I Told a Parent Group My Daughter Was Missing. It Was a Joke.
The kids were at the zoo. That was the whole crisis.
There were three preschool classes, about 50-60 kids, all around six years old, plus teachers and support staff. They were supposed to be back by three. For a week, the parent WhatsApp group had been arguing about the school’s updates. There weren’t enough updates, or they were the wrong kind, or they arrived too late. It was the usual drama, and I can’t stand the usual drama.
At three o’clock, the bus still wasn’t back. By 3:10, the chat had gone from worried to full-on crisis mode. “Are they back?” “Does anyone have eyes on them?” “We were told three.” There was supposed to be a buffer, and everyone knew about it, but it didn’t help.
So I did what I always do. I typed, “My daughter is missing. I’m calling the police.” Then I put my phone down, feeling pretty pleased with myself.
I was acting. I played the over-the-top, panicked parent for a group of parents who had been working themselves up all week. Anyone who knows me would have seen right through it.
But a preschool WhatsApp group isn’t full of people who know you.
The panic came right back. “Oh my god.” “What happened??” “How can we help?” I gave in immediately. “Sorry, everyone, that was a joke.”
That’s when one of them called me sick.
Karla, who’s six, was on the bus. The bus was just twelve minutes late.
I wish I could say this was out of character, but it wasn’t. My family would laugh if I tried. My brain is often about half a step ahead of my judgment, which is just how ADHD works for me. Most days, that half-step is where my best ideas come from. Other days, it’s where I end up posting a joke about a missing child to 40 strangers.
I’m usually the last person to realize when a joke has flopped. That afternoon, I managed to do it live, in writing, in front of everyone. I deleted the message within a minute, apologized, still got called sick, and then decided to do something more useful than argue. I started looking into whether laughter is actually good for you, physically, like all those posters claim.
We’ve all heard that claim without ever really checking it. Laughter is the best medicine. It’s been on mugs and hospital walls for decades. I wanted to see if there’s any real evidence behind it, or if the parent chat just punished me for using bad folk medicine.
What the Mug Gets Wrong
Let’s start with the slogan, because it’s mostly not true.
“Laughter is the best medicine” traces to Norman Cousins, a magazine editor who in 1976 wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that he had recovered from a painful spinal condition on a regimen of Marx Brothers films and vitamin C [1]. A lovely story. Also, one uncontrolled case. Self-reported. A condition that can clear up on its own, while he was also taking high doses of vitamin C, which means the films get no clean credit either way. One patient. No control group. 50 years of a medical myth.
The claims grew from there. You have read that laughter boosts your immune system, lifts your natural killer cells, and helps fight cancer. Those headlines come from a few tiny studies, 10-30 people, that measured a small blip in a blood marker for an hour or two [2]. None followed a patient to a real outcome. Laughter yoga, the organized-circle kind, has been properly reviewed: weak evidence, small, biased trials, and no clear edge over any other group activity [3].
The most honest voice is the field’s own. Rod Martin, who built the standard tool for measuring humor, reviewed the entire literature and found the immune effects inconsistent, the physical health benefits thin, and no good evidence that funnier people live longer [4]. The leading man in the field looked at the folklore and said, in effect: Slow down.
I could have stopped there, punished by a parent chat for a remedy that doesn’t even work. But the evidence doesn’t end there.
What a Laugh Actually Does
Beneath the slogans, there’s what laughter actually does to your body right after you laugh. Here, the evidence is solid because it’s measurable.
Laughter and stress move the cardiovascular system in opposite directions. In a randomized, controlled experiment, arterial stiffness fell after people laughed and rose after a stressful task. The same laughter lowered cortisol too [5]. Real, and gone within a day.
Cortisol shows your stress load. A 2023 meta-analysis pooled trials that had participants sit in front of something funny and measured the hormone before and after. Laughter cut it by roughly a third, most of that in a single session [6]. The authors are careful, and so am I. The studies are small, and none can be blinded, because there is no placebo joke. The effect is real, and the evidence is thin. Both are true.
