Ha! (24 page)

After revisiting his subjects in 1986, over sixty years after his study began, Friedman concluded that one personality trait significantly predicted longevity—conscientiousness. This trait reflects how prudent and thoughtful a person is when dealing with others, and it appeared to raise survival rates by as much as five years. Self-confidence didn't show this effect, and neither did sociability. In fact, the only other factor affecting how long Friedman's subjects lived was sense of humor, which apparently didn't prolong lives but shortened them.
The effect wasn't as strong as that of conscientiousness, but it was still impressive—the humorous people in Friedman's sample lived shorter lives than everybody else.

The reason for this inverse relationship is hard to explain, though it may have to do with the possibility that humorous people don't take better care of their bodies. For example, other studies show that, compared to nonhumorous people, they smoke more, put on more weight, and have a greater risk of cardiovascular disease. And then there's the issue of neuroticism, a personality trait often seen among humorous individuals (as we saw in
Chapter 4
). Neuroticism has been shown to increase risk of mortality by up to 30 percent. So, even though Cousins's strategy bought him an extra twenty-six years of life, it doesn't seem to work for everybody.

But don't give up hope yet. My goal is to show that humor is an essential protective mechanism. It may not promise longer lives, but it does enhance psychological health and shield us from pain. Which brings us to something I like to call
the Bill Cosby Effect.

T
HE
B
ILL
C
OSBY
E
FFECT

Imagine that you are about to have orthopedic surgery to correct a sprained disk in your back, when you are approached by someone claiming to be a graduate student majoring in communications arts. He tells you that he is doing his thesis on the effects of various media on pain, and asks if you would be willing to participate in his study. If so, then after granting him access to your medical records you will be shown movies to see how they affect your postsurgical recovery. It sounds like a fair deal, and you agree.

Fortunately your surgery is a success, and when it is over you are wheeled into a recovery room where you see the experimenter again. This time he is accompanied by a VCR player. He gives you a choice of humorous movies to watch, some new and some old, and on the list you see several favorites—
Weekend at Bernie's, Naked Gun,
and
The Odd Couple.
In the end you choose
Bill Cosby: 49,
a concert film of Cosby's
stand-up in which he talks about topics like aging, wives, and children. That evening you're presented with the same selection, except this time you choose
A Fish Called Wanda.

The entire process is repeated the second day, and soon you're feeling pretty good about your decision to participate. The experimenter asks a few awkward questions, particularly about the amount of pain you experienced after surgery and how you feel about your recovery, but these intrusions are minor. By the third day you've healed well enough for you to rehabilitate at home, so the hospital releases you to outpatient care. The experiment is over, and you thank the researcher before leaving.

Your own participation in this experiment was imaginary, but in real life this was one of the most important humor studies of all time. Conducted by James Rotton, a psychologist at Florida International University, it examined the effect of humorous movies on pain tolerance. There were seventy-eight participants in all, and the luckiest ones were those who watched funny movies. Other subjects saw movies with less emotional impact, such as
Dr. No
and
Labyrinth.

I say “luckiest” because the subjects who viewed funny movies experienced less self-reported pain than those who watched dramas. Specifically, they felt better about their postsurgical condition and requested 25 percent less medication than their peers. By the second day, this translated to a third less pain, even with the reduced drugs.

This finding is especially important because it shows how humor doesn't just make us healthier—it improves our quality of life. And it's all the more meaningful given that Rotton's design used actual patients with actual pain, a rare occurrence in the world of science. Conducting research in real-world settings is always preferred, but it's a challenge because universities are notoriously sensitive about protecting research subjects. It's the rare institution that allows its scientists to “hurt” its subjects, making pain a difficult topic to study.

This isn't to say that pain tolerance can't be studied in laboratories too. A benefit of laboratory studies is that they allow for complete control over the procedure, something Rotton didn't have. He had no way
of manipulating the actual pain his subjects endured because he didn't perform any actual surgeries or cause the injuries requiring treatment. Experimental pain studies, on the other hand, allow for such variables to be controlled and ensure that all subjects feel the same level of discomfort to begin with. One way to accomplish these goals is to use a cold pressor test.

The cold pressor test involves inserting your hand in a bucket of ice water chilled to 35 degrees Fahrenheit, just above freezing. Though cold and painful, this stimulus doesn't do any actual damage or cause frostbite, it only makes you really want to remove your hand. The amount of time you keep your hand inside the bucket becomes your personal measure of pain tolerance, and by administering the test multiple times—for example, before and after some experimental treatment—scientists are able to look at how your pain threshold changes over time.

Studies using the cold pressor test confirm that watching comedies does indeed give us protection from pain. This is what I mean by the
Bill Cosby Effect
—simply viewing a recording of humorous stand-up can increase the amount of time we're able to keep our hand in ice water, from 36 to 100 seconds.

Norman Cousins claimed that laughter is a natural pain killer, a better treatment than any manufactured drug. That would be a nice story, and a satisfying one too, but life is more complicated than that. Indeed, as it turns out, watching gruesome horror movies, filled with blood and gore, has the same effect. People who watch such movies are able to hold their hands in ice water for nearly two minutes, an increase of more than 300 percent compared to baseline. So the analgesic effect of movies isn't limited to humor.

How could that be? This whole time we've been exploring the benefits of positive mood, and now we see that fear has the same effect? It does, and to explain why we need to revisit the Rotton pain study. From his original finding you might have guessed that watching a funny movie is like taking aspirin—or, in the case of exceptionally
funny movies, codeine. But note what happened when the subjects in that study were shown movies other than the ones they selected.

