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They say that laughter is the best medicine. Personally, I prefer penicillin.

If you found that joke funny, then I may very well just have saved you from suicide. If you didn’t, then I may very well just have driven you to it.

Prescribing jokes to sick people sounds like a bad joke in and of itself, but the British National Health Service (NHS) may soon be about to become deadly serious about such a measure. A London-based charity has recently announced funding for a pilot scheme that will provide sessions of so-called “comedy-on-prescription,” in which clinically depressed mental patients are handed free tickets and sent off to see a local stand-up comedy show in order to have the presumed resultant laughter “reduce stress hormones such as cortisol while boosting endorphins.”

The hope is that this proves so successful that the program is subsequently taken up by the NHS, with further “free” (re: taxpayer-funded) comedy gig tickets handed out to sad people on an industrial scale—disturbingly, one in five adults in the U.K. is currently on antidepressants. Reading about this profoundly uneconomical plan made me want to join them.

Craic of Doom
I’m sure having a good laugh really is good for you. But what happens if the jester on stage that evening happens to be about as funny as Stephen Colbert or John Oliver, as is so often the case with dire, left-wing “claptivist” comedians these days? Wouldn’t that just “increase stress hormones such as cortisol while reducing endorphins,” making the depressed people even more depressed?

Figures from the U.S. already demonstrate that as many as eight out of 10 audience members of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart don’t make it back home alive, having taken the opportunity to swallow strychnine, slit their throats, or hang themselves in the studio toilets during the advertising intervals. As the U.K. government’s desired assisted medical dying bill currently flounders in Parliament, is this secretly just another way of introducing euthanasia through the back door?

I personally didn’t feel very much like laughing whilst perusing the promotional literature of the company ultimately behind this whole scheme, Craic Health. Their online “Events” page advertises upcoming free community health sessions such as a guided walk around central London led by a “Comedy-Style Tour Guide”—not actual comedy, do note, just something in a comedy style, like alcohol-free beer. Appropriately enough, therefore, future promised Craic events include “Alcohol-free comedy” and “Comedy for babies”; amusement for both the bottle-less and the bottle-fed.

The organization also intends to offer “LGBT+ inclusive comedy” and “Non-English-speaking-friendly performances,” which are certainly the correct pitifully PC paths to head down if they really do want to attract state funding.

Another Craic Health website page carefully explains the entire concept of comedy-on-prescription. Accompanied by heartwarming images of small Chinese children laughing so hard their eyes have gone all slitty, the authors promise such arrangements can “deliver between £2.14 and £8.56 for every £1 invested” in them by radically reducing the cost to the NHS in terms of the number of future hospital admissions.

How so? Apparently, “laughter enhances blood vessel function,” with its physical effects being “equivalent to a moderate 20-minute workout.” Laughing so much is certainly how John Candy managed to live to such a ripe old age.

Bodily Humors
But there is a problem: What if you just have no sense of humor to speak of? How can you possibly benefit from a course of comedy-on-prescription then? Craic Health has thought of this sullen possibility and helpfully provides a list of examples of things that might produce “mirthful laughter” amongst humans, including sidesplitting events like the following:

(1) Unexpected outcomes: When someone tries something new (like karaoke or a new dance) and the outcome is both surprising and amusing to everyone present.

(2) Playful games: Tickling matches or physical comedy, such as someone sitting on a whoopee cushion and the unexpected “fart” sound creating a burst of laughter from its harmless absurdity.

(3) Unexpected wardrobe mishap: A hat blown off by the wind in a funny way.

(4) Sudden irony: Spilling water while explaining how careful you are.

(5) Situational irony: Realizing in the moment that something ironic or absurd has happened, like getting caught in a sudden downpour but finding it so ridiculous that laughter becomes inevitable.

This sounds uncannily like a guide for alien shape-shifters in how to successfully impersonate an earthling whilst walking undetected in Homo sapiens form amongst us.

A traditional old insult handed out toward a congenitally miserable person was “You need a sense-of-humor transplant.” If the crackpot lobbyists at Craic Health get their way, the NHS will soon start dishing that particular imaginary procedure out to mentally ill people at taxpayer expense as well.

A Prescription for Failure
Extraordinarily, this is all just part of a wider NHS pattern. British doctors are increasingly being encouraged to engage in something called “social prescribing,” in which, rather than being given actual medicine, visitors to surgeries and medical drop-in centers are handed out “prescriptions” by their doctors to attend art classes, choirs, swimming pools, gardening clubs, underground terror training cells, or even brothels. NHS managers call this “innovative.” I call it “profligate.”

