Thank you for joining us for episode 565 of Live Happy Now.

April is National Humor Month, and what better way to kick that off than to have a laugh with this week's guest.

I'm your host Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with award-winning comedian, television writer, and radio and podcast host Chris Duffy,

whose new book is Humor Me, How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happy.

Chris is here to talk about why laughter and humor is so good for us and tell us how we can get

more of it in our lives. Let's have a listen. Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Thank you so much for having me, Paula. You are the perfect guest to kick off a National Humor Month because you have a terrific book out called Humor Me. I literally wrote the book on it. If I get kicked on this month, nobody can. We'll just scrap it. It's not a month anymore.

Listen, nothing would be more appropriate for humor month than deciding in 2026, we just scrapped it.

Sorry. There was not enough humor to be had. Nope, we decided not the year for humor. So we're moving on.

We're going from to tragedy month. And that one is going to be extra long. Yeah, that's going to go for about

six more months. So tell me how you first discovered the power of humor and laughter.

Well, I'll give you two answers. One is that I just think my whole life I've always loved

laughing with people. I felt like that's like such a magical thing. You know, being a guy who is

horrible at sports, this was often the way that I bonded with

people because it was like, I couldn't bond over athletic ability. So I was like, well, what about my ability to make puns and remember Simpsons episodes? So it's always been a way that I've made friends with people, and I've always admired people who can make people laugh. But the other answer and kind of the inspiration for why I wrote the book was I had a

period of my life where things were very not funny and I was really humorless. I kind of had like

lost the laughter in my life. And the biggest thing for me was I had lost the idea that it was important.

Right. I was like humor is just like this light frivolous thing. What I need to do is be serious. I need to work on hard issues and when things are tough, I need to put my head down and

just grind away and not waste time with goofing around. I basically felt that my life got really bad.

It was less fun. I wasn't as good at dealing with the hard issues. I certainly wasn't as much fun to

be around. And when I started laughing again, I realized, oh, this is this piece that has been missing that I think people, myself included, don't often give credit to. So that's where the inspiration for the book came from. Because we do get that message that at a certain point, we're supposed to settle down. We're supposed to straighten up, get serious, get to work,

do all these things, and we push humor and laughter out of our lives. Yeah, you know,

one of the people I talked to for the book, Noir al-Sadir, is this incredible psychoanalyst who is also

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