Each week at the Cosmic Cafe in Oak Lawn, the ceiling shakes and robust laughter drifts down into the dining room from the chaos above.It's not funny, ha-ha. It's funny yoga.In the room above the nervous diners, members of the laughter yoga class run in random directions, roll around on the floor, howl like wolves and scream at one another with excitement. Anything for a laugh. "Every Monday night," attendee Ken Campbell said, "you just hear laughter cascading across Oak Lawn from the window above the Cosmic Cafe."

The Dallas group is one of more than 400 across the country whose adherents swear by the stress-busting power of laughter. "I plan whatever I can to get them laughing," said the group's facilitator, Michele Schamburek. "It might be running around the room, pretending to be on a roller coaster or girls climbing over the Great Wall of China" – the "wall," in this case, consisting of nine men lined up on all fours.

Laughter yoga originally sprouted in 1995 with a small group of jokesters led by Madan Kataria in Mumbai, India. When they ran out of jokes, Kataria reviewed his research and determined that the human body can't distinguish between forced and sincere laughter.

Schamburek, 41, follows that blueprint – no jokes, no sitcom reruns, no demonstrations of physical humor – but sets the one-hour class to music and takes a more freestyle approach. (The sessions are free, but donations are welcome.)

"She's an acknowledged queen of laughter yoga," Campbell said.

Each session begins with Schamburek encouraging her class to "breathe in the Earth's power," then telling them to "release that power back into the Earth."They then practice the various forms of laughing: the light laugh, breathy and from the head; the medium laugh, from the chest and a little louder; and the deep laugh, from the belly and as robust as Santa's "ho-ho-ho."

Schamburek's next instruction is simple: Just dance. A few huddle in the corner of the L-shaped space and do an impromptu Macarena. Others run around the 800-square-foot space frantically, just short of doing cartwheels.

"I'm watching constantly, making sure no one looks uncomfortable," said Schamburek, who spends her days as a nutritionist at COREhealth Wellness Center. If people don't laugh from running around, they fake it – which, according to Schamburek, can eventually lead to real laughter.

After the music stops and (most) people stop dancing, Schamburek begins a visualization activity, telling her class that they're traveling the world: riding a roller coaster at Disney World or horseback riding through the Grand Canyon or gliding off the coast of Miami on WaveRunners. Between activities, class members clap their hands saying, "Ho, ho, ho," before clapping the hands of a stranger and saying "Ha, ha, ha."

It's not until the end, however, when they get really close: lying shoulder-to-shoulder and face-up (no downward-facing dog in this yoga class) on the worn pale-blue carpet. Schamburek squeezes into the human circle, finally joining the class as they all simply laugh for nearly 10 minutes. Full-bodied laughs. High-pitched laughs. Obnoxious laughs. Adorable laughs.

Not everything's a laughing matter for Schamburek and her class, though. She said she's looking for a new home for the class because the owner of their current locale was worried about the stress the group was putting on the second floor.

But while most local laughter yoga groups have faded away, Schamburek's is growing and seems likely to survive the move. "Even though it's not traditional," attendee Eric Post said, " the fact that she has a consistent group that's growing says that she's doing something right."