Jolene Nevers, right, leads a Laughter Club exercise as participants make believe they are riding a subway car. Nevers, a certified laughter leader, offers laughter therapy to students, faculty and staff at the University of Connecticut.

Can pretending to ride the subway, leaning into the turns and toppling fellow passengers, relieve stress?

Apparently, if the conductor is a certified laughter leader and the strap-hangers are willing to force a few laughs.

“Let’s do subway! Lean to the right, to the left!” barked Jolene Nevers, above a chorus of loud but faked ha-has that morphed into a real giggle here, a bona fide titter there.

“You end up actually laughing,” said Karissa Covelli, 19, who said the 20-minute laugh-therapy session at the University of Connecticut’s Health Education Center recently dissolved the day’s frustrations and a crabby mood. “I feel a lot better now.”

Nevers, a university health-education coordinator and a laughter leader certified by World Laughter Tour Inc., learned about the laughter-therapy movement at an American College Health Association conference two years ago.

“Laughter clubs are a form of structured play,” she said. “As adults, we have to work fun and play into our lives.”

Amid a merciless economy that has stripped millions of Americans of their jobs or homes or trapped them in the quicksand of debt, fitting fun into their lives is serious stuff. Laughter, researchers conclude, is nothing to joke about.

Laughter therapy reduced cholesterol and lowered inflammation in a group of diabetics with high blood pressure, according to a study this spring by doctors at Loma Linda University. Their findings jibe with a 2005 study by the University of Maryland’s Center for Preventive Cardiology, which found that laughing relieves stress. Stress can damage the endothelium, the protective barrier that lines the blood vessels and lead to the build up of fat and cholesterol, factors in heart attack, said Dr. Michael Miller, the center’s director.

But does forced laughter, as practiced by laughter-therapy enthusiasts, provide the same benefits as real laughter? According to some studies, the brain doesn’t know the difference between the two. Endorphins, the body’s happy hormones, are released when we laugh or simulate laughter, according to Charles Schaefer, a psychology professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J.