Our capacity to laugh is a human phenomenon we take for granted. But the social sciences have found more to our ability to laugh than we may have realized. We know we laugh and we love it. We almost always believe our sense of humor to be an unusual, even crazy one, because it makes us feel a certain superiority over the irrational, the misguided and the pretentious. I have spent a lifetime fascinated by the subject of what makes people laugh and how it can be produced in so many ways for so many social and intellectual reasons. I’d like to share what I know about different types of laughter, debunk some myths and explain how we know laughter/humor works for us and against us as shapers of our individual personalities.