Only When I Laugh

It’s an old joke-- A traveler came upon the victim of a savage attack. Not only had the victim been bound hand and foot, but a wooden stake had been driven through his heart. “Doesn’t that hurt?” asked the traveler, and the brutalized victim replied, “Only when I laugh.”

Survival in this grim world is often eased if in some corner of our lives we have maintained a bit of humor. There is a layer of my consciousness that ranges from a smile to a robust guffaw. I learned long ago that to keep my sanity I needed to stay in contact with the lighter side of life. This is more than just enjoying a good joke. It is rather the wisdom to take most things seriously, but also to reserve a grin at their flip side.

This darker humor has occasionally gotten me in trouble. Not everyone shares my whimsical view of life. So I might say something in jest while keeping a straight face. But my hearer, who might not posses a humorous gene, might hear what I have said as an insult. So occasionally my effort at humor has been inappropriate. No one should crack a joke in the house of the damned or in the presence of someone who is humorless. Since humor is more spontaneous than it is calculating, occasionally I have laughed at the wrong time.

Now there are exceptions. Every couple of days I will see published or I have received an e-mail that makes fun of Donald Trump. Some of these cartoons are brutal and others hilarious. I certainly would not share these bits of ridicule with anyone I knew to be a Trumper.

Some attempts at humor are more cruel than funny, and some are totally out of bounds. There should be no room for jokes that inflict hard racial jabs or putdowns aimed at any minority group. I remember years ago being in a locker room where a dozen professional men were trying to outdo each other with vulgar stories about women. I was unable to remain silent, and said out loud how disgusting it was. I never appeared in that locker room again, nor would I have been welcome. Jokes aimed at Gays or Lesbians are most often just plain nasty. Jokes about COVID-19 will probably inflict pain on anyone knowing somebody who has died. But then I don’t recall hearing or seeing such attempts at humor.

Now I must admit that my limitations mean that there are some attempts at humor that escape me. I have been in a group where everyone is laughing but I wasn’t, not because I was offended, but because I just didn’t get it. Every week I go through the cartoons in the New Yorker, and several of them sail right over my head.

Just to the right of humor is what I call “Delight.” It is that quiet smile produced upon encountering some pleasant sight. For me there are so many, but let me describe just one. I feel delight whenever I look across the room and
watch Wendy just sitting calmly or doing a puzzle, and I sense that for that moment all is well.

For most other things, these are dark times. We are killing the planet by refusing to take climate change seriously. We have just escaped from four years of a national presidential disaster. The pandemic shows no signs of abating, and a vaccine only looms somewhere in the future. But hey, it only hurts when we laugh.