How Humor Makes You Friendlier, Sexier

Key Concepts

• The concept of laughter as a cure for disease lacks scientific support, but humor may indeed have significant effects on the psyche.
• Laughter relaxes us and improves our hearing and hearing jokes may ease anxiety. Amusement can also counteract pain.
• Cheerfulness, a trait that makes people respond more readily to humor, is linked to emotional resilience—the ability to keep a level head in difficult circumstances—and to close relationships. Life satisfaction may increase with the ability to laugh.

Norman Cousins, the storied journalist, author and editor, found no pain reliever better than clips of the Marx Brothers. For years, Cousins suffered from inflammatory arthritis, and he swore that 10 minutes of uproarious laughing at the hilarious team bought him two hours of pain-free sleep.

In his book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (W. W. Norton, 1979), Cousins described his self-prescribed laughing cure, which seemed to ameliorate his inflammation as well as his pain. He eventually was able to return to work, landing a job as an adjunct professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he investigated the effects of emotions on biological states and health.

The community of patients inspired by such miracle treatments believes not only that humor is psychologically beneficial but that it actually cures disease. In reality, only a smattering of scientific evidence exists to support the latter idea—but laughter and humor do seem to have significant effects on the psyche, even influencing our perception of pain. What is more, psychological well-being has an impact on overall wellness, including our risk of disease.

Laughter relaxes us and improves our mood, and hearing jokes may ease anxiety. Amusement’s ability to counteract physical agony is well documented, and as Cousins’s experience suggests, humor’s analgesic effect lasts after the smile has faded.

Cheerfulness, a trait that makes people respond more readily to laugh lines, is linked to emotional resilience—the ability to keep a level head in difficult circumstances—and to close relationships, studies show. Science also indicates that a sense of humor is sexy; women are attracted to men who have one. Thus, in various ways, life satisfaction may increase with the ability to laugh.

Amusing Exercise
Ancient Greek philosopher AristotleAristotle viewed laughter as “a bodily exercise precious to health.” But despite some claims to the contrary, chuckling probably has little influence on physical fitness. Laughter does produce short-term changes in cardiovascular function and respiration, boosting heart rate, respiratory rate and depth, as well as oxygen consumption. But because hard laughter is difficult to sustain, a good guffaw is unlikely to have measurable cardiovascular benefits the way, say, walking or ­jogging does.

In fact, instead of straining muscles to build them, as exercise does, laughter apparently accomplishes the opposite. Studies dating back to the 1930s indicate that laughter relaxes muscles, decreasing muscle tone for up to 45 minutes after the guffaw subsides.

Such physical relaxation might conceivably help moderate the effects of psychological stress. After all, the act of laughing probably does produce other types of physical feedback that improve an individual’s emotional state. According to one classical theory of emotion, our feelings are partially rooted in physical reactions. American psychologist William JamesWilliam James and Danish physiologist Carl Lange argued at the end of the 19th century that humans do not cry because they are sad but that they become sad when the tears begin to flow.

Although sadness also precedes tears, evidence suggests that emotions can flow from muscular responses. In an experiment published in 1988, social psychologist Fritz Strack of the University of Würzburg in Germany and his colleagues asked volunteers to hold a pen either with their teeth—thereby creating an artificial smile—or with their lips, which would produce a disappointed expression. Those forced to exercise their smiling muscles reacted more exuberantly to funny cartoons than did those whose mouths were contracted in a frown, suggesting that expressions may influence emotions rather than just the other way around. Similarly, the physical act of laughter could improve mood.