Is It OK to Laugh?
by Alan J. Parisse

More Information About the Author: Click Here for the Alan J. Parisse Home Page

A few days ago, an agent told me that a number of clients had called wanting to cancel the humorists and comedians they had booked and replace them with "serious speakers." He said many clients seem to think laughter is inappropriate right now.

While their position is clearly understandable, it is misguided. People need to laugh and, as a country, we need them to laugh. We need them to laugh every bit as much as our economy needs them to travel, spend and invest.

A few years ago, I visited a friend with terminal cancer. He was in considerable pain but still had that crusty, feisty and mischievous spark that his friends and family loved. He told me about a support group he was in, and how they had "Joke Fests."  It was cancer patients getting together to tell jokes: clean jokes, raunchy jokes and even jokes about cancer and dying. He said that one that really stitched him and the other old guys was, "Dying is a lot like going to sleep, except with dying you don`t have to get up three times during the night to go to the bathroom!" Now I was old enough to have thought that a very funny joke, but I was afraid to laugh. Cancer, after all, is very serious business.

Did he ever get on my case! He told me that one of the few things cancer patients can do for themselves is laugh. He said that most docs say it helps "And besides," he said, "even if it doesn`t help, at least we laugh!" He told me that laughing gave him dignity at a time when he had precious little left. Then he started telling jokes again, and kept on telling jokes until I laughed. Then I joined in and even tried to top him. We had a ball. We almost forgot where we were.

His pain returned and things got serious in a hurry. When the worst of the pain passed, he was exhausted and it was time for me to leave. The last words I ever heard him utter - "Hey Al, this cancer stinks, this pain stinks, the whole thing stinks  … but I laugh. Damn it, I laugh!

Despite all his pain, and his impending death - he laughed.

For the record, in these trying times, this "serious speaker" is adding laugh lines to his presentations, not subtracting them. Of course I am setting them up a bit; giving the audience a context; in effect, giving them permission to laugh. I am telling them about my friend and even suggesting they buy Garrison Keillor`s  CD set "Pretty Good Jokes." It`s two hours of jokes of every genre: light bulb jokes, religion jokes, ethnic jokes and a lot of other jokes that we have stopped telling. Sure it pushes the boundaries of political correctness a little, but not too much and it is more important that we laugh. Then I tell the audience a few of the jokes. Jokes like "Your Mama is so fat when her beeper goes off, people think she`s backing up!" And do they laugh. They laugh way beyond what the joke or my telling deserves. One fellow came up to me after a speech in Hawaii last week and summed it up, saying simply: "It felt so good to laugh without feeling guilty. I needed that."

Despite all our pain, it is indeed a time to laugh. We should laugh for the release it gives us, for the sheer joy of it and for the satisfaction that will come from laughing in the face of terror and terrorists. After all, as one commentator put it "pursuit of happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence.