Little did we know when we sent this book to the printer earlier this year that the world would soon be turned upside down. Our new normal is anything but normal.

Yet here we are trying to make the best out of a very tough situation. We hope this new book, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Laughter Is the Best Medicine: 101 Feel Good Stories, our first-ever collection of laugh out loud stories, will lighten the burden and inspire hope.

Here are previews of two of my favorite really funny stories from the book that are sure to put a smile on your face:

Technology can be truly scary.
In her story "Home Alone" Jennifer Clark Vihel was in her bathroom, with her very noisy fan going. But even so, she heard the intruder pounding on her bathroom door and could even see its shadow through the crack at the bottom of the door. Her dogs were outside and she was home alone. Jennifer armed herself with the only “weapon” she could find in the bathroom, a hair clip with a sharp metal point. She was afraid to turn off the fan because that would alert the intruder to her presence, but when she hadn’t heard the intruder pounding on the bathroom door for five minutes, Jennifer mustered her courage. She opened the bathroom door, armed with her hair-clip “dagger.” She was going to make a dash for her cell phone and call for help. And that’s when she found the intruder—her robot vacuum, silent now and stuck under the low crossbar of a chair.

Laughing at yourself is just as good as chocolate.
In Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow's story "Round Trip" she was on one of her many diets and for once she was doing great, having gone a whole month without chocolate. She even made her sister her accountability partner so she’d have to admit it if she cheated. But then one day Elynne was running an errand from work and as she walked down a main street in Chicago she stopped at a light right next to a Fannie May candy store. Elynne cracked; she pushed that revolving door, already tasting the delicious chocolate in her mind. But, as she tried to enter the store, the revolving door wouldn’t stop and she found herself right back on the sidewalk where she had started. Why? Because her sister had coincidentally been passing by at the exact moment that Elynne lost her resolve and had rushed into the door behind her and kept it turning. Elynne says, “We laughed so hard that my need for a chocolate fix passed… for the moment.”


Amy Newmark