Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Looking Under the Hood of Laughter

Humor continues to provide scientific fodder for psychologists. National humor genes? Natural selection criteria? It's all here.

I challenge this bit toward the end of the article:

"One popular field of research is the effect of humour on health, which is widely assumed to be positive. The results so far are inconclusive, and slightly disturbing for anyone who likes to laugh. Rod Martin points out that if humour is good for health, then it should be associated with longevity. Yet it appears that cheerful people live less long than their gloomier peers, perhaps because they are too jolly to worry about their aches and pains. It may be true, as the proverb says, that he who laughs last laughs longest. But it seems that he who laughs longest does not last."
But isn't there some other study out there that says laughter is good exercise? Yes! There is!

Instead of "everything causes cancer," we might be heading for an era of "laughter causes everything."