Is Laughter Bad for You?

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From today's NY Times, an article about a study published this month in BMJ (the British Medical Journal) that proves once and for all that laughter is harmful to your health. Yes, harmful. The BMJ article drew upon 785 actual case studies that involved laughter-incited conditions.

Duchenne de Boulogne G-B.
Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine.
Analyse  électro-physiologique de
l’expression des passions.
Ve Jules Renouard, 1862.

You can read the whole Times article here and read the original BMJ study here. (It's short.)

Spolier Alert:  The article is legit, the cases are real, but the conclusions tongue-in-cheek. Their last paragraph: "These conclusions are necessarily tentative. It remains to be seen whether, for example, sick jokes make you ill, if dry wit causes dehydration, or jokes in bad taste cause dysgeusia, and whether our views on comedians stand up to further scrutiny."