I am one who believes that along with prayer, positive thoughts, eating healthy foods, exercising, etc. that having a good sense of humor and filling your life with joy and laughter does contribute to keeping us healthy and healing us faster too. Life can be hard and throw lots of curve balls our way, but if we can learn to look for the bright and humorous side of everything that happens in our lives I do believe we stay healthier physically, mentally, and spiritually. Life really is what we make it. And adding as much laughter to our lives as possible can make our journey through life a very happy trip for all of us.
Having a great "sense of humor" is healthy, but there are many out there that have a very hard time even producing a smile. My BIL was exactly that way. Every photo I took of him and seen of him, he was never smiling. Wife and I have a great "sense of humor" that some totally understand and others could think is rude. A person's health status and/or family status can definitely dictate on how much they like humor and/or laughing.
I'll never forget the morning my husband came around the kitchen counter to get his cup of coffee and saw our "silly bakers" smiling and grinning at him ... his laughter was so beautiful that morning and I was really glad I had decided to put those stickers on all those potatoes!
http://www.laughteronlineuniversity.com/norman-cousins-a-laughterpain-case-study/ Norman Cousins was a longtime editor of the Saturday Review, global peacemaker, receiver of hundreds of awards including the UN Peace Medal and nearly 50 honorary doctorate degrees. In 1964 following a very stressful trip to Russia, he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis (a degenerative disease causing the breakdown of collagen), which left him in almost constant pain and motivated his doctor to say he would die within a few months. He disagreed and reasoned that if stress had somehow contributed to his illness (he was not sick before the trip to Russia), then positive emotions should help him feel better. With his doctors’ consent, he checked himself out of the hospital and into a hotel across the street and began taking extremely high doses of vitamin C while exposing himself to a continuous stream of humorous films and similar “laughing matter”. He later claimed that 10 minutes of belly rippling laughter would give him two hours of pain-free sleep, when nothing else, not even morphine could help him. His condition steadily improved and he slowly regained the use of his limbs. Within six months he was back on his feet, and within two years he was able to return to his full-time job at the Saturday Review. His story baffled the scientific community and inspired a number of research projects.