A book about humor that asks you only to read would be like a book about swimming that never asks you to get wet. Understanding the science, the history, and the stories of humor’s relationship with mental health is valuable—but the real benefits come from practice. From doing.

This chapter gathers the practical challenges that accompany each chapter of this book into a single, comprehensive resource. They are designed to be accessible to everyone, regardless of whether you consider yourself funny. In fact, many of the most powerful exercises have nothing to do with being funny at all. They are about noticing, about reframing, about connecting, and about giving yourself permission to be lighter in a world that often feels heavy.

A few principles before you begin. First, there is no wrong way to do these. If a challenge feels forced or uncomfortable, skip it and try the next one. Humor that feels like homework defeats its own purpose. Second, many of these challenges work best when shared—with a friend, a partner, a family member, a therapy group, or even an online community. Humor is fundamentally social, and the benefits multiply when they are experienced together. Third, be patient with yourself. If you are in a period of deep depression, acute anxiety, or grief, some of these may not feel accessible right now, and that is okay. They will be here when you are ready.

The challenges are organized by the book’s five sections. You can work through them in order, pick the section most relevant to your life right now, or simply open to a random page and try whatever catches your eye.

Section 1: The Science and Psychology of Humor

These challenges build awareness of how humor works—in your brain, your body, and your social world. The goal is not to become funnier but to become more observant of the humor that already exists in your life.

From Chapter 1: The History and Evolution of Humor

This chapter explored humor as a deeply human capacity, from ancient relief theories to modern evolutionary accounts. These challenges invite you to notice how humor shows up in the most fundamental patterns of your life.

Challenge 1.1: The Humor Archaeology

Think back to the earliest memory you have of laughing—really laughing. Where were you? Who was with you? What was funny? Write it down in as much detail as you can remember. Then ask yourself: what does this memory tell you about the kind of humor that is most natural to you? Was it physical comedy, wordplay, absurdity, someone’s timing? Your earliest humor memories often reveal your most authentic humor preferences.

Challenge 1.2: The Relief Theory Test

The next time you find yourself in a mildly stressful situation—waiting for test results, stuck in traffic, sitting in a tense meeting—notice what happens to your body when something makes you laugh. Pay attention to your shoulders, your jaw, your breathing. Can you feel the tension release? This is not about forcing laughter. It is about noticing the physical dimension of humor that relief theory describes. Keep a brief log for one week: what was the stressor, what was the humor, and what did the release feel like?

Challenge 1.3: The Incongruity Spotter

Spend one day actively looking for incongruity—the gap between how things should be and how they actually are. A fire station with a “No Smoking” sign. A gym that has an escalator to the entrance. A self-help book titled “How to Be Humble (And Why I’m Better at It Than You).” Write down every incongruity you spot. You may be surprised at how much unintentional comedy is hiding in plain sight.

From Chapter 2: The Neuroscience of Laughter

This chapter mapped the brain circuits, neurotransmitters, and physiological systems involved in humor. These challenges help you experience those systems consciously.

Challenge 2.1: The Dopamine Diary

For one week, keep a brief nightly record of the funniest moment of your day. It does not have to be hilarious—just the thing that amused you most. At the end of the week, look for patterns. Are your funniest moments with certain people? In certain places? At certain times of day? This exercise trains your brain’s reward system to pay attention to humor, which research suggests increases your capacity to experience it.

Challenge 2.2: The Laughter Body Scan

The next time you laugh—genuinely, spontaneously—pause immediately afterward and do a quick body scan. Notice what happened to your heart rate, your breathing, your muscle tension. Did your face flush? Did your abdominal muscles engage? Did you feel a burst of warmth or energy? This is your parasympathetic nervous system at work. The more consciously you notice these effects, the more you can appreciate laughter as a full-body physiological event, not just a mental one.

Challenge 2.3: The Vagus Nerve Laugh

Try this simple exercise: laugh for thirty seconds, even if nothing is funny. It will feel absurd. You may feel self-conscious. That is fine. When the thirty seconds are over, notice how you feel. Most people report feeling lighter, warmer, and slightly more relaxed—not because the forced laughter was funny, but because the physical act of laughing stimulates the vagus nerve and shifts your autonomic nervous system toward the parasympathetic “rest and digest” state. This is the science of laughter yoga in miniature.

