One Thing or Another: Laughing Matters

One Thing or Another is a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

What’s funny can be very subjective, unique to each of us as we find some things to be laughing matters and quite a few others not to be. But how often do we stop and think about our sense of humor itself, and what it does for us? Laughing lets off steam, certainly. It releases tension—most clearly in nervous laughter. He didn’t kill me after all! Ha! Or, I was just kidding when I said you were a narcissistic prick! Don’t fire me! Ha! It provides communion. It even distorts faces and occasionally sends us into paroxysms of uncontrolled guffaws. But have you ever considered that it saves lives?

A sense of humor is the canary in the mine for me: when I no longer have it, I know I’m in trouble. This has only happened a few times in my life, but they were the direst, darkest moments from which I knew I was emerging only because I was able to laugh again. Depression and despair are mysterious states, especially when they’re not severe. It’s easy to self-diagnose them as … an absence of ambition. A bad case of doldrums. Maybe the dreaded self-pity so universally disdained. But depression? Like, this-needs-medication-or-at-least-talk-therapy depression?

When I finally realized I needed assistance during those difficult times, was when I became keenly aware that nothing was funny. Not the stupid sitcoms that were never really funny in the first place. Not the cleverest writer who’d always made me snicker along with her dry, cutting humor (Oh Fran! What wry and wicked observations on urban life!) Not even my own most closely held and inappropriate jokes, the ones I told only to myself, the ‘off-color’ ones that included pratfalls by the unsuspecting and words from the most recent prohibited words list. Nothing.

The canary in the mine had died. Not only was I unable to laugh even mildly at anything, but my worldview had darkened. A sense of humor is a way of seeing the world. It’s a way of knowing in the soul and bones that it’s all over quickly so you might as well chuckle. It’s a perspective—on our own lives and on the world around us that seems, day by to, to get angrier, meaner, more violent, more crazed, and absolutely determined to extinguish the human race, if not the planet. Yeah, you better damn well laugh, or you might start crying and never stop.

We need more humor in the world, not less. We need more things to laugh at, and the freedom to laugh at them, with the understanding that genuine laughter is not ridicule. Trust me, I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing with you, and with all the fleeting, temporal creatures on this fleeting, momentary planet. When I find myself unable to laugh, the end is near, calling out for a new day where something, anything, is funny. Once the first laugh comes, I know I’ll be okay.

Mark McNease is the Editor of lgbtSr, a website “where age is embraced and life is celebrated,” serving the over-50 LGBTQ audience. He’s the author of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries, co-editor and publisher of the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), host of the Live Mic with Mark podcast, and the co-creator and original writer for the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.