by Lola McPetit

Created on: October 11, 2008   Last Updated: December 27, 2009

I chortle at the mere prospect of the question! The better question would be could we possibly survive life without a sense of humor?  (Sorry Helium, don't mean to be so cheeky on my first assignment here but I'm feeling my oats.)

Let's look at what's going on in our world today just for an example. Our country is at war, the stock market is tanking, financial markets are crumbling around the globe. Pretty dismal. Add my own personal woes of being newly divorced, watching a real estate sign weather in my front yard and the fact I've had to give up pedicures due to a recently acquired toenail fungus and I barely want to get out of bed in the morning. (And I bet you feel pretty crummy reading this unless you're one of those people that get off on other people's pain and agony.) Now imagine dealing with all of this without the comedic relief of Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey distracting us momentarily from how seriously we take ourselves. Put another way, somehow life does go on. The only question is what's our state of mind going to be while life chugs along in all of its uncontrollable glory? And that's where humor, the tawdry seductress, makes her grand entrance.

To keep humor front and center in my life at all times (I mean that literally as the following anecdote will reveal), I've developed a mantra. It's simple and I repeat it frequently: let fun happen.

So I'm at a funeral. Yes, a funeral. And it's very sad, truly sad in that my friend's mother died in a fluke accident being struck by a car taking her garbage out to the street. I attend along with two other friends to be supportive. At the end of the funeral, all are invited to attend a short service at the cemetery and then a luncheon afterwards. Being from out of town and not having a clue as to where we were going, we went to our car and waited for the cavalcade to fall in line. We were one of the first behind the hearse and as we parked at the cemetery along the slender graveled road, I took note of the fact that I recognized few people gathering at the gravesite. We decided to wait for familiar faces. We waited. And waited. And waited yet more. Simultaneously we looked at each other knowingly: we were at the wrong graveside service. And because of the way the cars were parked, we could not leave. And because we were among the first people there, we were very close to the actual proceedings. It was too much. Not unlike the convergence of a failed economy, an unsellable house and a thick, discolored toenail. We had to laugh. We laughed until we cried. We laughed until the laughter left the audible world and invaded us like aliens rendering us unable to speak. We had to sign to one another with frantic gestures to communicate.

Later at the luncheon, we imparted our twisted story to our grieving friend. And predictably he laughed. He shook his head and he laughed a deep, hearty, belly laugh. He hugged us and told us what a relief it was to have irreverent degenerate friends on this of all days.

Would a humorous approach to life make a difference? Sorry Helium, but again I have to amend the question. A better question is how big of a difference does humor make? Sometimes it's the difference between making the seemingly unbearable, bearable; the difference between sanity and insanity. And the line is very fine, my friends. As for me, I still have nine beautiful and deserving toenails to file and polish. I think I'll do polka dots.

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