What follows are distilled quotes from a conversation with Bev Bender from 2009 in San Francisco. Bender believes in laughing for the health of it. She led a laughing class every Thursday in San Francisco and said laughing helps the immune system, lowers stress, helps breathing and lowers blood pressure.

On the benefits of laughing

I’ve been doing humor seminars for years. It helps the immune system, which protects us against colds and flus. It lowers the blood pressure. And for older people it helps with breathing because we’re breathing from the abdomen.

I wish doctors would give a prescription to go to a laughter club, go see a funny moving, go get a funny book instead of anti-depressants. This country is overmedicated.

It should be an alternative healthcare like exercise or tai chi.

On the laughter club:

It’s called “Laugh for no reason.” There was a man 40 years ago named Norman Cousins who had a debilitating illness, and he believed the mind and body were one. With his doctor, he took lots of vitamin C. He put himself in a hotel room and he just watched videos. He found that a 10-minute genuine belly laugh gave him 2-hours of pain-free sleep. And he cured himself. He wrote the book Anatomy of an Illness that’s used today with people with cancer. He helped start the alternative healthcare at UCLA. That’s when they started doing serious studies of laughter as a health benefit. Dr. Berke in Southern California has been studying the immune system and Dr. Fry at Stanford says when we laugh for one minute it’s like 10 minutes on a rowing machine because we’re doing all this internal jogging.

On training to be a laugh leader:

In the 90s, Dr. Kataria in India got a group of friends together in the park and they told jokes for 15 minutes before work. But within two weeks everybody heard the same joke because jokes are just recycled. He said we can laugh for no reason. He developed these laughing exercises. Now, there’s a thousand laughter clubs in India and 6,000 around the world. He taught Steve Wilson, the psychologist and humor speaking, in the United States. That’s who I was trained with originally. Then I went to Canada and trained with Dr. Kataria to be able to train other people.

The mission of the laugh movement is to laugh for world peace and good health. It promotes comradery. The whole idea is we’re laughing with each other, not at each other. What’s good about the laugh for not reason is it covers all cultures and ages. You don’t even have to speak the same language. Because it’s not about a joke.

I thought, I want to do this. I want to be a laugh leader.

On why laughing works:

Humor is about a joke. We all laugh at different things. Laughter, though, and the laughter club is just the physical part of laughing. If you just go, “Ho, ho, ho,” you’re telling your body you’re happy. And it doesn’t have to be about a joke. I always tell people stand up straight and smile and you can feel it in your body. When you smile and laugh, you’re telling your body you’re happy— even when you’re not. Sometimes, if you just get a wave of depression for whatever reason, just smile.