GRAND RAPIDS – LaughFest 2012 opened its 10-day festival with 607 people wearing chicken beaks and doing the "Chicken Dance" to set a new world record.

Let the laughs begin.

Gilda's LaughFest, which opened its first festival last year with a rubber chicken toss, kicked off its second festival of seriously funny stuff on Friday with more than 600 people enduring the cold, wearing yellow beaks, and waggling their wings to start 10 days of stand-up comedy, improv, movies and more.

Some 649 people, shortly after 6 p.m., were corralled in the “chicken coop” on Louis Street near the Grand Rapids Art Museum, along with such characters as Cluck from WFGR-FM (98.7)

"This is all about laughter for the health of it," said Leann Arkema, president and CEO of Gilda's Club Grand Rapids, to the waiting crowd. "Looking at all of you with your chicken beaks makes me laugh.

Aiden and Corbin Lallo, 4 ½-year old twins, were more interested in their matching dinosaur hats and Batman sneakers than in wearing their yellow beaks for the full 10 minutes to establish a Guinness World Record for the most people wearing animal noses simultaneously.

“Corbin did, for a while,” said their mother, Courtany Lallo, of Grand Rapids. “But we just were here for some fun.”

After 11 minutes and 39 seconds, including two rounds of the “Chicken Dance” led by the polka band Diddle Styx, official counters determined only 607 had kept their beaks on for at least 10 minutes.

Details of the stunt will be forwarded to Guinness World Records for certification.

Dozens of participants brought along their rubber chickens from last year's toss that first put LaughFest officially into the Guinness Book of World Records when 925 faux fowl were flung simultaneously across Rosa Parks Circle.

Grace Runals, and her mother, Robin, from Middleville, also brought along their live, egg-laying hen to Friday’s stunt.

“We thought we needed a real chicken,” Robin Runals explained. “And we all need to get off the farm every now and then.”

Afterward, 16 comedians entertained at McFadden's Restaurant & Saloon, Pyramid Scheme, Dr. Grins at The B.O.B. and 25 Kitchen + Bar, previewing entertainment happening through March 18 in the festival created by Gilda’s Club Grand Rapids, a non-profit agency providing services to people and families living with cancer.

Whoopi Goldberg appears tonight in Grand Rapids Community College's Ford Fieldhouse, the first in a list of LaughFest headliners that also includes Jim Gaffigan, Kathleen Madigan, Bo Burnham and Sinbad.

"Saturday Night Live" alumni Martin Short and Kevin Nealon, plus former SNL writer Alan Zweibel, will be in town March 17 for a fundraiser for Gilda's Club Grand Rapids, which takes its name from the late Gilda Radner, an original cast member of NBC-TV's "Saturday Night Live," who died in 1989 from ovarian cancer.

Radner's brother, Michael Radner, of Detroit, returned for the second time to encourage the participants in today's stunt.

“Gilda loved to make people laugh, and people loved to laugh at her,” he said. “This event is so wonderful because it leaves so many people laughing.”

E-mail Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk: jkaczmarczyk@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ArtsWriter

Here's the world record-setting stunt to open LaughFest 2012