-of-war began.

"No one prepares you for what to do if this happens!" the woman exclaims as Grissom takes hold of her hood. "This is not how I want to go out, Grissom!"

She tries to wrestle the hood away from the dog, but as anyone who has played with a dog could anticipate, that just makes him pull back. It doesn't take long before she collapses into peals of laughter as her tail-wagging pup takes her for a ride around her deck.

Watch:

People in the comments, for the most part, were in stitches right along with her.

"Grissom was really doing all of this just to hear the laugh," wrote one commenter on Instagram. "He succeeded 😂😂😂😂."

"Her laughter is so infectious, it's hard not to smile hearing it 🥰," shared another."

"I just couldn’t stop laughing once she started," added another. "I think it’s her ability to see the absurdity and humour in the situation maybe? Whatever it is ❤️❤️."

Someone else wrote a brief ending to the story: "😂 …..And she died laughing with her best friend…"

But a few expressed concern that the dog wasn't going to let go, citing bad behavior and dangerous habits. However, as others pointed out, at no point did he appear to be aggressive. His body language is playful, and he even lay down to take a break from what he apparently thought was a pretty fun game right in the middle of it. She clearly wasn't afraid, and if she hadn't been laughing hysterically, she probably would have thought to take the jacket off to free herself.

Most people, however, simply delighted in the joy of a human enjoying a silly moment with her dog. And the woman herself addressed some of the concerns in a follow-up video in which she shared some terrible comments people have left calling for her to be violent with Grissom, writing, "Owning a reactive dog isn’t easy. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of training. But we are a team and Grissom is the best dog with the most loving heart."

She also shared how she has been working with Grissom with a great deal of love and patience to work through his reactive tendencies:

@justttmakayla

Replying to @katiejohnson7862 I am so thankful that I get to be Grissom’s owner🤍 #reactivedogawareness #reactivedogtraining #leashreactivedog #leashreactivity #positivereinforcementdogtraining #clickertraining #goldenretrieverlifestyle #goldenretrieversrule #goldenretrieversoftiktok #reactivedogsaregooddogs #englishcreamgolden #womansbestfriend

She and Grissom do make a good team, and if her laughter is any indicator, there's plenty more fun to be had for these two.

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Joy

See if you can watch these 'Magic Flute' videos without laughing at least once

It seems that few can make it through the Magic Flute Challenge without losing it.

@ilse.faith/TikTok

The Magic Flute challenge has people trying to stifle their giggles.

They say laughter is the best medicine, and it's true. When we're in a bad mood, it's practically miraculous how a good laugh can lift us out of it. Giggles can help relieve stress, which is good for our overall health, and as Patch Adams taught us, raucous joy can even help our bodies heal.

However, research shows that adults only laugh an average of 15 times a day, compared to children who laugh around 400 times a day. So we can all use some ways to laugh more.

Ironically, one almost surefire way to laugh is to be in a group of people who are trying to keep a straight face when something funny happens. There's something about trying not to laugh that makes it nearly impossible not to, especially when you're with others.

The "Magic Flute Challenge" illustrates this phenomenon beautifully—and hilariously.

This challenge is simple—a group of people takes turns trying to sing a piece of the famous aria from Mozart's "The Magic Flute" with no one laughing. Sounds easy enough, but some people's singing is…well, it can't really be called singing. Squawking, perhaps? Imitating a rooster with a bad cold? Whatever it is, hearing someone attempt to opera sing and having it come out sounding like a wounded animal is so funny, especially when everyone is supposed to keep a straight face.

Take this video from Reddit's Contagious Laughter subreddit (make sure you watch with sound up from the beginning):

How long would you last? I lost it at the strangled rooster 😆
by u/enacheionut1991 in ContagiousLaughter

This is one of those videos where picking one person to watch the whole time makes it funnier and funnier. Not one of them lasted through the whole thing. Can't really blame them.

Here's another iteration of the same challenge from @ilse.faith on TikTok. Again, no one survives.

Tuck this one away for when you're trying to figure out an activity the whole family can do together, or for when you and your friends are bored, or for when everyone in the household is cranky. Instant mood lift, right here.

Keep laughing, everyone. It really is good for us.

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A good laugh is contagious. These New Zealand parrots seem to agree.

When researcher Raoul Schwing went up to the valley, a bird tried to take apart his car.

Photo from iStock.

That bird, a kea, was precisely the reason he was there. Keas are large parrots that live in the mountainous areas of New Zealand's South Island. They're wicked smart and armed with a beak like a Swiss army knife, which makes them great at dismantling puzzles (and Schwing's poor car).

They're also highly social and love to play with each other, chasing their bird peers in complex aerial dogfights or hopping across the ground and making a huge variety of whoops and calls. It was those play calls that Schwing was really interested in, a kind of squeaky "bwa-ha-haaaa."

It sounded — well, it sounded a lot like laughter.

Was it laughter Schwing was hearing? That raises a weird question: Can animals even laugh?

Photo from iStock.

Laughter is a difficult concept to study. There are plenty of animals that sound like they’re laughing. Kookaburras, for instance, or hyenas. But a kookaburra’s laugh is territorial, not gleeful, and a hyena’s cackling seems to be the equivalent of a nervous wail, not it enjoying a particularly hilarious joke.

True laughter is as much as message as it is a noise. In humans, it's a way to communicate playfulness or relaxation and a way to infect others with that mood as well. We might laugh at our dates' corny jokes not because they're the next Tig Notaro, but to show we're having a good time. We giggle when we're nervous to let off steam, and we add laugh tracks under sitcoms to invite the audience into the joke.

In this emotional messaging capacity, most animals aren't part of the evolutionary comedy club. But there are some. It turns out that rats enjoy a good tickle. There's tentative evidence dogs might laugh. Great apes, like chimps or orangutans, seem to laugh too. None of them sounds like human laughter — rats giggle at frequencies too high for humans to hear and chimps sound like they're panting — but they seem to carry that oh-so-important emotional messaging.

But do keas deserve entry into this group? Maybe, says Schwing.

Photo from Raoul Schwing.

When Schwing went to the research sites, he brought with him a specially designed, kea-proof speaker system (no taking apart this one). From a distance, he could use a remote control to play a variety of recorded calls at the kea.

Most didn't seem to have any specific effect, but the play call — that bwa-ha-ha noise — did. When he played it, nearby kea often would turn to each other and begin hopping and playfully chasing each other around. Even solitary birds got into the act, playing with objects or doing aerial acrobatics. In short, the play call definitely seemed to fit the emotional contagion category.

So while it may be going a bit far to label this as laughter as we humans know it, it could at least be a cousin of it.

Schwing and his team published their findings in the journal Current Biology.

These kinds of studies can have a lot of interesting results, but maybe most of all, they remind us how complex animals can be.

Some researchers have used it to study how our brains organize emotion or create a mood; there's even a potential antidepressant currently being tested that got its start from studying laughter in rats. Others have used laughter in the great apes to speculate about our own human roots.

For Schwing and his colleagues, studying the kea's play call gave them a window into the animal's social life. They're planning to continue to study the role of play in the kea's lives.

If nothing else, it's something to think about. "If animals can laugh," said Schwing, "we are not so different from them."

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