From Chapter 3: Types of Humor and Personality

This chapter introduced Rod Martin’s four humor styles—affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating—and their relationship to well-being. These challenges help you identify your own patterns.

Challenge 3.1: The Humor Style Audit

Over the next three days, pay attention to every time you use humor—in conversation, in texts, in your internal monologue. For each instance, ask yourself: was this affiliative (bringing people together), self-enhancing (helping me cope with something difficult), aggressive (putting someone down, even subtly), or self-defeating (making myself the butt of the joke to gain acceptance)? Don’t judge yourself. Just notice. Most people are surprised by how much of their humor falls into patterns they had never identified.

Challenge 3.2: The Self-Enhancing Swap

The next time you catch yourself using self-defeating humor—making yourself the punchline in a way that feels less like confidence and more like anxiety—try rewriting the joke in your head as self-enhancing humor instead. Instead of “I’m such an idiot, I can’t believe I did that,” try “Well, that’s one way to keep life interesting.” The goal is not to suppress self-deprecation entirely—it can be charming and connecting—but to notice when it tips from playful to painful.

Challenge 3.3: The Affiliative Challenge

Make it your goal this week to make one person laugh each day—not with a rehearsed joke, but with a genuine observation, a shared absurdity, or a playful comment about your shared situation. Notice what happens to the quality of that interaction afterward. Affiliative humor is the most consistently associated with relationship satisfaction, and this challenge trains you to use it deliberately.

Section 2: Humor and Mental Health Fundamentals

These challenges address the specific connections between humor and mental health that were explored in the foundational chapters.

From Chapter 4: The Psychological Benefits of Humor

This chapter covered humor’s role in resilience, coping, and emotional regulation. These challenges build your capacity to use humor as a genuine coping tool.

Challenge 4.1: The Reframe Game

Choose a minor frustration from your day—a cancelled plan, a parking ticket, a spilled coffee. Write a straight description of what happened in two or three sentences. Then rewrite it as if you were telling the story to make a friend laugh. Notice what changes in the retelling. What details do you emphasize? What do you exaggerate? What perspective shift makes it funny? This is cognitive reappraisal through humor, and it is one of the most powerful coping mechanisms available.

Challenge 4.2: The Resilience Playlist

Create a personal humor emergency kit: a playlist of five comedy specials, five funny videos, five comedians, or five episodes of shows that have reliably made you laugh in the past. Put them somewhere accessible—a saved playlist, a bookmarked folder, a note on your phone. The next time you are having a terrible day, use it. This is not escapism; this is deliberate emotional regulation, the same principle behind therapists recommending specific coping strategies for difficult moments.

Challenge 4.3: The Worst-Case Scenario Comedy Hour

Take something you are currently anxious about and imagine the absolute worst-case scenario—but push it to such ridiculous extremes that it becomes absurd. Worried about a job interview? Imagine showing up and the interviewer is a golden retriever. Nervous about a date? Imagine you accidentally bring your mother. The point is not to trivialize real anxiety but to practice the cognitive skill of holding fear and absurdity simultaneously—the benign violation in action. You may find that your real fear feels slightly more manageable once you have visited its absurd cousin.

Section 3: Practical Uses of Humor for Mental Wellness

These chapters were already practical by design. The challenges here go deeper, asking you to build sustained practices rather than one-time experiments.

From Chapter 5: Humor in Therapy

This chapter explored how humor functions within therapeutic settings. These challenges adapt therapeutic principles for everyday use.

Challenge 5.1: The Paradoxical Intention

Viktor Frankl developed paradoxical intention as a therapeutic technique: deliberately wishing for the thing you fear, with humor. If you fear blushing in public, try to blush as hard as you possibly can. If you worry about trembling during a presentation, try to shake as dramatically as possible. The absurdity of trying to do the feared thing often short-circuits the anxiety that produces it. Try this with one minor, non-serious fear this week. Approach it with a spirit of playful experimentation, not clinical intervention.

Challenge 5.2: The Cognitive Distortion Comedy Show

Pick one cognitive distortion you recognize in yourself—catastrophizing, mind-reading, all-or-nothing thinking, fortune-telling. Personify it. Give it a name, a voice, a personality. Maybe your catastrophizer is a breathless news anchor who reports every minor inconvenience as breaking news. Maybe your mind-reader is a psychic with a 100% failure rate. The next time the distortion shows up, greet it by name. This is a version of the defusion technique used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and humor makes it more memorable and more effective.

