LOGAN, Utah — Laughter actually may be the best medicine as a chortle, chuckle, guffaw, giggle, howl, roar or hoot is better for your health than you know.
"I woke up and had a flat tire this morning. Yeah, not a great start to the day," laughed Dr. Matthew Wappet, a professor at Utah State University. "What else do you do? It’s a natural response to stress."
Wappet said humans aren't the only ones who laugh to communicate - dogs, cats, ducks and even rats join the funny club.
Even elk have adopted a form of laughing, Wappet explained.
"When that danger is passed…they do something called 'chuffing,'" he said. "It’s a forceful exhalation of air and it signals that it’s safe to go back to not being on alert, not being in that fight-or-flight response...In animals it sounds different than it does in humans, but in animals that chuffing is laughter."
Humans have been laughing before they could even speak as it helped inform groups that it was safe to relax.
"What’s been shown through about 50 years of research is just hearing laughter causes us to relax and say, 'Oh, I’m safe, it’s OK, it’s fine,'" Wappett said.
In the video below, learn how HUMOR helps people cope with life's challenges
Beyond the behavioral benefits, there are physical health benefits to laughing.
"It’s been shown that if you laugh continuously...laughter has the same benefits as aerobic exercise," Wappett claimed.
One group in Logan is cracking themselves up with "laughter yoga."
Dr. Madan Kadaria leads the group, starting it 25 years ago to get people to laugh without jokes or humor.
Kadaria claims laughing helps with chemotherapy, depression, bone density, diabetes and more.
Wappett is also promoting laughter at USU, leading a group through laughing exercises.
"Fake laughter turns to real laughter and you get the health benefits," he said.
But laughter and humor are two different things. Both important, humor through the decades is documented in a collection at USU.
Students collected jokes through the centuries with some that may seem disturbing, like jokes after 918 people died in Jonestown in 1978, or when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986.
"We’re not endorsing those jokes, we’re just saying yes, this is another form of human expression. This is a way people cope," explained photo curator Daniel Davis.
Davis says as we get older, combined with our culture becoming more sensitive, laughter and humor are trained out.
"Stress is actually the number one threat to public health," he said. "Everything is just so tense and so stressful."
So next time you come to a fork in the road, where you can decide how to react, try to laugh. It may benefit your life in the long run.
