At a senior center in the Bronx last Friday, a group of 35 mature adults enthusiastically shouted out "Shoot them!" and "Throw them out!" to the tall, thin man before them who waved his arms in encouragement after posing the question, "What would he some good or bad advice you would give somebody whose spouse was cheating on them?"

  "Get a divorce!" one cried.

  "Change the locks!" hollered another.

  "Cheat on them back!"

  The crowd at the Riverdale Terrace Senior Community laughed and nudged each other as the "advice" grew more bizarre. After everyone had a chance to chime in, the man orchestrating the session, Ardsley resident Andy Wainer, changed the topic and moved on to another in a series of "exercises" that were designed, he said, not only to get the seniors laughing, but to spark their imagination and creativity.

  For Wainer, 47, the old saying "laughter is the best medicine" is more than a cliché - it's the guiding principle of his one-man company, Andy's Improvabilities (www.andysimprovabilities.com).

  Since 2002, Wainer has taught his one-hour class on comedy improvisation more than 85 times at nursing homes, adult residences and assisted-living facilities in the tn-state area. He's also delivered a more animated version of the class for children and adults at public schools, colleges and summer camps, and conducted workshops on comedy improvisation for teachers and other professionals at numerous schools and organizations in the area.

  Wainer and his wife, Gail, who is a property manager in Manhattan, and their 9-year-old daughter Allison, have lived in Ardsley for seven years. He said that his future plans include expanding his client base to include the corporate market.

  Wainer said he defines improvisation as the act of "inventing, composing or performing with little or no preparation," and he was first exposed to it while living in Manhattan in the late 1980's. He began taking classes at Chicago City Limits, an offshoot of the comedy theater group called Second City, the famed, Chicago-based training ground for comedians John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner and Bill Murray.

  Wainer said he became "hooked" on the art of improvisation, especially "the spontaneous nature of it developing the ability to think on your feet while working with other people, and reacting to each other.

  After moving to Westchester in 1993, Wainer found a workshop on comedy improvisation that met weekly at the Rye Art Center, which he attended regularly until it disbanded last year.

  "As I got more into improvisation, I thought I could teach it," he said. "As much as I like performing, I like teaching it better, and particularly bringing this program to the seniors."

  Wainer said the games and exercises he uses employ techniques that psychologists would call "free associating" or a businessman might call "brainstorming." At Riverdale Terrace last week, for example, he gave his audience a premise - a purple creature with three eyes walks into a restaurant -- and told them to make up a story about it. In another exercise, he held up a cheese grater and asked what else it could be. And an activity that elicited enthusiastic participation from nearly everyone in the group was one in which Wainer asked the seniors to look at their neighbor and pantomime a series of emotions including anger, sadness, excitement, and love and friendship.

  What makes comedy improvisation especially popular with his clients who care for the elderly, Wainer said, is that it can actually have physical, as well as emotional, benefits.

  "Medical studies have shown that there is a link between a sense of humor and longevity," he said. "Other research has proven that positive emotions, such as humor, help to defend against sickness by keeping the immune system strong."

  To emphasize that point, Wainer said he recently joined an organization called the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (www.aath.org), which is specifically devoted to understanding the uses of humor for improving physical and mental health.

  But since the physical benefits are generated from the emotional ones, Wainer elaborated on the psychological effects he tries to produce or enhance with improvisation. These include a sense of trust, spontaneity, imagination, and social connection - all of which are interconnected, he explained.

  "In the book 'The Artist's Way,' the author says that everybody has boundless creativity, but we're taught to suppress that as we grow up' Wainer said. "Improvisation teaches us to let it loose again, like it was when we were kids. When I teach it to kids at summer camp, I can't stop them - their creativity is literally endless. But adults can also recapture that, to some degree?"

  In order to create an atmosphere for that to happen, Wainer said he usually begins by having his groups participate in trust-building exercises.

  "Trust is necessary in two respects," he said, "[To be creative], you're learning to trust your own instincts. Lots of people don't think they're capable of it, hut everyone can do it. The next step is trusting your partner, so you build a good working relationship?"

  Another important component in learning to improvise, Wainer added, is the ability to listen to the person you're improvising with.

  "That's absolutely essential, because often people can come up with ideas, but they don't listen to their partner;'" he said. "They're only focusing on what's in their own head. You need to drop what's in your head and respond to what your partner is doing, and then build on that or add to it."

  With practice, Wainer said, the skill of listening will also increase an improviser's ability to react spontaneously, or "off the cuff," but he pointed out that all performance humor isn't necessarily spontaneous, as when a comedian does a stand-up routine. And since a performance can also be spontaneous without being funny, he said comedy improvisation requires a structured set of instructions for the participants to act out, so that the comedy will occur naturally from the situation.

  Wainer said his techniques have also won praise at Westchester Community College and elsewhere from the teachers of writing courses who've invited him to help get the creative juices of their own students flowing.

  One of Wainer's clients, Rosemarie Annunziato, recreation director at the Bronxwood Home for the Aged in the Bronx, said she decided to have him appear there on a monthly basis after seeing the effect his class had on residents. "He's brilliant, just amazing," she said. "We're an assisted-living center, and everyone is ambulatory. So we have a wide variety of people - from age 60 and up to people with Alzheimer's - and he has the ability to work with everybody. We get 100 percent participation.

  "And he gets them to use their imagination, which is very important;' Annunziato added. "As we get older,we can kind of forget what the outside world is like, and he kind of brings that back to them. And he's never dull or boring - it's worth attending just to see what he comes up with each time?'

  Wainer said that in addition to the positive impact his comedy classes can have on a person's overall well-being, he's seen practical benefits as well. It's not uncommon he said, for people who have a problem with shyness or speaking in public to tell him that they've experienced an increased sense of self-confidence after taking his class.

  "People can lose their inhibitions in a group setting, because everyone else is doing the same thing - pretending, making things up," he said. "The barriers between people get broken down, and that can carry over into the rest of your life?'