Go Ahead and Joke About Coronavirus
It’s not too soon
The biggest risk I ever took with a joke was in a London pub on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
I was out for a drink with a few acquaintances, and one woman in our group was telling the rest of us about the night she’d said her final goodbye to a man we’d all known. I’ll call him Edward. He’d passed away at almost 80, in the hospital, after living the splendid life as the most English of Englishmen.
“I wanted to say all the things you could never say out loud to him as he lay there,” my acquaintance told us, her eyes wet. “So I said all the things we hadn’t.”
Someone reached out and put their hand on hers.
“I told him I loved him,” she said. “I told him we all loved him. I told him everybody loved him. And that was the moment he slipped away.”
Her words hung heavy in the air. No one knew quite what to say. So I said: “It sounds like he may have died from embarrassment.”
She looked up at me, eyes wide, trying to register what I’d just said. “I’m just saying,” I clarified, “it sounds like you may have killed Edward.”
Just like empathy, black humor is a natural human reaction. Indeed, it’s a necessity for making it through tough times. As the comedian Robin Ince, author of I’m a Joke…
