Here’s how humor can improve your life:

• Humor makes you happy: Watching comedy is three times as effective at reducing stress than just relaxing.
• Giggles make you more successful: Jokes build trust, improve negotiations, make you more creative — and help others ignore your missteps.
• Humor improves health: Better immunity, fewer heart attacks, less pain and a longer life.
• Laughs increase love: Don’t reminisce about that vacation. Recollect the time you two laughed so hard you cried.

If you don’t have time for more comedy, you’re not doomed. Just spend your free time hanging around with friends who have a good sense of humor.

Not only will you laugh more because they tickle your funny bone, you’ll laugh more because you’re around others who are laughing.

From Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why:

As Ruch’s study demonstrated, humor ratings can be influenced simply by exposing subjects to laughter. Other studies have found that subjects laugh more and rate jokes as funnier when a nearby actor shares their laughter…

Need a laugh right now? Here’s Louis CK talking about turning 40 (NSFW):

In closing, why is childhood something most people remember so fondly? Maybe it’s because we laughed more then. Actually, a lot more.

From The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny:

Studies of five-year-olds have shown they laugh, on average, 7.7 times per hour, while the average American adult laughs just eighteen times a day.

Want to be as happy as you were as a kid? It might be as simple as laughing more with friends.