Good news. People with a sense of humor live longer, says researcher Sven Svebak of the medical school at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

He presented his study in Budapest at a meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society.

Sven kept tabs on 54,000 Norwegians over a seven year time-frame.

At the start of the study, the participants were asked to fill out a form about how likely they are to find humor in real-life situations and how important they thought having a humorous outlook is.

Guess what? The higher they rated humorous qualities, the more likely they were to get to the end of the study alive.

In fact, the subjects who ranked in the top quarter for thinking humor is important turned out to be 35% more likely to be alive than the folks in the bottom quarter.

And, if you happened to have cancer at the beginning of the study, you were even more likely to survive. A highly developed sense of humor improved the chances that people with cancer would make it through the seven years by a remarkably remedial 70%.

So here’s to your sense of humor – and what better way to cultivate it than to read the sanely funny humor NewsLaugh specializes in?