A visiting Scottish humorist has advised Islanders to ?exercise your chuckle muscles because you cannot live without laughter?.

Rev. Dr. Jim Simpson ? who has authored six humour books with all royalties going to research Cystic Fibrosis ? said laughter was definitely the best medicine.

?Some time ago a doctor told me ulcers cannot grow when you are laughing,? Rev. Dr. Simpson told Hamilton Rotarians on Tuesday.

Even Aristotle described laughter 2,000 years ago as a bodily exercise essential to health, Rev. Dr. Simpson said, while a modern medical research programme showed people who laughed often resisted disease better than constant grumblers.

?The surly bird catches the germ,? he said. ?In more than one hospital in Britain today are what we call laughter therapy clinics. It was once said of one of our finest Scottish humourists, he was a walking National Health Service. He dispensed more good than some chemists.?

Laughing relaxed muscles and relieved stress, he said.

?A sense of humour is rather like a shock absorber, easing the bumps of life,? he said. ?A person without a sense of humour I sometimes liken to a wagon without springs. You?re jolted and bumped by every bump on the road of life.?

Laughing was great therapy for the lungs, he said, and was the cheapest anxiety reducer available.

Cartoonists thought in fun but felt in dead earnest, Rev. Dr. Simpson said.

?They love to highlight the absurdities of political life, legal life, ecclesiastical life,? he said. ?They love to expose hypocrisies, deceptions and illusions of grandeur.?

In the seventh week of the Northern Ireland peace talks, he said US Senator George Mitchell disarmed Irish politicians when he likened their longstanding feuds to opera.

?I know that Rodolfo is going to sing the same words every time, but that prepares me for my return to Belfast,? he said. ?The one thing I know is that I am going to sit here and listen to you guys say the same thing over and over again.?

Humour had ?A Funny Way of Being Serious? ? the title of his new book ? and Rev. Dr. Simpson agreed with Jewish writer David Kossoff?s prayer for humour which he called an ?overlooked sense?.

?Lord, I want to be serious about being funny,? he prayed. ?Humour, Lord, the sense of humour not included in the five senses census. Play on words Lord, ignore it. The other five senses are but the servant of the over-looked one. A touch of heavenly genius, dear Lord.?

He said humour helped transcend life?s heartbreaks and all its jumbled contradictions.

?I sometimes think of laughter as God?s hand on the shoulder of our very troubled world,? Rev. Dr. Simpson said. ?As an old black preacher once said, if you could just sit on the wall and see yourself pass by, you?d die laughing at the sight.?

Humour was a form of perspective about the human experience that preserved sanity, he said.

When a small boy was told that his surly, grouchy aunt had died, the boy responded with a very sincere look of sympathy, but not for his menacing aunt. ?Poor God, he says. Poor God.?

And when rebuked in class for laughing, a small girl told her teacher, ?I was just smiling and the smile burst,? which he called one of the best definitions for laughing he ever heard.

?Give me rather a laugh that has music in it,? he said.

?The laugh that looks out of a person?s eyes first then steals down to the dimple of his cheek, then waltzes a spell at the corners of the mouth and then fills the air for a moment with a shower of silvery tongue sparks and then steals back to its lair in the heart.?