When your life is falling apart, the last thing most people tell you is to find something funny about it. But Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey make a compelling case in “Build the Life You Want” that humor might be the most effective emotional tool you possess for managing difficulty—more powerful than affirmations, more reliable than optimism, and more accessible than meditation.
Humor doesn’t just make you feel better temporarily. It physically occupies the neural receptors that would otherwise be filled with negative emotion, creating space for perspective, resilience, and human connection even in the worst circumstances. It’s emotional caffeine of the highest order.
The mechanism is straightforward and scientifically validated. But the practice requires something most men struggle with: the willingness to be light in the midst of heaviness, to find absurdity in suffering, to laugh when circumstances seem to demand only grimness.
How Humor Works in Your Brain
Brooks and Winfrey explain the neuroscience with an example. Read this sentence: “When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather… not screaming in terror, like his passengers.”
If you laughed, three things happened in lightning-fast succession. First, you detected an incongruity—you imagined a peaceful grandfather in bed, then realized he was driving a vehicle. Second, you resolved the incongruity—grandpa was asleep at the wheel. Third, your parahippocampal gyrus helped you recognize the statement wasn’t serious, so you felt amusement instead of horror.
This rapid-fire cognitive process does something remarkable: it blocks whatever negative emotion you were experiencing. You can’t feel joy and fear simultaneously in the same neural space. Humor doesn’t solve your problems, but it creates temporary relief that allows you to think more clearly about them.
Research demonstrates this with striking consistency. In a 2010 study, senior citizens who received eight weeks of “humor therapy”—daily jokes, laughter exercises, funny stories—reported feeling 42 percent happier than they had at the start. They were 35 percent happier than the control group and experienced decreases in both pain and loneliness.
Humor has an almost anesthetic quality. It doesn’t eliminate suffering, but it lowers your focus on pain and helps you remember joy even during terrible times.
The Black Death and Laughter
Brooks and Winfrey point to a fascinating historical example. Around 1353, as the Black Death ravaged Europe and killed perhaps a third of the population, Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio finished “The Decameron.” The book consisted of one hundred comedic stories told by ten fictional friends quarantining together at a country estate to avoid the pestilence.
It became massively popular across Europe as the plague dragged on. It didn’t avoid themes of sickness and death. It didn’t minimize the horror of what was happening. But it found what was hilarious about life even under rotten conditions—and in doing so, relieved the fear and tedium that characterized those years.
The lesson isn’t that suffering should be ignored or minimized. It’s that finding humor within suffering makes the suffering more bearable and the recovery faster. Life can be pretty funny even when it’s also pretty terrible. But seeing the funny parts depends on your attitude.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, those who maintained their sanity often did so through humor—memes about sourdough bread and Tiger King, jokes about Zoom fashion, absurd observations about the strangeness of lockdown life. This wasn’t denial. It was survival through perspective.
Why Being Funny Doesn’t Make You Happy
Here’s a paradox Brooks and Winfrey reveal: consuming humor reliably boosts happiness, but being funny doesn’t. This is sometimes called the “sad clown paradox.”
Research shows no significant relationship between being funny—as judged by outside reviewers rating people’s jokes and comic responses to frustrating situations—and getting happier. Professional comedians actually score above population norms on measures of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure.
This matters because it removes pressure. You don’t need to be the person who tells jokes to get happiness benefits from humor. You just need to be the person who appreciates them and laughs. Funny people often have particular neurological characteristics and unusually high intelligence. But people who enjoy funny things simply prioritize humor, cultivate the taste for it, and give themselves permission to laugh.
For men who feel pressure to be entertaining or witty, this is liberating. Let others tell the jokes. Listen and laugh. That’s enough.
The Type of Humor That Matters
Not all humor serves happiness equally. Brooks and Winfrey emphasize that the type of humor you consume and share makes a crucial difference.
Humor that doesn’t belittle others, or that makes you laugh at your circumstances rather than at people, is associated with self-esteem, optimism, and life satisfaction. It correlates with decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress. This is humor that unites, that finds absurdity in situations, that laughs with people rather than at them.
Humor that attacks others or prompts you to belittle yourself follows the exact opposite pattern. While it can feel satisfying momentarily, it doesn’t block negative feelings. It’s like decaf coffee—it goes through the motions without delivering the effect you need.
Sarcasm and cynical humor, when they become your default mode, actually reinforce negativity rather than providing relief from it. They can feel sophisticated or edgy, but they keep your attention focused on what’s wrong, what’s disappointing, what’s worthy of contempt.
The humor that heals finds lightness in darkness without denying the darkness. It acknowledges difficulty while refusing to let difficulty be the entire story. It’s honest about pain but insistent that pain isn’t all there is.
Three Practices for Bringing More Humor Into Your Life
Brooks and Winfrey offer concrete ways to make humor a more active force in your emotional management.