If a patient has an “illness” so non-severe a physician genuinely thinks it can be “cured” simply by him ambling gently into a herbaceous border area and plonking down a marigold there in the soft, yielding loam one afternoon, then I put it to you that said patient is not actually ill at all, just pretending. When I ended up in an NHS hospital with pneumonia several years back, they gave me an intravenous drip, not a hosepipe and trowel. If such malingerers had something proper wrong with them, like typhoid, yellow fever, or Yersinia pestis, it couldn’t really instantly be made better simply by initiating immediate close contact with a free begonia, could it?

Meanwhile, besides micturating away public cash on choirs, prostitutes, and flowers, there are plenty of genuinely necessary medical procedures, substances, and services the NHS doesn’t provide, like certain forms of cancer drug that are deemed “too expensive” to actually ever be prescribed to anyone. If so, what was the point of researchers ever developing the things in the first place? Just to taunt the dying with what might otherwise have been?

The NHS now has a website advertising the whole cut-price idea of social prescription to the general British public, upon which they announced an ambitious goal of having placed “at least” 900,000 patients on such ludicrous plans by last year. To facilitate this, the NHS promised to have 1,000 “social prescription link workers” trained and in place, to whom doctors could easily refer their patients—and not just mental patients, either, but those with long-term chronic physical issues like diabetes and suchlike, too, insulin no doubt being so very expensive these days.

What do these “link workers” actually do? They meet with patients and draw up a “simple personalized care and support plan”…for equally simple actions such as “going for a walk.” What will such a literal step-by-step “plan” even look like? It is, as any ordinary pedestrian knows, just a case of putting one foot in front of the other, repeatedly. To be clear, this isn’t physiotherapy, aimed at people with genuine physical mobility problems like arthritis or swollen ankles: Pseudo-doctors really are going to be paid to explain to people how best to go outside and move around in the fresh air using things called “legs.”

Medical Waste
The basic idea behind social prescribing seems to be that “X activity has Y health effect as a beneficial side effect”; for example, going swimming a lot might help diminish your weight and waistline, thereby reducing your chance of suffering a heart attack whilst going swimming after your doctor has just ordered you to. This rather obvious observation then leads unnecessary U.K. quangos like Swim England to announce their comprehensive tie-in “Swimming as Medicine” plan. Swimming as Medicine? Only if you’re severely dehydrated.

Government-funded doctors prescribing “free” tickets to government-funded swimming pools is no substitute for genuine health-care policies and treatments. And besides which, why can’t people just go swimming on their own initiative like they always used to?

Equally as spendthrift is the notion of “Green social prescribing,” which recommends “horticultural therapy,” “eco-therapy walks,” and “wildlife observation,” each serving as “a natural pain reliever,” especially if there happen to be plenty of handy opium-producing poppy seeds growing nearby.

The NHS now even claims to have its own “NHS Forest” that should henceforth be used as a gigantic outdoor treatment center for the entire nation. Closer inspection reveals this “forest” to be simply a fancy overblown description of all the patches of grassland and landscaped shrubbery NHS hospitals have lying unused around the edges of their car parks.

From now on, when an invalid visits such a building in need of genuine medical aid, their physician should simply hand them over a spade and tell them to go outside and plant a tree. Perhaps they could dig their own shallow grave there while they’re at it. Grave-digging no doubt builds up participants’ core muscle strengths, just like gardening does, so why not socially prescribe doing that on the NHS, too? If all doctors are going to do from now on is tell people to laugh, walk, garden, or swim their ailments away, there’ll surely end up being plenty of bodies to bury.

Despite the inflated claims made for social prescribing, a 2022 meta-analysis of several previous studies into the issue performed by researchers from the University of Dublin found there was “scant evidence” such schemes had any positive health effects for patients at all, physically or mentally. One anomalous study did find such a correlation—but this was rather offset by the simultaneous finding that the social prescription schemes themselves often cost more money than normal medical treatments would, contrary to many of the above-made assumptions.

With such findings in mind, I have an alternative idea. Other clinical investigations have demonstrated a direct causal link between the simple act of a person saving money and the release of health-boosting endorphins throughout the human brain. Therefore, NHS bosses should simply sack all the social prescribing link workers, rip up all the “free” pool and comedy tickets, and stop shredding public cash. But they won’t. Raising a laugh is always far easier than lowering taxes.