Humor has tremendous benefits for physical health, mental well-being, and your bottom line
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Judd Apatow told me that the Best Picture Oscar nominations irked him, because they’re all dramas, and all dramas are a lie. There’s a war, or a cancer, or a poor family in Seoul conning a rich family in Seoul by pretending they have skills they don’t have, which then gets really violent for reasons no one can remember. The characters react to these tragedies by yelling, crying, moping, and never making any jokes. Which is not how people act during war or cancer or probably the Seoul thing. It’s how people who have never experienced trauma assume they’ll act.
We don’t know how to act during a pandemic. So we’re putting on a character. We’re withholding our jokes out of fear that it will hurt someone who is experiencing COVID-related suffering, home-school-related suffering, end-of-democracy suffering, or have-to-pretend-to-be-amused-by-your-Zoom-fake-background suffering.
But as risk-reward analysis shows time and time again, a lack of risk costs us rewards. A 15-year longitudinal study of more than 50,000 Norwegians found that women with a strong sense of humor had a 73% lower risk of dying from heart disease and an 83% lower risk of dying from infection. Men who scored high on humor experience similar benefits and also have a significantly higher percent chance of getting laid, which is much more important to us than avoiding heart disease or infection.
Avoiding disease does seem like a pretty big upside right now, though. And that same study of Norwegians showed that people with a sense of humor lived eight years longer. Though there’s a much greater opportunity for growth for Norwegians than any other nationality. The only Norwegian comedian anyone has ever heard of is Espen Eckbo, star of the show Mandagsklubben. The takeaway here is that foreign words are funny.
This piece originally appeared in Stanford Business Insights from Stanford Graduate School of Business. To receive business ideas and insights from Stanford GSB click here: (To sign up: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/about/emails)