Challenge 5.3: The Therapeutic Alliance Laugh

If you are currently in therapy, notice the moments of shared humor between you and your therapist. What prompts them? How do they change the feel of the session? If you feel comfortable, bring this observation into session—therapists often appreciate when clients notice the dynamics of the relationship. If you are not in therapy, notice moments of shared humor in your closest relationships and ask yourself: what makes this person safe enough to laugh with?

From Chapter 6: Creating vs. Consuming Humor

This chapter showed that making humor has deeper psychological benefits than just watching it. These challenges push you to create.

Challenge 6.1: The Humor Journal

Every evening for two weeks, write down three funny things that happened during your day. They do not have to be hilarious. A dog wearing a sweater. A typo in an important email. Something your child said that was accidentally profound. The research on “three funny things” exercises shows that this practice measurably increases positive affect and decreases depressive symptoms—and the effects are stronger when you write the events down rather than just recalling them mentally.

Challenge 6.2: The Five-Minute Set

Write five minutes of stand-up comedy material about your own life. You will never have to perform it. No one ever has to see it. But the act of shaping your experiences into comic form—finding the incongruities, choosing the details, crafting the punchlines—is a form of narrative therapy. It transforms you from someone to whom things happen into someone who shapes those experiences into art. David Granirer’s Stand Up for Mental Health program is built on this principle, and participants consistently report that the writing process alone is therapeutic, even before they perform.

Challenge 6.3: The Improv “Yes, And” Day

Spend one day practicing the fundamental improv principle of “Yes, and”—accepting what is offered and building on it rather than blocking or negating. When a colleague suggests a strange idea in a meeting, say “Yes, and” instead of “Yes, but.” When something unexpected happens in your day, accept it and add to it rather than resisting. This is not just a comedy technique; it is a mindset that research has linked to greater cognitive flexibility, reduced anxiety, and improved social connection.

From Chapter 7: Daily Habits

This chapter provided the framework for building humor into your routine. These challenges help you establish sustainable practices.

Challenge 7.1: The Morning Absurdity

Before checking your phone, your email, or the news, spend two minutes thinking of the most absurd thing you can imagine. A penguin in a board meeting. A philosophical debate between two socks. The International Space Station running out of milk. This is not about being funny. It is about activating the playful, flexible, creative mode of thinking before the anxious, reactive, defensive mode takes over. The research on cognitive priming suggests that beginning the day in a playful mindset can influence how you process stressors for hours afterward.

Challenge 7.2: The Comedy Commute

Replace one of your regular commute activities—the news, the doom-scrolling, the anxious mental rehearsal—with comedy. A podcast, a comedy special, a funny audiobook. Do this for two weeks and notice the difference in how you arrive at your destination. You are not avoiding reality. You are choosing, deliberately, to begin your day with an experience that reduces cortisol, increases dopamine, and primes your brain for social connection rather than threat detection.

Challenge 7.3: The Bedtime Funny

End your day with humor instead of news or social media. Watch ten minutes of a comedian you love. Read a chapter of a funny book. Listen to a comedy podcast. The research on pre-sleep mental activity shows that the emotional tone of the last thing you consume before bed affects sleep quality and next-morning mood. Make the last voice you hear before sleep one that makes you smile.

From Chapter 8: Social Benefits

This chapter explored humor as a bonding tool. These challenges strengthen your social connections through shared laughter.

Challenge 8.1: The Inside Joke Inventory

Make a list of the inside jokes you share with the most important people in your life. The references that make you laugh because of a shared history no one else would understand. Then, deliberately create a new one. Go somewhere new with a friend. Watch a terrible movie together. Share an experience strange enough to become a reference point. Inside jokes are not frivolous; they are the private language of intimacy, and research shows that couples and friends with more shared humor report higher relationship satisfaction.

Challenge 8.2: The Laughter Map

For one week, track when and where you laugh. Not when you type “lol” or blow air through your nose while scrolling. When you actually laugh—out loud, with your body. At the end of the week, look at your map. Who makes you laugh? Where does laughter happen? If there are people or places notably absent from your map, that is information worth having. Robin Dunbar’s research shows that laughter is one of the primary mechanisms through which humans build and maintain social bonds, and a laughter map reveals the topology of your social world.

