For years, Don Riddell’s sons secretly recorded their father at distinctly unflattering moments. Their collection includes footage of him walking into a wall while carrying a mattress over his head and trimming his nose hairs while preparing for work.

The resulting family highlight reel still leaves everyone howling, even though Riddell usually knows which embarrassing clip is coming next. His sons are now in college, but laughter remains a dependable part of their relationship.

That comic relief feels especially valuable amid bitter politics, wars in Ukraine and Iran, rising living costs and the frightening effects of the climate crisis. Laughter cannot solve those problems, but it can make people feel better about their place in a troubling world.

Riddell, an anchor and correspondent for CNN’s World Sport, says he laughs frequently with his family and irreverent colleagues. He had not seriously considered laughter’s possible health benefits, although aching cheeks after a comedy show always left him eager for another performance.

A deep laugh is more than an emotional reaction. It opens the chest, increases oxygen intake, stimulates circulation and prompts chemical changes that help the inner lining of blood vessels dilate, improving blood flow.

American comedian Craig Shoemaker described laughter in terms that sound almost athletic. “You’re pumping blood, your lungs are expanded,” he said before an Atlanta show. “Everything happens when you’re laughing. It’s as good as a workout!”

Research has also found a connection between laughter and the body’s stress response. A systematic review of eight small, brief studies conducted between 1989 and 2021 linked a good laugh with a roughly 30% reduction in cortisol, a stress hormone.

Endocrinologist Dr. Caroline Kramer and her team published their study of spontaneous laughter and stress response in 2023. “Even 10 minutes of laughter can reduce cortisol significantly,” Kramer said. “Our results were of greater importance than I thought they would be.”

Kramer is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and a clinician scientist at Mount Sinai’s Leadership Sinai Centre for Diabetes. She said people sometimes discount interventions that improve well being because they are accustomed to studies focused on mortality, hospitalization and other measurable outcomes.

Shoemaker expressed the same frustration more bluntly. “It’s so important to our wellness, and yet we completely dismiss it, because laughter doesn’t have a lobby.”

In the 1990s, Shoemaker developed the Lovemaster, a confident character with a gravelly voice who offered audacious pickup lines and relationship advice. Shoemaker said several audience members later credited that character with helping them conceive children, including a Michigan couple who had been told they could not have a child.

The comedian eventually came to view laughter as more than entertainment and made promoting its health benefits his life’s work. “I realized this is truly wonderful medicine for people to be shared,” he said.

That mission became deeply personal after his friend, screenwriter Michael Goldberg, was diagnosed with brain cancer around 2001 and given three months to live. Shoemaker began working with a cancer facility to explore ways comedy could help Goldberg, who lived 15 years beyond that prognosis.

Shoemaker gives some credit to Goldberg’s will to live and the joy in his life. The work also led Shoemaker to create workshops and products designed to offer people what he called “a reset, a recharge, a reclamation” while confronting difficult experiences.

Jamie Bendall, co owner of the Punchline Comedy Club in Atlanta, believes comedy can provide social connection during divided times. When an audience laughs together, nobody knows how anyone else voted, and Bendall observed that “it’s very hard to both laugh and throw a punch.”

Bendall still emphasizes diet, moderation and getting 10,000 steps each day. But he argues that a healthy, balanced life also includes regular laughter, particularly because its return can signal that circumstances are beginning to feel better.