One thing I didn't share earlier about Rotton's study is that he asked all his subjects what kind of movie they preferred, but only half of them actually viewed the movies of their choice. The other half—those in the “no choice” group—were shown movies that they
hadn't
selected. Interestingly, he found that for the latter subjects, watching funny movies didn't decrease requests for pain medication. Instead it increased them. In fact, the “no choice” subjects asked for more than twice as much pain medication as did those whose choices were honored. So, watching funny movies wasn't enough to increase pain tolerance. Subjects also had to watch the kind of humor they liked, and had to feel as though they were in control of their own moods.

In short, laughter—or, more specifically, positive affect—isn't what confers benefits. What matters is our emotional engagement. The subjects in Rotton's study who watched movies they didn't choose probably didn't find the films funny because they weren't emotionally invested in them. Our minds need emotional engagement just like they need exercise. Without that engagement, we become passive to our environment. And a passive mind is an unhealthy mind.

The reason both comedies and tragedies lead to greater pain tolerance is that our minds are exercised by each. When we laugh, just as when we cry, our bodies experience emotional arousal. This effect is both engaging and distracting, strengthening our bodies—and our minds—for what is to come, much like a boxer lifts weights before a bout. Earlier we explored the question of how psychological states induce physical changes in the body—and now we see that, by providing our brains with exercise, humor prepares them for greater stressors down the road. Conflict can be a good thing, so long as it's harnessed properly.

This emotional-exercise view of humor also explains why watching comedies is sometimes more beneficial than meditating or listening to calming music. For example, simply viewing an episode of the sitcom
Friends
has been shown to reduce anxiety three times more effectively than sitting and resting. Our brains want to relax and overcome stress, but they need to stay active too. Simply allowing them to be dormant does no good.

Like physical exercise, humor takes many different forms, and not all of them are created equal. Humor keeps our brains and bodies active, but not all activity—whether physical or mental—is beneficial. Earlier we noted that there are no fewer than forty-four separate types of humor—wit, irony, and slapstick being just a few. But humor styles vary too, based on psychological motivations rather than punch lines. One example is affiliative humor. People with high degrees of affiliative humor enjoy saying funny things, sharing witty banter to amuse friends, and joking to reduce interpersonal tension. As you might guess, affiliative humor is considered a positive humor style, meaning that it leads to constructive psychological and social behaviors.

Another positive style is self-enhancing humor, which characterizes people who enjoy funny outlooks and who laugh in order to see the bright side of troubling situations—anything to keep a positive attitude. People who score high on measures of self-enhancing humor tend to have high self-esteem and to be conscientious. And as we've seen, that last personality trait is especially important for health because it's the only personality factor that predicts longevity. So humor can indeed help us live longer, as long as it's the right type.

The idea of humor styles was developed by Willibald Ruch as a way of characterizing humor in everyday life. They're assessed using a test called the Humor Styles Questionnaire, which identifies two negative styles too. First there's aggressive humor, which involves sarcasm, teasing, or ridicule. People who rely on aggressive humor try to build themselves up at others' expense, and not surprisingly also score high on tests of hostility or aggression. And then there's self-defeating humor. To understand this style, you need only think of Rodney Danger-field. Rather than putting down others, self-defeating humorists target themselves, often as a defense mechanism for low self-worth.

Whereas positive humor styles increase feelings of self-worth and conscientiousness, and possibly even improve longevity, negative humor styles have the opposite effect. People who use self-defeating humor tend to experience depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem, and those who use aggressive humor often adopt poor coping mechanisms. It's easy to see how this might have adverse long-term effects on longevity.

In short, humor can either improve or harm our health, depending on how it's used. Dealing with conflict in positive ways, such as laughing to put ourselves in a good mood, is probably as important as getting on that Stairmaster three times a week. Laughing negatively at ourselves or taking a dark, sardonic attitude—well, you might as well start drinking and smoking too.

In my life I've run two marathons, once when I turned twenty and the other when I turned forty. For both races I was unprepared but I ran them anyway, the first time to impress a girl and the second time to trick myself into believing I wasn't middle-aged, because that same girl—now my wife—wouldn't let me buy a Porsche. The funny thing about both experiences is that I just missed my goal each time (under four hours), mostly because I hadn't trained well enough. But even so, after the race was over I didn't increase my training. Why? Because the race was over. Exercise improves our fitness only
after
we've finished training.

If laughter is like exercise for the mind, then we should expect mental training to work the same way. And it does, as we'll see in what I like to call the
Faces of Death
test. Arnie Cann is a social psychologist from the University of North Carolina, where he studies how people recover from traumatic experiences. Though we humans are remarkably resilient, sometimes that resilience breaks down. When that happens we get sick or feel depressed—or, in extreme cases, we suffer conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder. One way to protect ourselves from stress is through humor. To explore this possibility, Cann performed an experiment using the most gruesome film in the world, one that prides itself on being banned in over forty countries.

My guess is that if you're over the age of thirty, you've heard of
Faces of Death.
It was released in 1978, and nobody had seen anything like it before. It showed scene after scene of horrific deaths, all presented as actual footage with Rod Sterling-like narration. Men are set on fire, families are doused with napalm, bicyclists are run over by tractor trailers—all in Technicolor splendor. Though the advent of YouTube and allegations of fakery have diminished the movie's impact over the years, it's still quite gory. Few people are able to watch it for more than a few minutes without feeling ill.