Challenge 8.3: The Vulnerability Laugh

Share something mildly embarrassing with someone you trust—not as a confession, but as a funny story. The thing that happened to you that you have been holding as a source of shame but that, with the right framing, could actually be hilarious. Notice the response. When you share vulnerability with humor, people almost always respond with their own stories, their own vulnerabilities, their own laughter. This is the affiliative humor cycle that transforms isolation into connection.

Section 4: Humor in Specific Mental Health Contexts

These challenges are tailored to specific conditions and contexts. Please use your judgment about which are appropriate for your current situation. If you are in crisis or experiencing severe symptoms, the challenge is not to be funny—it is to seek support.

From Chapter 9: Humor and Anxiety

This chapter explored how humor can short-circuit the stress response. These challenges work with your body’s anxiety systems.

Challenge 9.1: The Pre-Load

Before your next stressful event—a presentation, a difficult conversation, a medical appointment—watch or listen to something funny for ten to fifteen minutes. The 2021 Scientific Reports study found that a brief humorous intervention before a stressor significantly reduced cortisol levels and psychological distress. You are not pretending the stressor does not exist. You are biochemically preparing your body to handle it with greater resilience.

Challenge 9.2: The Catastrophe Narrator

The next time you catch yourself catastrophizing, narrate your thought process in the voice of a dramatic movie trailer narrator. “In a world where one email could DESTROY EVERYTHING… one person must face… A MEETING.” The exaggeration makes the cognitive distortion visible and the humor disarms it. This is Albert Ellis’s technique of “ripping up exaggerations by humorous counter-exaggerations” in a form you can practice anywhere, silently, without anyone knowing.

Challenge 9.3: The Anxiety Character

Give your anxiety a ridiculous persona. Maybe it is an overprotective grandmother who sees danger in everything. Maybe it is a conspiracy theorist who believes every social interaction is an elaborate trap. Maybe it is a weather forecaster who predicts hurricanes every day and has never once been right. The next time your anxiety speaks up, respond to it as this character: “Thanks, Grandma, but I think I’ll be fine at the grocery store.” Research on cognitive defusion shows that creating distance from anxious thoughts—and humor is one of the most effective ways to create that distance—reduces their power over behavior.

From Chapter 10: Depression and Humor

This chapter explored when humor helps depression and when it masks pain. These challenges are gentle, designed for the reality that humor is not always accessible.

Challenge 10.1: The Low-Effort Laugh

On days when you cannot generate humor—and depression makes many days feel that way—let humor come to you. Curate a folder on your phone of images, videos, or screenshots that have made you laugh in the past. Animal videos, absurd memes, screenshots of funny texts. When you have no energy to be funny, you can still receive humor. The research on depression memes suggests that even passive engagement with relatable humor can reduce feelings of isolation and increase a sense of being understood.

Challenge 10.2: The Mask Check

This challenge is less about humor and more about honesty. The next time you use humor in a social situation, pause afterward and ask yourself: was that genuine amusement, or was I performing okay-ness? Was I connecting, or was I concealing? There is no wrong answer. But noticing the difference between humor-as-connection and humor-as-mask is one of the most important skills this book can offer. If you find that most of your humor is masking, that is worth exploring—with a trusted friend, a journal, or a therapist.

Challenge 10.3: The Gentle Return

If you are in a period where humor feels distant or inaccessible, do not force it. Instead, notice any moment—however brief—when something strikes you as even slightly amusing. A pun on a sign. A dog doing something ridiculous. A child’s logic. You do not have to laugh. You do not have to feel joy. Just notice the flicker of amusement, and treat it as evidence that the capacity for humor is still there, waiting. As Gary Gulman learned after his worst depression: the funny comes back. It always comes back.

From Chapter 11: Neurodivergence and Humor

This chapter celebrated the distinctive humor of neurodivergent minds. These challenges honor different ways of being funny.

Challenge 11.1: The Pattern Interrupt

Neurodivergent humor often thrives on noticing patterns that others miss. Spend a day deliberately looking for absurd patterns: the way all office buildings have the same carpet, the fact that every pharmacy sells both vitamins and candy, the peculiar logic of any bureaucratic process. Write them down. You are training the eye for incongruity that many neurodivergent people describe as their natural mode of perception. If you are neurotypical, this exercise can expand your humor range. If you are neurodivergent, it validates what you may already do automatically.

