What happens when someone who has always believed in the restorative intelligence of laughter suddenly cannot laugh?
This question is a bit different from the typical “how humor helps grief” column of modern humor articles. The latter leads to advice; the former question results in deeper contemplation.
Recently we lost a family friend to a violent tragedy. Without going into unnecessary details of the events, I can say that a real tragedy can destroy the very mechanism this blog has been exploring.
For years I’ve asked what laughter can do for us. I’ve explored it for myself, in every post. Today I have a small comment on what its absence reveals.
There are some forms of grief in which the idea of smiling feels biologically impossible, where your only focus is breathing or maintaining yourself in proper social constructs. It’s not that your thoughts are 24/7 sad, though grief is steeped in sadness. It’s that you can’t think or organize your thoughts. You have no energy for cognitive lifts. No desire to explain yourself. No real desire to communicate. You start to, but then the words disappear, and all you feel is heavy.
Ordinary incentives lose their pull and importance flies out the window. The world seems to be focusing on absurd things while you’re feeling something closer to internal detonation.
As a philosopher I eventually make my way back by scanning theories on loss and grief. But they are too heavy to read. Something between recognition and response has gone askew.
HTTF has never been about jokes, though they are interspersed throughout. It is about exploring human connection. When that connection is lost there is no laughter. It is the experiment’s hardest reality.
Humor is for those who can breathe their way through the day. Not for those who are truly mourning. On the ascent back you can find a soft respite in lighthearted humor. In puns or wordplay, but no word associated with the trauma of real loss or violence could ever be funny.
Visitors will note a deliberate absence of those words in this blog. This is for one very specific reason: respect for human dignity. You never know what others are surviving through; humor isn’t the time to remind them.
For anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one to violence, my most profound condolences. I’ve long since said that we may speak different languages but we laugh in the same language. And now I am reminded that we also cry and hug without needing a single word to be uttered.
Dedicated to Connor. You will always be remembered as the friend who would stay over and help pick up after parties, for your laughter, your calm and kindness, and your devotion to saving people. Our hearts cannot fathom how this could have happened to a young man who spent his entire life learning how to save other people’s lives. Our hearts break for your family and for Dan and Talon, who did everything they could to try to save you. 💔
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