Laughter and tears at the same time

 

Laughter.

It's medicine to both the creator and recipient of the laugh.

Chuckling. Chortling. Guffawing. Giggling. Tittering.

The words we use to describe the action are even snigger inducing. Personally, I love to laugh. I love to laugh with someone. I'm even learning to love being laughed at. If you've got an insult to give me, you'd better bring your best because I've heard them all. I've laughed at all of them, eventually. 

I was a chubby kid and fat adolescent. Then I slimmed down and blew up and slimmed down and blew up and on and on. I used to think "Nothing succeeds like excess," I've written about this before if I recall. Then that was exactly what I'd do: binge and blow up to the size of a house and then go over the top and get lost in the sauce and finally get called "Skeletor" and have one of those road to Damascus moments.

"Road to Damascus refers to a sudden turning point in one's life. It is in reference to the conversion to Christianity of the apostle Paul while literally on the road to Damascus from Jerusalem. Prior to that moment, he had been called Saul, and was a Pharisee who persecuted followers of Jesus."

Howling. Convulsions. Fits. Hysterics. Hooting.

What causes a laugh? Humor, usually. Though I've discovered much laughter hidden amidst great sadness. If you think of the silver lining of clouds off in the distance while a great dark storm cloud sits angrily above you that's the imagery I associate when I laugh and cry at the same time. It's a bitter coffee wake up call from somewhere deep in my emotional brain finding the absurd in an unexpected place.

What makes humor? If you try and find a definition online you only stumble around in circles where people show off their ability to copy and paste words from the "humor" entry in the thesaurus. It is supposed to be intuitively understood but then that doesn't explain those of us who laugh about the supposedly darker things in life. Humor is personal. Everyone finds different things to laugh about. We have to laugh or go insane, I've heard. That only explains that we seek out humor when we're at our most vulnerable. It is a safety net some of us use to catch us before we fall fully into the depths of our own madness.

Humor, to me, is how I already described. It is something absurd and unexpected. When I find humor in a dark place, for example any number of the dead baby jokes littering this blog for the last twenty years. I have a different perspective now but I would never dream of removing any of that stuff. Unexpectedly encountering the absurd is what makes me laugh, after all, and I can't think of anything more absurd than a kid who makes blog posts about dead baby jokes growing up to be a man with a tattoo on his wrist to remember a dead baby.

Yet, somewhere in the above exposition is miraculously another dead baby joke. I'm still doing it, even with perspective. The difference now is that I'm also crying. Laughter and tears at the same time.