Loretta LaRoche has been preaching her own, nondenominational gospel for decades, bringing her spirited and laughter-filled message to audiences through appearances, PBS programs and books.

Tomorrow night, LaRoche brings her brand of keep-your-chin-up-and-learn-to-laugh-at-the-absurdity message to Concord, with an appearance at the Capitol Center for the Arts.

LaRoche's most recent tour is tied to her book Lighten Up! The Authentic and Fun Way to Lose Weight and Your Worries. The book and tour are not simply entries in the celebrities-tell-you-about-their-impossible-diet-regimes; LaRoche mixes sensible advice with a deeper look at the whys of gaining and losing weight and at our cultural pitfalls. In her book and on tour, LaRoche offers a good deal of funny, spot-on criticism of our obsession with self-help, even as she guides audiences with her sort of anti-self-help self-help message of humor and altruism. In an interview last week, LaRoche was at once funny and seriously earnest.

Going back to your own childhood, were you always the funny kid in the lunchroom or the dinner time or was this more of a family trait?

I was born funny - everybody in my family was. It's the family genetics - we were all funny, all always fighting for the laugh. And being in that environment allowed me to embrace it. I was egged on.

One of your longstanding messages has been one of defeating stress through laughter. Given the bad, bad times we're in and the lack of control people seem to feel over their lives, is it a time to alter that goal: maybe to punch stress in the nose rather than expect to defeat it?

Unfortunately, what we all tend to do is the very nature of our times, which is to assume that we are in the worst of times. We are not in the worst of times - look back at the Depression, World War II. People were standing in bread lines, waiting in line for rations of sugar and coffee. Kids were doing drills under their desks to practice for nuclear war.

That's not to say that there are not many many people having hard times - absolutely

there are, and we all need to have great compassion and understanding. But there is rhetoric in our culture that cues us to see everything in the most catastrophic way. We need to get a grip! Of course laughter is not the be all and end all and it doesn't solve everything - but using laughter is a manner of taking back control as you face crisis. It's a big part of the mental attitude and resilience.

You have always focused a lot on resilience. Do you think we are all born with equal abilities toward resiliency, or are some naturally more able to tolerate and bounce back?

Resilience is a sort of Darwinian thing, I think. It kicks in, and some people seem to be born with more resilience than others. Some are more prone to anxiety, depression. It's common sense that those who can tap into their resilience are going to be better able to rise to the occasion when horrible things happen. It's at those most vulnerable times - loss of job, a cancer diagnosis - when it's so vital that you be able to step up to the plate. For a lot of us, I don't know that we know just how resilient, how strong, we are until we are tested. This is about problem solving, not feeling helpless, and being able to find the strength to say 'How do I get through this and come out the other side?'

You have talked a lot about this self-help culture of ours, and how we are kind of being conditioned to believe we are broken and need to be constantly fixed, including the entire sections of books about diet. How did we get here?

We're in this culture - we call it self-help but it's really based on fear, fear of not doing something right. It never stops. Next we're going to have 12-step Breathing Programs because, you know, we probably all don't breathe quite right.

Meanwhile, so much of what's gone wrong as a culture can be traced to very fundamental things, things that other, far less advanced cultures get right. Such as eating together. We are all so over-scheduled, and our kids are over-scheduled. Everybody is busy, busy, busy. Meanwhile, you never see a kid outside playing anymore. Families can't find time to eat together. We've moved from these basic things. As a result, kids lose. They lose learning to socialize, learning to negotiate, learning to be patient. But that's okay - we'll write another book about it.

I rant and rant and rant about this - obviously - and I hope, I hope, somewhere along the way I have planted a seed and maybe somebody goes home and thinks about this. Somebody, I hope, says 'A ha! I get it!'

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