First, reject grimness. It’s easy to feel that lightheartedness is inappropriate when facing serious challenges or caring about injustice. But grimness isn’t actually more effective than humor at solving problems. In fact, it’s less effective because it makes you less appealing to potential allies and collaborators.
Humor isn’t denial or minimization. It’s perspective. And perspective is crucial for effective action. Some of the most powerful social movements have used humor to maintain morale and attract support. Some of the best eulogies at funerals are the most humorous because they honor the full humanity of the person, not just the tragedy of loss.
Researchers have found that a particularly humorless ideology is fundamentalism—the conviction that “I am right and you are evil.” The current ideological climate in many countries is aggressively humorless, with political extremists using offense at humor as a weapon. Don’t participate in the war on jokes, regardless of your politics. Life is difficult enough without eliminating laughter from it.
Second, don’t worry about being funny yourself. Some people can’t tell jokes to save their lives. They forget the punchline or start laughing so hard themselves that the joke gets lost. That’s completely fine. For happiness benefits, it’s better to consume humor than to supply it.
This is particularly important for men, who often feel pressure to be the entertaining one, to lighten every mood, to always have the perfect quip. If that’s not your gift, stop forcing it. Find funny things—podcasts, shows, writers, friends who make you laugh—and let them do their work.
Third, stay positive in your humor. Seek out humor that brings you joy without requiring someone else to be the butt of the joke. Notice what makes you genuinely laugh versus what makes you smirk cynically. Cultivate more of the former.
This doesn’t mean only consuming sanitized, inoffensive comedy. Some of the best humor is edgy and provocative. But there’s a difference between humor that challenges and humor that just attacks, between comedy that illuminates human nature and comedy that just tears people down.
When Humor Feels Impossible
What about when you’re in genuine crisis—grief, betrayal, catastrophic loss? Brooks and Winfrey don’t suggest forcing laughter when your world has collapsed. But they do suggest that even in the darkest times, moments of lightness can coexist with moments of pain.
This is the value of gallows humor, the jokes people make in terrible circumstances. Emergency room doctors, soldiers in combat, people going through chemotherapy—they often develop dark, absurd humor about their situations. This isn’t disrespect for the seriousness of what they’re facing. It’s a survival mechanism that creates brief relief from unbearable intensity.
You don’t need to laugh all the time. You need to remain open to laughter when it emerges naturally, even when it seems inappropriate. The ability to find something funny while also acknowledging that things are terrible is a sophisticated emotional achievement, not a failure to take life seriously enough.
The Integration: Humor Plus Other Practices
Humor becomes most powerful when combined with the other emotional management techniques Brooks and Winfrey teach. When you practice metacognition, you create the space to choose humor as a response rather than defaulting to anger or despair. When you cultivate gratitude, you become more receptive to the absurd and delightful aspects of life. When you maintain hope, humor feels less like denial and more like resilience.
The goal isn’t to become someone who’s always joking or never takes anything seriously. It’s to develop the capacity to access humor when you need it most—when difficulty threatens to overwhelm you, when stress is building, when relationships are tense, when you’re starting to catastrophize.
Brooks and Winfrey remind us that we’re living in an age of aggressive seriousness. Every topic is treated as life-or-death. Every disagreement is apocalyptic. Every mistake is unforgivable. This cultural grimness is suffocating and counterproductive.
Choosing humor in this environment isn’t frivolity. It’s resistance against the cultural forces insisting that everything must be heavy, everything must be terrible, nothing can be light. It’s maintaining your humanity when circumstances or culture want you to become grim and brittle.
Why This Matters for Building Your Life
When Brooks and Winfrey write about building the life you want, they’re not talking about achieving perfect circumstances. They’re talking about developing the emotional capabilities to live well regardless of circumstances. Humor is central to this project.
The life you want isn’t one where nothing bad happens. It’s one where bad things happen and you maintain your capacity for joy anyway. It’s one where difficulty exists alongside delight. It’s one where you can experience both grief and laughter, sometimes in the same conversation.
Humor doesn’t fix your problems. It makes you someone who can face problems without being destroyed by them. It creates the emotional spaciousness necessary for clear thinking and wise action. It makes you better company for yourself and others. It reminds you that life contains more than just struggle.
The person who can laugh at themselves is free from the tyranny of self-importance. The person who can find humor in difficult situations is free from the tyranny of circumstances. The person who can maintain levity alongside gravity is free to build a life that’s fully human—aware of suffering but not consumed by it, serious about meaning but not grimly joyless.
This is the paradox Brooks and Winfrey keep returning to: getting happier requires taking yourself seriously enough to do the work while also taking yourself lightly enough to find the absurdity in it all. Humor is how you hold both at once.
Find a reason to laugh. Your life doesn’t have to be funny for laughter to save it.
“Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey offers evidence-based practices for building emotional resilience and genuine well-being.
