Laugh When You’re Not Supposed To

Twelve years ago, instead of making a new year’s resolution, for the first time I chose a word for the year. The word was risky. In the years since, my word-for-the-year has trended toward expansion and evolution. This year’s word, though, is different.

Recently, I realized no matter what our family talked about at the dinner table, if we laughed, everyone felt it was a good dinner. Road trip? If we laughed, good travels. Chores? If we laughed, good work. Funeral? If we laughed, good grief, literally. Laughter is like a holy detonation happening on the inside of a human heart, blasting it open so joy can flow out and life can flow in.

This year, my word is going to be laughter.

The seeds of this idea can be found in a chapter of True Companions, which I’ve excerpted below for you. Regardless of your word for the year, I hope this reading will encourage you to laugh along the way, because…a year? If we laughed, good year.

Excerpt from True Companions by Kelly Flanagan. Copyright (c) 2021 by Kelly M. Flanagan. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com

In the spring of my junior year of college, my maternal grandmother finally succumbed to lymphoma after a decade-long struggle. She was the grandparent I’d grown closest to over the years. Arriving at her house always felt like coming home. It was a painful loss.

On the morning of her funeral, my uncle decided to distract my brother and I from our grief with a game of basketball in the driveway. While playing, it began to rain ever so slightly. My uncle cautioned us against injuring ourselves on the dampening pavement. Then, while my brother was shooting a free throw and my uncle and I were looking at the hoop and waiting for the rebound, there was a yelp of pain behind us. Somehow, in the safest moment of the game, my brother had jumped just high enough while shooting to land awkwardly and badly sprain his ankle. My uncle started laughing, and he couldn’t stop. He’s normally a very tender and caring guy, but the circumstances were just too comical for him. It was the contagious kind of laughter too. Soon, I was doubled over in laughter as well. Before long, my brother, despite his pain, followed suit.

It was a bad sprain, and the time before the funeral was spent tracking down bandages and renting a set of crutches for him to get around on. Finally, it was time for the funeral. As the immediate family, we were ceremonially ushered into the church after everyone else had been seated, including my uncle, who married into my dad’s side of the family. I’ll never forget the moment. As we walked down the aisle, he turned around to watch us, saw my brother hobbling in on crutches, and slowly collapsed into silent laughter once again. His whole body shook.

Watching him laugh, I began to laugh, too, on the inside, where no one could see. I was laughing so hard, new tears sprang to my eyes, this time salty with humor rather than grief. That’s how my companions—my grandmother and my uncle and my brother—taught me that laughter can be the silent sound that holds joy and sorrow together. It cannot turn back time and erase loss, but it can magically pause time and redeem loss.

In the darkest of times, laughter can be a light.

§

A little more than a year after that funeral, I met my wife. I quickly became addicted to the sound of her laughter. She has a great laugh, and I love being the cause of it. So, the first time she took me to Catholic mass, as we waited for it to begin, I tried a joke in church for the first time since fourth grade. I can’t remember what the joke was, but she gasped and admonished me for telling jokes like that in church. “Oh, come on,” I appealed to her, “God must have a sense of humor; he created Richard Simmons.” This time, she laughed. Success.

When you ask Kelly about our most memorable moments of companionship, she’ll tell you about an evening I defended her laughter and the spirit behind it. We were in a chapel rehearsing her sister’s wedding ceremony, and her step-father was giving her a hard time, accusing her of not having a sense of humor. The truth is, Kelly doesn’t have a great sense of humor about big people who make small people feel even smaller, which was her step-father’s preferred method of parenting, so he had been mostly on the receiving end of her feistiness rather than her playfulness. As he teased her, I spoke up. I told him she had a great sense of humor. I told him she was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She grabbed my hand and squeezed.

That night, my companionship with Kelly taught me you have to stand up for your laughter.

Laughter doesn’t always come easy, and sometimes people want to take it away from you, but they can only do so if you give it to them. So, if you’ve given your laughter away, go get it back. If you still happen to have your laughter in you somewhere, don’t give it up. Surround yourself with companions who want to see it and celebrate it. The Beastie Boys once said you have to fight for your right to party. Sometimes, you have to fight for your right to laugh too.

Fighting for each other’s laughter is one of the best ways to see each other through.

§

Over the years, since that first joke during my first Catholic mass with Kelly, we’ve laughed as much in church pews as we’ve laughed anywhere else, always holding it in as well as possible in order to respect the solemnness of everyone around. A recent Sunday was no exception. Aidan was scheduled to lead the congregation in the Old Testament reading for the week, so we arrived early to give him a couple of minutes to review it. When he was handed a slip of paper with the passage on it, he looked at it briefly, turned bright red, and with a wry smile on his face said, “Oh no.” He handed us the verse. “When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, ‘Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.’”

He was fifteen, and in just a few moments, he’d be standing up in front of our mostly elderly congregation saying “whoredom” three times in a matter of seconds. His mother and I could barely contain ourselves. His brother and sister were beside themselves with glee. Moments later, it was time. He walked up to the lectern, cheeks a little rosier than usual, and he started his reading. When he said “whoredom” the first time, we were all grinning. By the third “whoredom,” the four of us sitting in the pew were silently and joyfully apoplectic. Aidan says he wants to be a standup comic when he grows up. If he creates material half as funny as that, he’ll do just fine.

Perhaps our funny bone had been irrevocably hit. Fifteen minutes later, it was time for the offering. Typically, the kids save a portion of their allowance and contribute it to the plate. This time, they’d forgotten for several weeks, and the contribution was a thick wad of one-dollar bills. As usual, we passed the whole wad down to the person at the end of the row. This time, that person was Quinn. The plate was almost to us when Quinn flattened out the roll, turning it into a stack and, out of nowhere, began to mimic “making it rain,” as if he was planning to brush off the bills into the plate with an ostentatious motion. I was caught off-guard.

I laughed out loud this time.

The laughter echoed through the silent church, and I immediately choked it down. But it was too late. Our whole family was infected. Aidan shook with the effort of containing it. Kelly had tears running down her face. Caitlin, who doesn’t care what she is laughing about as long as she is laughing, had her giggling head buried in my chest. And Quinn just smiled slightly, pleased with himself. The plate arrived, and he simply set the money in it. The good damage was done though. In a church pew, our laughter made a memory of our companionship.

§

Over time, my companions have taught me that there’s an ordinary, boring, repetitive, monotonous, painful, sorrowful, and fleeting life that hangs like a veil over the rest of our beautiful, sacred, holy, eternal, timeless, and mysterious reality. They’ve taught me it makes sense to be serious about the former, but they’ve also taught me how to lift the veil so I can get a glimpse of the latter.

They’ve taught me laughter is the way to see that every bush is burning.

They’ve taught me that mathematics may be a universal language, but it’s not the only one. Laughter is too. It can bridge races and nationalities and cultures. Shared laughter is shared humanity. It accelerates the cultivation of companionship at the beginning. It fortifies companionship over time. And in the end, time can take almost everything away from us except our laughter, if we choose to hold on to it. In the end, laughter can become the soundtrack of philia. May we, as companions, over time, become each other’s funny bone. May we learn to make the good music of great companionship.

May it sound a lot like laughing when you’re not supposed to.