The sturdiest finding is, in evolutionary terms, the oldest. Robin Dunbar at Oxford ran six experiments showing that genuine laughter, the helpless kind, raised people’s pain threshold, most likely by releasing endorphins [7]. Feeling good on its own did not do it. The laughing did. The effect was strongest when people laughed together, and Dunbar thinks the physical act of real laughter is what matters. He argues it evolved to do the job grooming does for other primates: hold the group together. It is, first, how humans bond.
What bothered me that evening wasn’t being called sick. I’ve been called worse by people whose opinions actually matter to me. What really bothered me was simpler: I thought the joke was good, but I was wrong about the only thing that mattered. Who was reading it.
The same eight words, if I sent them to my wife or to the two friends who always reply with something even darker, would be a good joke. Sending it to 40 strangers stressed about pickup made me look like someone who doesn’t take a missing child seriously.
Same words, completely different meaning. The difference was the audience, and I got it wrong.
Four Kinds of Funny
Psychology has spent 20 years measuring the exact thing I got wrong. It starts, again, with Rod Martin, who in 2003 showed that humor comes in four distinct styles [8]. Two tend to help you. Two tend to cost you.
The two that help: affiliative humor, which brings people together, and self-enhancing humor, which you use on yourself to keep a bad day in proportion. The two that cost: aggressive humor, at someone else’s expense, and self-defeating humor, putting yourself down to buy a laugh.
The style matters more than the amount. A meta-analysis of 37 studies and nearly 13,000 people found that the two adaptive styles show lower depression and higher self-esteem. At the same time, self-defeating humor is the only one that reliably tracks worse mental health [9]. A second, 85 studies and over 27,000 people, put numbers on it: adaptive and maladaptive humor move well-being in opposite directions, the signs cleanly reversed [10]. The effects are modest in magnitude, and they recur across studies. In this kind of research, consistency counts for more than a big number that fails to replicate.
There is a mechanism behind this. In one experiment, people looked at upsetting images and found a kind, funny way to see them. Their bad feeling dropped. A cruel joke did not work nearly as well [11]. Humor is one way the mind decides how big a threat really is, and the kind you reach for changes the answer. Under real stress, the helpful styles soften the blow, and the self-defeating ones deepen it [12].
None of this research told me my joke was wrong. I figured that out on my own, sitting on the sofa that evening. The research just explained why.
Whose Joke Is It
Now, let’s move from a parent chat to something more familiar for most of you, a team you’re responsible for. The same rules apply, but the stakes are higher.
A meta-analysis of 49 studies found that positive humor at work is associated with higher performance, more trust, better teamwork, and lower burnout. The link was about 0.36, which is strong for this kind of research [13]. Leaders who use warm humor well get more from their people. That much holds up.
The catch is that it depends on you. A review of leadership studies found that humor helps when the leader is already trusted and seen as competent, but it backfires if they’re not [14]. Another study followed the same leaders for six weeks and found that affiliative humor improved their standing within the team, whereas aggressive humor worsened it [15].
And dark humor, the kind I reached for, is not the clean tool people assume it is. Among more than 500 investigators who work on the worst cases imaginable, lighthearted humor was associated with lower traumatic stress, whereas gallows humor was associated with higher traumatic stress [16]. Joking about horror did not protect these people. The darkest humor went with the most stress, not the least.
Which brings us back to the late bus and my bad joke. What really matters is your standing and where you’re coming from: whether you’re laughing with the people who are dealing with the problem, or at them from the outside. That afternoon, I was on the outside, even though I thought I was in.
In my Upward ARC framework, this falls under Recover, the work of bringing your nervous system back to normal between stressful moments. A real laugh does that quickly: it lowers cortisol, relaxes your arteries, gives you a boost of endorphins, and usually happens with someone else. It also affects Capacity. The kind of humor you use under pressure either builds your resilience over time or slowly wears it down. You reset every day, and your style adds up.
Does It Buy You Years
The last promise on the mug is the biggest. Does humor make you live longer?
