Life is one long, crazy trip, and you're lucky to make it out alive. In fact, a majority of us don't.

Alan Alda, however, has stayed alive, at least so far. His has been a spectacularly long life, and it's been filled with more professional and personal milestones than you can shake a stick at. The guy was on M*A*S*H, and he's got a family that genuinely seems to like him and only has nice things to say about him. Do you know how rare that is? He's a great actor, and reportedly, a great father as well. One-in-a-million, that Alan Alda.

Alda revealed in 2018 that he'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease three years earlier. This is, obviously, brutal news, but, as a guy who's made his living off of making folks laugh and forget about their worries, Alda has taken it in his typical stride.

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In a 2025 interview with The Independent, Alda revealed that he felt the main thing keeping him alive was laughter.

“When something goes wrong, I often see it as funny. Take my Parkinson’s. (Please.) The night I accidentally fell into the dishwasher, I reassured our dinner guests by telling them, ‘I’m fine. It was only on rinse cycle.’ Fortunately, when you’re old, pretty much any bizarre thing you say gets a laugh.”

He might not be Hawkeye Pierce in real life, but he does embody that show's uncanny ability to balance life's peaks and valleys. 

And, hey... Maybe he's immortal! We don't have any proof to the contrary yet.