The floggings will continue until morale improves

Not continuously — she’s not in hysterics over something that keeps coming back to start her off again — but repeatedly. Every time one of the men speaks, this woman cracks up. In between cackles she waits with her cheeks drawn in anticipation.

It’s as if it were her designated role. Three of them are drinking, so they have a designated driver who stays sober (that’s her husband). The other man does the entertaining and she is in charge of the laughter.

The other woman? Who knows, but she and the driver seem to have conceded the overt good times to their spouses. They’re not looking hostile, just detached. Maybe they’re playing footsie under the table. There is no law that says you have to be demonstrative.

The stereotyped Caribbean style of laughing has much in common with the American inner-city culture that brought the world such witty conversational staples as “wassup”. It also involves the same willingness to be highly tickled at the smallest of stimuli. You could call it a “joie de vivre”, the sheer delight at being alive and expecting your friends to be hilarious, to the point where, even when all they’re saying is hello, you’re going to laugh in a high-pitched voice and squeak something with “man” on the end, and laugh some more. But that is a stereotype, just like the insane cackle of the cartoon Mexican with a droopy moustache and a cactus in the background. Some Mexicans are like that, but not all.

Personally, I don’t laugh much. I love comedy and can sit through a funny film and thoroughly enjoy it, but you wouldn’t know, because I don’t show it. And it’s not because I’m British: my ancestors are French. But it is the complete opposite of the woman in the cafe and, to give her a highly unlikely companion, a German mime artist with whom I once attended another mime’s little show in a church hall outside Stuttgart. Now, the Germans are not famous for their humour, but when they find something funny, boy, do they like to make it clear. My friend rocked back and forth at every slapstick move her colleague made. She threw her head back and she slapped her thigh. There was little room for doubt that she was amused.

Laughter may well be the best medicine, and naturally there is research on the subject. They say the act of laughing is akin to exercise, in that it raises the heart rate and blood pressure. In the great tradition of such research, it doesn’t come to any definite conclusion, but leaves us with the same feeling we had before we started reading it — that laughter is basically a good thing — but no indication of why, for instance, it seems that the big laughers tend to be on the plump side.

Even if it were clinically proven, how would doctors make people laugh? Nitrous oxide, known as laughing gas, has a long history of use in childbirth, as it distracts the agonized mother, rather than actually easing the pain.

Smoking marijuana, too, can lead to uncontrollable mirth, but modern medicine, particularly the alternative strands, is moving away from drugs. Perhaps we will have laughter clinics in which patients will be given a choice of DVDs, from Monty Python to Mr Bean. There might be an occasional visit by a specialist: a stand-up comedian who can not only provide the amusement but monitor progress too. Interactive, you see? You’ve got to interact these days. Don’t just sit there getting better – say something.

Laughter can also be infectious, as a string of comedy records in the 1920s demonstrated. A man named Charles Penrose, trading as Charles Jolly, brought the English-speaking world to its knees with The Laughing Policeman, in which he sings a few lines and then laughs a few and so on. Audiences duly wet themselves in empathy, so he made follow-ups such as The Laughing Major, Curate, Steeplechaser, and Typist. It’s hard to imagine making a success of such an enterprise today, in these sophisticated, cynical times.

If this is a natural health resource that has been there all the time, we have to learn to tap into it and do it deliberately. But is that possible for the stony-faced inscrutables? Or is feeling amused more important than showing it? It’s a serious question, man (slaps hands, giggles and adds ‘Damn!’ for emphasis.)