The honest answer is a quiet maybe, and it gets weaker the more you look into it. One study of over 66,000 Norwegians found that people with a stronger sense of humor were less likely to die over 7 years [17]. But when the same group was followed for 15 years, the effect persisted among women but largely disappeared among men [18]. A Japanese study of 17,000 adults found that people who rarely laughed had nearly double the death rate of frequent laughers, even after adjusting for obvious risk factors [19]. It’s interesting, but far from settled, and could just mean that sick and lonely people laugh less.
The stronger evidence is actually for optimism. A meta-analysis of nearly 230,000 people found that optimism is linked to lower rates of heart disease and early death [20]. But that’s about optimism as a personality trait, and optimism isn’t the same as humor.
So I won’t tell you that humor adds years to your life. The evidence just isn’t strong enough. What humor really changes is how today feels, how your team works, and how you handle tough moments.
Try This Today
The Hard Laugh. Not just a smile. A real, full laugh. Find what really cracks you up, whether it’s a comedian, a video, or a friend who does the voice, and give yourself ten minutes of it when your day gets heavy. The studies that showed a drop in cortisol did it just like this: healthy adults, something funny, nothing else [6]. The key is that it has to be genuine. In the study, the effect only stemmed from real, uncontrollable laughter, not just from feeling amused [7]. Think of it as a dose. Use it when you need it, not just once in a while.
The Style Audit. For a week, pay attention to which of the four types of humor you use. Affiliative brings people together. Self-enhancing helps you keep your own bad day in perspective. Aggressive is at someone else’s expense. Self-defeating is at your own. The first two are worth keeping. If you often use the fourth, making fun of yourself for a laugh, that’s the one most clearly linked to feeling worse [9][10]. Try to cut those.
The Standing Check. Before you make a joke that might go too far, ask yourself quietly: am I laughing with the person who’s dealing with this, or at them from the outside? If you’re sharing the burden, almost anything goes. If you’re not, almost nothing does. I didn’t ask myself that question at three o’clock that afternoon. I’ve asked it many times since.
The Room Rule. If you’re a leader, your humor isn’t just yours. Warm humor from a trusted leader brings the team together, but the same joke from someone who isn’t trusted yet, or aimed at someone with less power, does the opposite [14][15]. Earn trust first. Then you’ll get the laughs.
The Morning After
The next morning, I thought about writing a proper apology to the group. A calm one, after a night’s sleep. But I didn’t.
I had already apologized right away, as soon as I saw the joke land badly. That was real, and it was enough. A second apology wouldn’t have been for them. It would have been for me, just to feel better. The two who called me sick weren’t waiting for me to change. They just wanted me to grovel. I don’t grovel to a group chat.
So I let it go. I admit I messed up. They’re right that it landed badly. I still stand by why I made the joke, but I won’t defend how I sent it.
Karla doesn’t know that any of this happened. She came back twelve minutes late, after seeing elephants and monkeys and eating ice cream, three scoops, according to her, and she was as happy as one can be. The crisis that took over the chat that afternoon turned out to be the best day of the month for the only person it was really about.
I’ll keep making jokes. I wouldn’t be any use to my kids, or to you, if I tried to make myself smaller and safer just to please strangers. But I will choose my audience more carefully. The best laughs I’ve ever had come from a few people who know me well enough to joke right back. They’re what really matters.
Stay healthy.
Andre
PS: If you have a friend who would have answered my text with something far worse and made you laugh harder for it, send them this. That’s how this newsletter grows, and it’s the only way I want it to.
References
[1] Cousins, N. (1976). Anatomy of an illness (as perceived by the patient). New England Journal of Medicine, 295(26), 1458-1463.
[2] Bennett, M. P., Zeller, J. M., Rosenberg, L., & McCann, J. (2003). The effect of mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 9(2), 38-45.
[3] Bressington, D., Mui, J., Yu, C., Leung, S. F., Cheung, K., Wu, C. S. T., Bollard, M., & Chien, W. T. (2018). The effects of group-based laughter yoga interventions on mental health in adults: A systematic review. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 25(8), 517-527.
[4] Martin, R. A. (2001). Humor, laughter, and physical health: Methodological issues and research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 127(4), 504-519.
