The Healing Power of Humor

BY MEHMET C. OZ, MD
As a heart surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical
Center in New York City, I have to deliver a lot of bad news. Humor is a wonderful tool.
It helps patients cope with what they’re facing, and it helps them get better too. There’s
a lot of data showing that patients who are depressed after heart surgery have a
higher mortality rate, and optimistic patients have significantly fewer wound infections.
Good sense of humor is biologically useful, which helps to prevent heart disease and
to have better physical and mental health in general."The fact that people contract
stress with humor suffer 40% less heart attacks or strokes, suffer less pain in dental
treatments and live four and a half years," says the report.

Laughter can cultivate that optimism, and it truly is the best medicine in many ways:
It defuses fear. People are scared of their bodies. Humor can crack through the ice
and take the fear away. For example, I have to tell patients about the risk of cognitive
impairment after surgery. They’re terrified, fearing the worst, so I tell them in a
humorous way that it’s usually just like forgetting second grade. People understand
what that means, and it doesn’t seem quite as scary.

It’s reassuring. After open-heart surgery a patient might say, “Doctor, my chest really
hurts.” And I’ll say with a wink, “Oh, does it feel like someone opened you up, cut the
bone and operated in there?” That tells them the pain is normal and they’re going to be
fine.

It relaxes you. Medical procedures such as surgery are stressful. When you push any
engine, including your body, to its maximum, every once in a while it slips a gear. The
ways the body manifests that are irregular heartbeats, high blood pressure and
increased sensitivity to pain. When people use humor, the autonomic nervous system
just tones down a bit to take it off high gear, and that allows the heart to relax.

It helps doctors cope. If you’re giving people bad news every day, it becomes tough.
For many doctors, our coping mechanism is to take the humanity out of it. Humor is a
mutually beneficial coping mechanism. Plus, it’s a better way to enjoy life.
Humor (from Latin: humor, -ōris) is defined as the way of presenting, judging or commenting on
reality, highlighting the comic, smiling or ridiculous side of things.

Joseph Klatzmann, in his work L'Humor juif ("Jewish humor"), defines it according to his need:
"Laugh so as not to cry". More pessimistic, one can also quote Nietzsche: "Man suffers so
terribly in the world that he has been forced to invent laughter", 2 conception that approaches
him to the cynical philosophy and that establishes that humor is, deep down , a kind of
catharsis or spiritual counter-poison that makes existence more bearable, like art.
And it is specific in man, no doubt due to natural evolution because it helps to survive in a
social environment. Because humor is social and after all, laughter is a communal activity that
promotes the creation of bonds, diffuses a possible conflict and relieves stress and anxiety, but
becomes something else when the individual exercises it in solitude. .
Humor uses comedy to derive a form of entertainment and human communication, which is
intended to make people feel better, even happy, and laugh. Humor even reaches a form of
expression in animals; ethologists point out that humor is first and foremost a rictus that
appears on the lips of primates and is shown when they face situations that are absurd,
irresolvable, unacceptable, harmful or simply incomprehensible: teaching the teeth is a way of
diverting a aggressive impulse or to summarize it mimically, a kind of intelligent sublimation
that serves to avoid violence and pain. Hence, teaching teeth or laughing among humans is
often linked to dissociate from events that normally cause deep concern and often associated
with misfortune (black humor). There is even talk of the so-called nervous laughter, as a failed
act of the unconscious. From this point of view, humor becomes an act of purification that
would allow us to evacuate this violence, born of frustration and suffering.
Humor plays a cathartic function similar to that of tears, but different in that humor supposes a
separation of and not an identification with the object that is support of it, a disregard and not a
compassion.
There are different types of humor adapted to different sensitivities and human groups. For
example, children tend to laugh more at falls and trips, while they do not understand the
subtlety of satire or irony.
The sense of humor not only makes our lives happy and makes adversity more bearable, but in
the long run it ends up modifying our brain in a positive way, in addition to strengthening the
body and improving health.

This is what the professor of Biochemistry and molecular biology Natalia López Moratalla of the
University of Navarra, UNAV, (Spain), who in his lecture 'Humor and happy brain', has
indicated that the humorous sense responds to a cerebral mechanism " precious ", which is
being investigated by neuroscience and originates in a region called" central error detection ".

According to López Moratalla, when listening to a joke, the brain processes the language and,
when the story takes an absurd turn, the "central error", located between the two hemispheres,
detects the mistake and synchronizes the logical and illogical of the narrative "

When the error is detected, the brain obtains a "reward" through the release of dopamine, a
hormone that generates a sense of rejoicing that ends up somatizing in a laughter that, in turn,
strengthens the heart and generates somatic responses (corporal) healthy, has indicated the
professor of the UNAV.

According to López Moratalla, the cerebral mechanism of humor is very complex and innate in
the human being and "is expressed in the same way in all cultures, in all ages." Laughter
means joy and happiness universally and in all ages.

However, there are some differences between the sense of humor of men and women, since
the cognitive part of it is the same, but not the emotional part, according to this expert.

"To men, something that is absurd makes them laugh out loud, while women do not usually like
it and they need that, in addition to being absurd, it's fun," said the scientist. There are also
some differences between adolescents and adults, since the former "have very little sense of
humor", because grasping the illogical and the absurd "requires work on the part of the frontal
lobe that, precisely, matures very late". In addition, since the sense of humor needs good
management of emotions and adolescents tend to process them disproportionately because
"expect a lot of reward for things that are not so much," young people in general have less
sense of humor.