At nineteen I was homeless. Seven months on the streets and in shelters, two GCSEs to my name, and not much reason to expect things to change. What got me through, more than anything I could point to on paper, was laughter: the people who could still find it, and the moments it created when nothing else worked.

Seven years later I had a First Class BA (Hons) in Media and Performance, specialising in humour and comedy, and a place at the University of Cambridge for my PGCE. I went on to become one of the UK’s fastest-progressing Advanced Skills Teachers, then Lead Practitioner and Initial Teacher Trainer. Along the way I collected some genuinely ridiculous jobs: sausage packer, washing-line salesman, glove-puppet demonstrator, damaged-pork-pie separator, actor. All of it turned out to be training.

Then burnout. The full stop kind.

The rebuild that followed became the work I do now. I went back to the thing that had carried me through the worst of it and asked a serious question: what does laughter actually do? Not as a nicety. Physiologically, psychologically, socially. The answer took me into gelotology, the scientific study of laughter, and a decade of research across neuroscience, positive psychology and play.

“The strategies I teach are the ones that helped me survive. I don’t just teach this. I’ve lived it.”

Today that research runs through everything: workshops with NHS teams, cancer support groups and suicide-bereavement charities; training for businesses and schools; BBC radio; opening the NHS Virtual Wellbeing Festival alongside Dr Michael Mosley, Dr Amir Khan and Nicola Adams OBE; and Comedy on Prescription, the creative health programme I deliver with Craic Health, supported at parliamentary level by Dr Simon Opher MP.

The methodology

You don’t need to be funny.

My methodology is called Integrative Levity Praxis (ILP). It grew out of a simple observation the research kept confirming: genuine, spontaneous laughter does things that forced exercises can’t reach, and you can’t instruct it into existence.

So ILP doesn’t teach jokes or routines. It creates the conditions in which real laughter arises naturally, drawing on psychology, improvisation, play theory and sixty years of laughter science, with every claim graded against the evidence.

It’s the spine of my book, the Levity Library, the practitioner certification, and every session I deliver.

Explore ILP →

A short history

Laughter science didn’t start with me

1905

Freud takes jokes seriously

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious becomes one of the first major works on the psychology of humour.

1964

Gelotology gets its name

Psychiatrist William F. Fry coins the term and begins establishing the physiological evidence base: heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation.

1979

Norman Cousins goes mainstream

Anatomy of an Illness describes managing serious illness with, among other things, deliberate daily laughter, and inspires decades of clinical research.

2017

Laugh Therapy is born

I founded Laugh Therapy to take the science seriously: beyond feigned laughter exercises, towards conditions that produce the real thing, in workplaces, schools, healthcare and communities.

2026

The methodology goes public

You Don’t Need to Be Funny, the introduction to Integrative Levity Praxis, publishes under Edacity Press, with practitioner certification to follow.

Basis for trust

Credentials, memberships, track record

Certified Laughter Therapist and gelotologist. Personalised Care Institute (PCI)-accredited wellbeing practitioner coach. Thirty-plus years of experience across education, training and wellbeing since 1994, including fifteen in the classroom.

ISHS Associate Member CMA Member IAHT Member CPD-certified accreditation PCI-accredited coach Founding member, Comedy on Prescription

Laughter changed my life. Then I found out why.