[5] Vlachopoulos, C., Xaplanteris, P., Alexopoulos, N., Aznaouridis, K., Vasiliadou, C., Baou, K., Stefanadi, E., & Stefanadis, C. (2009). Divergent effects of laughter and mental stress on arterial stiffness and central hemodynamics. Psychosomatic Medicine, 71(4), 446-453.
[6] Kramer, C. K., & Leitao, C. B. (2023). Laughter as medicine: A systematic review and meta-analysis of interventional studies evaluating the impact of spontaneous laughter on cortisol levels. PLOS ONE, 18(5), e0286260.
[7] Dunbar, R. I. M., Baron, R., Frangou, A., Pearce, E., van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Stow, J., Partridge, G., MacDonald, I., Barra, V., & van Vugt, M. (2012). Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1731), 1161-1167.
[8] Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(1), 48-75.
[9] Schneider, M., Voracek, M., & Tran, U. S. (2018). “A joke a day keeps the doctor away?” Meta-analytical evidence of differential associations of habitual humor styles with mental health. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 59(3), 289-300.
[10] Jiang, F., Lu, S., Jiang, T., & Jia, H. (2020). Does the relation between humor styles and subjective well-being vary across culture and age? A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 2213.
[11] Samson, A. C., & Gross, J. J. (2012). Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour. Cognition & Emotion, 26(2), 375-384.
[12] Fritz, H. L., Russek, L. N., & Dillon, M. M. (2017). Humor use moderates the relation of stressful life events with psychological distress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(6), 845-859.
[13] Mesmer-Magnus, J., Glew, D. J., & Viswesvaran, C. (2012). A meta-analysis of positive humor in the workplace. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 27(2), 155-190.
[14] Rosenberg, C., Walker, A., Leiter, M., & Graffam, J. (2021). Humor in workplace leadership: A systematic search scoping review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 610795.
[15] Pundt, A., & Herrmann, F. (2015). Affiliative and aggressive humour in leadership and their relationship to leader-member exchange. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88(1), 108-125.
[16] Craun, S. W., & Bourke, M. L. (2014). The use of humor to cope with secondary traumatic stress. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 23(7), 840-852.
[17] Svebak, S., Romundstad, S., & Holmen, J. (2010). A 7-year prospective study of sense of humor and mortality in an adult county population: The HUNT-2 study. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 40(2), 125-146.
[18] Romundstad, S., Svebak, S., Holen, A., & Holmen, J. (2016). A 15-year follow-up study of sense of humor and causes of mortality: The Nord-Trondelag Health Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 78(3), 345-353.
[19] Sakurada, K., Konta, T., Watanabe, M., Ishizawa, K., Ueno, Y., Yamashita, H., & Kayama, T. (2020). Associations of frequency of laughter with risk of all-cause mortality and cardiovascular disease incidence in a general population: Findings from the Yamagata Study. Journal of Epidemiology, 30(4), 188-193.
[20] Rozanski, A., Bavishi, C., Kubzansky, L. D., & Cohen, R. (2019). Association of optimism with cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 2(9), e1912200.
A note for new readers:
I’m a trained reconstructive facial surgeon, medical doctor, and dentist. Before launching this newsletter, I had a varied career: competitive freestyle wrestler, management consultant (McKinsey), entrepreneur (Zocdoc, Thermondo, and docdre ventures), and corporate executive (Sandoz). Today, I’m a Managing Director and Partner at BCG.
Husband of one. Father of three. Split between Berlin’s urban pulse and our Baltic Sea retreat. I’d rather be moving than sitting. Not just hobbies. Research. My body is my primary laboratory; I’ve been conducting experiments for decades.
If this is your first time here, welcome. I’m excited to share what I’ve learned and will continue to learn with you.
DISCLAIMER:
Let’s get one thing straight: None of this, whether text, graphics, images, or anything else, is medical or health advice. This newsletter is here to inform, educate, and (hopefully) entertain you, not to diagnose or treat you.
Yes, I’m a trained medical doctor and dentist. No, I’m not your doctor. The content here isn’t a replacement for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
If you have questions about your health, talk to your physician or a qualified health professional. Don’t ignore their advice or delay getting care because of something you read in The Upward ARC. Be smart. Do your research. And, as always, take care of yourself.