Challenge 11.2: The Literal Translation

Take five common idioms or expressions and interpret them literally. “Break a leg” becomes medical advice. “It’s raining cats and dogs” becomes a weather emergency requiring animal control. “Bite the bullet” becomes dental instructions. Many autistic individuals have described this kind of literal humor as one of their great strengths—the ability to see the absurdity embedded in language that neurotypical speakers take for granted.

Challenge 11.3: The Double Empathy Experiment

If you are neurotypical, show something you find hilarious to a neurodivergent friend and ask them what they think. Then ask them to show you something they find hilarious. Notice the differences without judgment. If you are neurodivergent, try the same experiment in reverse. The point is not to agree about what is funny. It is to practice what Damian Milton calls the double empathy problem—recognizing that communication differences are mutual, not one-sided, and that different brains find different things funny for valid reasons.

From Chapter 12: Humor in the Workplace

This chapter examined humor’s role in burnout prevention and team morale. These challenges are for your professional life.

Challenge 12.1: The Meeting Moment

In your next meeting, make one lighthearted observation. Not a prepared joke—just a genuine, good-natured comment about the shared situation. Maybe it is acknowledging that this is the third meeting about meetings. Maybe it is a playful observation about the difficulty of the task at hand. Research consistently shows that leaders who use affiliative humor build stronger teams, and that meetings with shared laughter are rated as more productive by participants.

Challenge 12.2: The Burnout Buffer

If you are experiencing burnout or work stress, find one colleague who shares your sense of humor and make a point of connecting with them briefly each day. Not to complain—to laugh. A shared eye roll, a funny observation about a frustrating process, a meme texted during a tedious conference call. Research on workplace humor shows that humor between peers is one of the strongest buffers against burnout, because it transforms the experience of shared suffering into shared resilience.

Challenge 12.3: The Perspective Shift

At the end of a particularly difficult workday, sit down and write about it as if you were a nature documentary narrator observing office life as wildlife behavior. “And here we see the middle manager in their natural habitat, clutching a lukewarm coffee and staring at a spreadsheet that appears to be winning.” The technique of narrating your own experience in the third person has been shown to increase emotional distance and reduce rumination. Adding humor to the narration makes the distance more enjoyable and more sustainable.

Section 5: Humor and Society

These challenges engage with the broader social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of humor explored in the final section of the book.

From Chapter 13: Cultural Variations in Humor

This chapter explored how humor varies across cultures. These challenges expand your humor horizons.

Challenge 13.1: The Comedy Tourist

Watch a comedy special or show from a culture other than your own. A British panel show, a Japanese variety program, a Bollywood comedy, an Australian comedian’s set. Notice what translates and what does not. What references do you miss? What is funny despite the cultural gap? This exercise builds the humor equivalent of cultural competence—the recognition that your sense of humor is shaped by your context, not by some universal standard of what is funny.

Challenge 13.2: The Humor Heritage

Interview an older relative or family friend about what was funny in their generation, their community, their childhood. What jokes did they tell? What made their parents laugh? What comedy was popular when they were young? Record the conversation if you can. You will likely discover that humor is one of the most revealing windows into a person’s history—and that the comedy traditions of your family are part of your inheritance, whether you knew it or not.

From Chapter 14: The Ethics of Humor

This chapter examined when humor helps and when it harms. These challenges develop ethical humor intelligence.

Challenge 14.1: The Punch-Up Check

The next time you laugh at a joke—in person, online, in a show—ask yourself: who is the target? Is the humor punching up (at power, at absurd systems, at the powerful) or punching down (at vulnerable people, at marginalized groups, at people who cannot fight back)? You do not have to stop laughing at everything. But developing the habit of noticing direction is the foundation of ethical humor. Over time, you may find that your humor preferences shift—not because you have become humorless, but because you have become more discerning.

Challenge 14.2: The Discomfort Journal

For one week, pay attention to moments when humor makes you uncomfortable—not offended in a theoretical way, but genuinely uneasy. A joke at a party. A scene in a show. A meme shared in a group chat. Do not dismiss the discomfort or perform outrage about it. Sit with it. Ask yourself what norm was violated, and whether the violation was benign. Peter McGraw’s framework suggests that when a violation does not feel benign, the humor fails—and your discomfort is valid information about where your boundaries are.

