A wellbeing tool from Laugh Therapy
Collect the photos, clips, voice notes and running jokes that reliably lift you, and keep them somewhere you'll find them on the days your mood needs a hand. Built on the science of laughter.
The only currency here is comedy. The Laughter Bank is not a financial service. It doesn't hold money, take cash deposits, pay interest or involve savings, and it provides no financial service of any kind. It's a place to keep the things that make you laugh, so you can find them on the days you need them. A Laugh Therapy product, from Edacity Ltd.
What you're opening
The Laughter Bank is a simple idea out of the research on laughter. Know what reliably makes you laugh, keep it somewhere you can find it, and make a withdrawal on the days that need one.
Social prescribing works because it's social. A comedy night, a workshop, a group that meets every Thursday: somewhere to laugh with other people, where the conversations that matter start on their own and it never feels like an appointment.
The Laughter Bank is for the stretches in between. The days there's nothing on near you, or it costs more than you've got, or a room full of people feels like too much. And the nights you're alone with your thoughts, which is when laughter is hardest to find and needed most. Keep your balance topped up for those.
When you feel ready to take your laughter out of the house, Comedy on Prescription's events map will show you what's on near you.
Nothing here asks you to be funny.
The science, briefly
A genuine laugh sets off a small chemical event. Three things go up, and one comes down:
The body's own feel-good and pain-relief chemicals. The warm, loose feeling after a proper laugh.
Reward and motivation. The bit of your brain that says do that again.
A mood steadier. Laughter gives it a nudge, too.
Your main stress hormone. Genuine laughter cut it by about a third across eight pooled studies. PLOS One, 2023
Across ten studies and more than 800 people, laughter-based approaches reduced low mood and anxiety and improved sleep. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 2019 Not for everyone, and not every time. On average, and enough to matter.
A laugh also interrupts the body's stress response long enough for perspective to get back in, which is what halts a spiralling train of thought. You'll know it as the moment a disaster becomes a story. The Welcome Pack explains that as compound interest.
A tool that helps, never a treatment. Every study behind this page is named in full inside Your Rainy Day Account.
Loose change
You've been making deposits for years without calling them that. They turn up in odd places: a photo you'd forgotten, a joke still running in a group chat, a voice note you've played eleven times. None of them are to hand on the day they'd be worth the most.
Full of deposits you've never counted.
The running joke that's still running.
One line brings the whole joke back.
Saved once, never seen again.
The ones you have to hear to get.
Ticket stubs, cards, the printed photo.
Your Rainy Day Account is the vault they've been missing: one safe place to keep every one of them, and a reason to keep adding.
Free
Seventeen pages, free, and the map to everything on this page.
The whole idea in under ten minutes: what the Laughter Bank is, why laughter works the way it does, and three deposits you can make today. It finishes with a walk round every account on this page, so you can see which one suits you.
It also carries the kindest small print in banking.
Download the pack (PDF)
This is the account you'll use. A ready-made vault that runs on the free version of Notion, and it arrives with an opening balance of deposits from me, so it's never empty on day one. Pay in whatever lifts you. Withdraw on the days that need it. Nobody can see what's in yours, including me.
Two guides come with it. The 32-page book covers how to use the account and why it works, written to be read in bed, on your phone, on a bad day. The Laughter Bank Guide to Notion takes anyone who's never touched the app from signing up to a stocked account in eight pages, and shows how to undo anything.
Why laughter works. The research with every study named: what a real laugh does to stress hormones, pain, sleep and the people around you, and what it doesn't do.
Know your funny. The four kinds of humour and the two worth building on, plus your taste, your thresholds and your laughter people. Nothing to fill in. You find them as you read.
Thirty days of one-line prompts, each under a minute, across four weeks: deposits, withdrawals, high interest, and making it stick. Plus a page for bad weeks, a page for in-person deposits, and printable deposit slips if you'd rather bank on paper. Miss a week and nothing's lost.
