The Lasting Laughter

Celebrated humour columnist Dave Barry once described humour as, "The extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge."


He's right.


And it truly is a beautiful, wonderful gift we have.


Though there's some disagreement in the scientific community with regard to elephants and certain kinds of whales--who have been observed exhibiting behaviours that might indicate that they mourn their dead--the general consensus is that humans alone have any understanding of death. We know that death is a fate that awaits us all. We are aware of our own mortality. No other member of the animal kingdom, so far as we know, have this knowledge.


We are also the only creatures who laugh. We have a sense of humour. We find release, relief, and maybe even comfort and solace in comedy.


No other animals do this, either.


When you step back and take a look at the people who are known for their comedy and humour, one trait you find very often is an upbringing in unfortunate circumstances. They had hard lives. It's hardly universal, of course, but by and large many people coming from hardship produce comedy. It's a coping mechanism. It's a survival technique.


George Carlin was raised poor in New York City by a single mother and was a frequent runaway.


Mel Brooks was bullied in school during a time when anti-Semitism was the norm; he never knew his father, who died young, and his mother brought Brooks and his siblings up so poor that she mixed crushed chalk with water in milk bottles so that the neighbours wouldn't see they couldn't even afford milk.


Gene Wilder was bullied and sexually abused in school. His mother was chronically and debilitatingly ill and he was told by her doctor, "Don't make your mother angry, it might kill her--try to make her laugh instead."


Chris Titus's mother was severely mentally ill and committed suicide after a lifetime spent in and out of mental hospitals. He was raised by his abusive alcoholic father.


Art Buchwald spent his childhood bouncing between foster homes before running away and joining the Marines. Even as he was dying of kidney failure and had a leg amputated due to complications from diabetes, he kept making people laugh.


Bill Cosby was extremely poor, and born into a world where racism was rampant, acceptable, and sometimes even institutionalized.


Naturally this doesn't apply to everyone, but the link is surprising. When all around you life is hardship and madness, and so hopeless so as to make death seem like an attractive option, we humans do a remarkable about-face. We laugh.


The world is harsh. The world is unfair. And we are almost always completely helpless against the fickle hand of fate. The only way to deal with it is to develop some kind of defense mechanism.


Irvin S. Cobb summed this up when he said, "Comedy is just a tragedy standing on its head with its pants torn." Comedy isn't something that lives in a different world, or is out of touch. People who admonish others by asking, "How can you LAUGH at a time like this?" seem to think that those who laugh simply don't understand the circumstances when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Humour knows exactly what's going on--it just takes the same world and turns it upside-down to look at it from an absurd angle.


When asked why he wrote, Art Buchwald said, "If you can make people laugh, you can get all the love you want."


And that's how I've lived my life--since long before I was aware of either of this quotations. Without going into much uncomfortable detail, I had a difficult upbringing, unsupportive and emotionally abusive and sometimes even physically violent. As a result, I developed profound mental illnesses and was hospitalized involuntarily three times before I even left high school. I'm almost paralyzingly obsessed with getting people to like me. Deprived of acceptance even within my own family, I will do anything--really, almost ANYTHING--to get people to like me. From a young age I had to cope with depression so severe it ranged from physically incapacitating to suicidal. I had no choice but to find a way of dealing with things that were completely beyond my control, and the one I eventually developed helped me deal with all of it. I made people laugh. More to the point, I made MYSELF laugh. The world around me was cruel and shorn of affection and that I could still find a way to laugh at it made me believe that things couldn't have been as bad as I supposed. Instead of seeing the cruelty, I decided to turn it upside-down and see the madness, insanity, absurdity.


I was very young--probably too young--when I learned that my options were to see the world as it was and crawl into a hole and die, or to see it another way all together and laugh so loudly I couldn't hear the abuse anymore.


I chose laughter--and strength.


I won't pretend that cracking jokes has magically cured all of my problems. Far from it. I still have all of my problems and they still flare up and disrupt my life--I still have depression that all but destroys me, and I'm still simultaneously socially retarded and desperate for acceptance. But seeing comedy in misery helps to ease the pain a little bit. A cold compress on my ragingly out-of-control emotional instability. Sometimes it even helps to pull me back from the abyss before the abyss reaches back up at me.


And as long as I can still do this, I know that somewhere deep inside I'm okay. That I can still fight. That I can still see humour in misery. That I can stay alive, and keep moving.


If I can still laugh, I know that all is not lost.


If I can still laugh, then I can live. And live I will do. I'll go on living--and laughing--until my body hasn't a single breath left for either.


This is my shield. This is my shell.


All I have to do is laugh--forever.