From Chapter 15: Humor in Marginalized Communities

This chapter explored humor as a survival tool for communities facing oppression. These challenges invite thoughtfulness.

Challenge 15.1: The Listening Challenge

Seek out a comedian from a community very different from your own—a different race, religion, gender identity, disability status, or national origin. Watch a full special, not just a clip. Notice what you learn about their experience through their humor. What do they find absurd about the world? What do they want you to understand? Comedy is one of the most efficient vehicles for empathy ever invented, because it requires you to see the world through someone else’s eyes—and to enjoy the view.

Challenge 15.2: Your Own Humor of Resistance

Think about a system, institution, or situation in your own life that feels oppressive or absurd—a bureaucracy, a set of arbitrary rules, a cultural expectation that makes no sense. Write three jokes about it. Not to share publicly, necessarily—just for yourself. The act of finding humor in the structures that constrain you is an act of resistance. It does not change the structure, but it changes your relationship to it. It says: I see the absurdity, and I refuse to be defeated by it.

From Chapter 16: Real-Life Stories

This chapter shared the stories of people who used humor to survive mental health crises. These challenges honor their example.

Challenge 16.1: Your Five-Minute Story

Write the story of the hardest thing you have been through—but write it as a five-minute comedy monologue. You do not have to perform it. You do not have to show anyone. But the act of shaping pain into a comic narrative—finding the absurd details, the ironic moments, the parts that are so terrible they become funny—is what Gary Gulman, Maria Bamford, and Chris Gethard all describe as transformative. It does not make the experience less real. It makes you the author of it, rather than its victim.

Challenge 16.2: The Support Group Laugh

If you are part of any kind of support group—for mental health, for recovery, for grief, for chronic illness—pay attention to the moments of humor that arise naturally in the group. They are there, even in the most serious settings. Notice how they change the atmosphere. Notice how they create connection. If you feel comfortable, allow yourself to contribute to them. The laughter that happens in support groups is among the most healing laughter that exists, because it says: we share this burden, and we are still capable of joy.

From Chapter 17: Expert Interviews

This chapter gathered perspectives from researchers, therapists, comedians, and doctors. These challenges synthesize their wisdom.

Challenge 17.1: The Martin Inventory

Take Rod Martin’s Humor Styles Questionnaire—it is freely available online—and read your results with curiosity rather than judgment. Which styles do you use most? Which do you use least? Does the profile match your self-perception? Share the questionnaire with someone who knows you well and compare notes. Martin’s central insight is that the question is never “do you have a sense of humor?” but “what kind of humor do you use, and what does it do for you?”

Challenge 17.2: The McGraw Test

The next time something strikes you as funny, run it through Peter McGraw’s benign violation framework. What is the violation? What makes it benign? And when something does not strike you as funny but seems like it should—an offensive joke, a prank that goes wrong, a comedian who leaves you cold—ask: what makes the violation not benign enough, or the benign not violated enough? This is not to suck the joy out of humor. It is to understand, with precision, why your sense of humor works the way it does.

Challenge 17.3: The Authenticity Audit

Every expert in the interviews chapter emphasized that therapeutic humor must be authentic. Apply this to yourself: which of your humor habits are genuine expressions of who you are, and which are performances designed to manage other people’s perceptions of you? This is a hard question, and the answer may be uncomfortable. But as Bamford, Gulman, and Granirer all demonstrate, the most powerful humor comes from radical honesty about who you are and what you have experienced. The challenge is not to be funnier. It is to be more real.

Master Challenges: Integrating Humor into Your Life

These final challenges draw on the entire book. They are designed for sustained practice rather than one-time experiments.

Challenge M.1: The 30-Day Humor Practice

Commit to thirty days of intentional humor engagement. On odd-numbered days, consume humor: watch a comedy special, read something funny, listen to a humor podcast. On even-numbered days, create humor: write in your humor journal, craft an observation for a friend, reframe a frustrating experience as a funny story. At the end of thirty days, notice what has changed—in your mood, your relationships, your resilience, your relationship to difficulty. The research on humor training programs consistently shows that regular practice over multiple weeks produces measurable improvements in well-being.