Inside the account
Your account arrives ready-made with six rooms, and the withdrawals room already holds an opening balance, on loan from me. Pay it back by paying it forward.
It's private and secure. Nobody else can open your vault, and that includes me.
Where new deposits land. Photos, clips, memes, one-liners, memories, people.
Your best deposits, a tap away, chosen on a good day for a bad one.
What's in the bank, at a glance, without counting anything.
Some deposits you can only make in person. Where to find them.
For comedy gold: the stories and lines you're shaping into material. Optional, always.
The ways you go looking for a laugh, like a game you love or a laughter exercise from a workshop.
Pay it forward
Some of the people who'd get the most from an account are the least able to open one themselves. The Equity Fund is how you open one for them.
Your £9.90 opens a full Rainy Day Account there and then: the account, its opening balance, both guides. The purchase is complete at the till, and what's transferred afterwards is the account, never the money.
A short page asks which after you've paid. Not sure yet? There's no rush: if a month goes by, it goes to someone who needs it most, and I'll tell you the day it happens.
Nothing downloads to you with this one. The account you pay for opens for somebody else, and the benefit is all theirs. Credit where it's due.
Mutual interest
A bond between two people who keep each other going: a private account each, and a joint one you both pay into.
Some people can make you laugh on a day nothing else can. The Joint Account is for you and one of them: two people who invest in each other.
You each get your own Rainy Day Account, as private and secure as ever: neither of you can see inside the other's. Between you sits the joint account, linked to you both, where you make transfers to each other: the clip you know will set them off, the voice note, the photo from that night. When one of you is running low, the other's deposits are already there, credited and waiting.
Nobody has to ask for support or explain a bad day. Set up a standing order if you like, a deposit each every week, and the interest compounds even when neither of you is thinking about it.
After you've paid, a short page asks who your joint account holder is, and I issue their account by email. Then you open the joint account and invite them, which takes about two minutes, and a short guide shows you both how. You'll each need a free Notion account. The one who opened it can close it, and the other can leave whenever they like. Your own accounts stay private whatever happens.
Not sure who yet? If nobody's named within a month, the second account is transferred to the Equity Fund and issued to someone who needs it as a single, private Rainy Day Account. No joint account comes with it, and nothing links it back to you.
Take it out of the house
more likely to laugh with other people than on your own. Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, 2000
Provine spent years recording when and where people laugh, and most of it wasn't at jokes at all. It was the sound people make when they're getting on.
Laughing in company does everything laughing alone does for your stress and your mood, and then adds the part a vault can't: other people. After the first shared laugh, a room full of people you've never met feels different. Conversations start that nobody planned, somewhere that feels like a night out and nothing like a waiting room.
Comedy on Prescription's events map lists comedy nights, workshops and groups around the UK, with a section for free and low-cost events under £10 and accessibility details for each one. Take a friend, or go on your own and come back with one.
Opens cop.craic.health, run by Craic Health.
Each event is organised by its own host.
For organisations
If you work in social prescribing, mental health support or workplace wellbeing, or you'd like your organisation's name behind something that helps, there's room for you here.
The Laughter Bank
Buy accounts for a course group, a caseload or a whole team. You get one code by email a few minutes after you pay, and each person uses it to open their own private account, at no cost to them. For Joint Accounts, one person in each pair uses the code and names the other, who gets theirs by email.
The opening balance in every account leaves out dark humour about self-harm and suicide. It's a wellbeing tool, not a treatment. It sits alongside the care and support you already give, never in place of it, and it isn't suitable as someone's only support in a crisis. Follow your usual safeguarding route, and the crisis contacts are on this page too.
Need an invoice? Email me at barry@laughtherapy.lol with your organisation's name, which accounts and how many, and I'll send an invoice you can raise a purchase order against. The code goes out when the invoice is paid, and I'm happy to fill in your supplier forms. Edacity Ltd isn't VAT-registered, so there's nothing to add.
