Abraham Lincoln once said that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Gail Wolz has chosen to be happy.

As if to prove this point, the first thing you might see when you spot Wolz is a silly hat.

Wolz, you see, is a "certified laughter leader."

About twice a month Wolz visits the Providence Mount St. Vincent assisted living center in West Seattle (known as The Mount, for short).

"Gail brings great energy to The Mount and shares her unique gifts with everyone she comes in contact with," said Arlene Carter, a spokeswoman for the Mount St. Vincent Foundation.

Those unique gifts include the ability to make people laugh, and not just because it's fun. Laughter is a mild form of aerobic exercise that relieves stress and boosts the immune system.

Wolz would know.

A licensed veterinary technician who worked at Michigan State University and the University of Washington, she was diagnosed about eight years ago with an aggressive form of arthritis that made her immune system attack her joints.

This chronic condition left her depressed.

To cope, she turned to her faith and laughter.

Literally.

"I found when I was depressed, my arthritis was a lot worse, and when my spirits were up, my arthritis was tolerable," she said.

Wolz gave up television news and Stephen King novels. Soon she spotted a story in The Seattle Times about a "laughter fitness" class in Redmond.

She contacted the instructor, but was warned that it may not be for her.

"I have to say it was a little awkward at first," she said.

That's because therapeutic laughter fitness, strictly speaking, involves a systematic way of laughing without jokes based on deep breathing and other yoga techniques. A series of exercises get hearts beating and lungs breathing. The end result is a gentle workout.

"It can feel sort of forced, like you're just getting yourself to laugh," she said. Laughter is something most people associate with jokes and being with friends, not a physical exercise.

But after her first 40 minute-session, Wolz felt better, so much so that she came back. The more often she did, the more authentic her laughter became, from a forced to a genuinely mirthful guffawing. That's the objective, she said.

Wolz felt so inspired by the process that she trained as a laughter leader, traveling to Chicago in March 2003 to attend a workshop offered by the World Laughter Tour, a national organization for therapeutic laughter training founded by Ohio psychologist Steve Wilson.

Laughter fitness was developed in India in the mid-1990s by Dr. Madan Kataria; concerned about his patients' stress level, he used the traditional practice of yoga in parks to create a new method for reducing stress.

After about a week, Kataria's first group ran out of jokes, and some of the puns became offensive.

To solve this problem, Kataria started to laugh without jokes. The technique was brought to this country about 10 years ago. Now there are about 4,000 laughter leaders around the country, with about 12 in Seattle.

Wolz does her laughter sessions part-time; based out of Bellevue, she's active as an elder and deacon at the city's First Presbyterian Church.

"I believe humor and laughter are God's good gifts to us, to help celebrate our good times, but especially to help us with our hard times," she said.

Wolz thinks of her knack for humor as a ministry.

"It's something I was called to do," she said.

Lisa Phelps, her long-time friend and fellow church member, agrees.

"You get the sense of the healing power of laughter" from her, Phelps said. Wolz has a "God-given sense" about who could use a lift.

"She sees God as not only loving, but that He wants us to find joy, and that He wants us to connect with each other through humor and laughter," she said.

An extension of Wolz's laughter fitness is laughter therapy for homebound seniors from her church and people recovering from surgery at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue.

Wolz has been visiting the hospital for about five years now, every Friday for about three hours. She started out by wearing the hospital's standard volunteer uniform, a yellow top with khaki pants ... with antennae. The staff wasn't quite comfortable with Wolz's collection of what she calls her "crazy outfits," but that changed after about three months.

Her "care clown" persona engaged people in conversation and laughter. She didn't do tricks, but did bring jokes. Wolz started mixing up her costume collection, and got patients and staff to guess what she would dress up as next. Now she has about a dozen outfits, and keeps developing more.

Wolz, true to her wacky nature, gives her laugh-therapy costumes names. One flower-pot-themed outfit, for example, is "the blooming idiot" (a named bestowed by a cantankerous British physical therapist at the hospital).

"The benefit to our environment is huge," said Kim Smith, Overlake's director of volunteer services. Her distracting presence is good for patients and families alike; doctors and nurses constantly request her cheery presence.

"She's also someone who will just sit and listen," Smith said, something that's very important for elderly patients who might be at the hospital alone.

"I leave, and I'm tired, but I'm so uplifted, over and over again. (It) confirms that this is the right thing for me to do," Wolz said.

She tries to bring a bit of light to often dark circumstances as she visits patients in the post-surgical and cardiac wards.

"They're very lonely, they're worried," she said.

But she said that doctors and nurses have told her that if patients that can look at their conditions with a humorous point of view, they generally do better than those who do not, recuperating faster and better.

"If you can find humor in even the worst situations and challenges, you can get through them," she said.

Laughter, she says, is a daily choice. "When you need it the most, you do it the least."

So laugh a little.

The public is invited to join Wolz at the Mount for her monthly laughter sessions; for more information, call the Mount at 206-937-3700 or visit its Web site at www.providence.org.

Will Mari is a student at the University of Washington News Laboratory and may be reached via wseditor@robinsonnews.com