Challenge M.2: The Humor Buddy

Find one person willing to be your humor accountability partner for a month. Share funny things you encounter. Text each other the absurdity of your days. Challenge each other to the exercises in this chapter. Meet weekly to share what you have noticed. Humor is fundamentally social, and having a partner turns a solitary self-improvement project into a shared adventure. Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that the endorphin release from shared laughter is significantly greater than from laughing alone—so the buddy system is not just motivational, it is neurochemical.

Challenge M.3: The Humor Legacy

Write a letter to someone you love about what makes them funny. Not generically—specifically. The way they tell stories. The face they make when something surprises them. The running joke between you that always lands. Tell them how their humor has affected your life. This is the challenge that brings the entire book full circle: from the science of humor to the deeply human experience of being known, being connected, and being made to laugh by someone who matters to you. Humor is not just a psychological mechanism. It is one of the ways we say: I see you. I am glad you are here.

A Note on Using These Challenges

These challenges are invitations, not prescriptions. The research consistently shows that humor’s benefits are greatest when it is authentic, voluntary, and connected to genuine social interaction. Forcing humor is counterproductive. Performing humor to please others without feeling it yourself can actually increase distress. The goal is not to become the funniest person in the room. It is to become more attuned to the humor that already exists in your life, more deliberate about the humor you choose to consume and create, and more aware of the difference between humor that heals and humor that hides.

If you are currently in treatment for a mental health condition, consider sharing these challenges with your therapist. Many of them align with established therapeutic techniques—cognitive reappraisal, behavioral activation, exposure, defusion, narrative therapy—and a skilled therapist can help you tailor them to your specific situation.

If you are a therapist, educator, or group facilitator, these challenges can be adapted for clinical, classroom, or workshop settings. The challenges from Sections 3 and 4 are particularly suited for therapeutic homework assignments, and the Section 5 challenges can spark productive group discussions.

And if you have made it this far in the book and are now holding these challenges in your hands, consider this: the fact that you picked up a book about humor and mental health means you already understand, at some level, that laughter matters. That it is not trivial, not superficial, not a distraction from the serious business of being human. It is part of the serious business of being human. These challenges are just ways of honoring what you already know.

Sources and Suggested Reading

Foundational Research

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.” Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 48–75.

McGraw, A. P., & Warren, C. (2010). “Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny.” Psychological Science, 21(8), 1141–1149.

Martin, R. A., & Ford, T. E. (2018). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Humor Interventions

Tagalidou, N., Loderer, V., Distlberger, E., & Laireiter, A. R. (2019). “Change of humor styles and reduction of depressive symptoms.” Cognitive Therapy and Research, 43, 480–491.

Wellenzohn, S., Proyer, R. T., & Ruch, W. (2016). “Humor-based online positive psychology interventions.” Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 540–552.

Sarink, D., & García-Montes, J. M. (2023). “Humor interventions in psychotherapy and their effect on levels of depression and anxiety.” Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13, 1049476.

Panichelli, C., et al. (2020). “Humor Associated with Positive Outcomes in Individual Psychotherapy.” American Journal of Psychotherapy, 73(3), 101–107.

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.

Therapeutic Techniques

Ellis, A. (1977). “Fun as psychotherapy.” Rational Living, 12(1), 2–6.

Frankl, V. (1946/2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Franzini, L. R. (2001). “Humor in therapy: The case for training therapists in its uses and risks.” Journal of General Psychology, 128(2), 170–193.

Social and Neurological Research

Dunbar, R. I. M., et al. (2012). “Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 279, 1161–1167.

Samson, A. C., & Gross, J. J. (2012). “Humour as emotion regulation.” Cognition and Emotion, 26(2), 375–384.

Berk, L. S., & Tan, S. A. (2006). “Endorphin and HGH effects of mirthful laughter.” Loma Linda University.

Vrticka, P., Black, J. M., & Reiss, A. L. (2013). “The neural basis of humor processing.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14, 860–868.

Comedian Perspectives

Gulman, G. (2019). The Great Depresh. HBO.

Bamford, M. (2016). Interview on Fresh Air, NPR.

Gethard, C. (2017). Career Suicide. HBO.

Granirer, D. (n.d.). Stand Up for Mental Health. standupformentalhealth.com.

Additional Resources

Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (AATH): aath.org

Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ): Freely available through academic repositories.

Humor Research Lab (HuRL): humorresearchlab.com

Stand Up for Mental Health: standupformentalhealth.com