Buying for 200 people or more? That's 200 Rainy Day Accounts, or 100 Joint Accounts. Email me with which accounts and how many. Bigger orders are invoiced, and a Laugh Therapy session or talk for your people costs half my usual fee.
The code opens exactly as many accounts as you bought, so it can't be overused if it gets forwarded on. Fewer than 10? Buy them one at a time further up the page.
Orders are final once your code is issued. Any accounts not opened within 12 months of your code arriving pass to the Equity Fund, so none go to waste.
Laugh Therapy is a trading name of Edacity Limited. Registered in England, company number 09380627.
Sponsorship
The Laughter BankThe Equity Fund lets one person open an account for someone else. Sponsorship does the same in blocks: you buy accounts at the checkout, and each one is issued free, through organisations that support people's mental health, to someone they feel would benefit. You can sponsor as an organisation or as yourself.
Headline sponsor
£1,980 a year
200 accounts
Your logo or name in the top row, and a Laugh Therapy session or talk at half my usual fee, for your team or a group you choose.
Lead partner from 500 accounts a year
For organisations that want to go further. You choose how many accounts, and the community or cause that receives them. Your logo leads this page and the printed handouts, and each year includes a Laugh Therapy session or talk for your people at no extra cost. Bigger partnerships can include more.
Every sponsor gets a badge for their own website, dated for the sponsorship year and linked back here. Everyone who sponsors in the first year is a founding sponsor, and keeps the title. Sponsorships renew each year until you cancel. Need an invoice instead of paying by card? Email me at barry@laughtherapy.lol.
I don't take sponsorship from gambling, alcohol, tobacco or vaping brands, or from payday and high-cost lenders. Sponsors are credited here, not endorsed.
Supported by
Workshops and talks
I'm Barry Taylor, Gelotologist and Founder of Laugh Therapy. I give talks on laughter and wellbeing at conferences and mental health training days, and run practical workshops for staff teams and community groups.
Previous events include the NHS Care Excellence Conference, and the NHS Virtual Wellbeing Festival with Dr Michael Mosley, Dr Amir Khan and double Olympic gold medallist Nicola Adams OBE.
If your organisation buys accounts for 200 people or more, a session or talk costs half my usual fee.
Your taste in comedy
Everyone's funny bone sits somewhere different. Sixty questions find out where yours is, so the deposits you make are the ones with the best returns.
Sixty questions in six short sections, with no right answers and nobody watching. It looks at the kinds of comedy you're drawn to and the triggers that set you off.
At the end, on screen: your strongest taste in comedy out of forty-five genres, the two triggers that put it there, and the two genres close behind.
Use it alongside any account here to sharpen your deposits, or on its own if you've ever wondered why you laugh at what you do.
Your sixty answers, written up as a seventeen-page statement that's yours alone.
Stock your Rainy Day Account with things that fit, or keep it as your taste in comedy on the record: print it, or send it to somebody who'll argue with it. Paid once, and worth going back to as your taste changes.
Nobody's offered anything until they've seen their free result. Your Current Account is written from your answers, so the questions always come first.
Who's behind the counter
Barry is a gelotologist, which means he studies the science of laughter for a living. He's also a Personalised Care Institute-accredited Health and Wellbeing Practitioner Coach, working in line with the NHS's personalised care approach, a creative health specialist and a certified laughter therapist.
The Laughter Bank draws on the same research he delivers in training with NHS trust teams, CAMHS, hospices, Macmillan Cancer Support, mental health charities and frontline social care teams.
"I read the studies, grade the evidence, and teach only what stands up."Barry Taylor
The idea came from something he noticed in every room he worked in: people can tell you exactly what makes them laugh, and almost nobody has any of it to hand on the day they need it.
This is a tool that helps. It isn't treatment, and it's no substitute for real support. If you're struggling, talk to someone. Speaking to a person beats typing at a screen, so start here:
Free, seventeen pages, less than ten minutes. Share it with anyone who needs it.
Get the free Welcome Pack