she's got jokes

Lately I’ve been really worried that this newsletter isn’t funny enough. Lol!

Up until this year, masking pain with humor has been my specialty. I love a good bit, especially one about my parents’ divorce or my father’s mental illness! I’ve been workshopping a joke about Dunkin Donuts sponsoring my depression for years, though I still think it needs more of a punchline. 

For the most part, I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. My girl Drew Barrymore recently did this pretty remarkable interview with Jennette McCurdy about her abusive mom memoir, and one of the first things she says to Jennette is “I knew I could trust you because you did have comedy in there…if you haven’t found comedy as a coping mechanism, we have nothing to talk about.” I tend to agree. There’s just something about how fucked-up-ness and comedy twine together, how it lets you whistle in the dark. Plus it’s just so dreary and self-serious to be all sad, all the time (she says, in her newsletter about being sad). 

I have discovered some of the limitations of sad-humor over the years, though. That bit about my parents’ divorce, for example. It really was good for jokes – I mean, at one point, my dad literally hurled every mattress in the house out onto the lawn and tried to set them on fire – and in my early twenties I milked it for every single one, especially to my close circle of friends I’d grown up with, who’d known my parents the longest. Have you heard the one about my father chasing me and my mom down in her car, until they both stopped in the middle of the road, got out of the cars and started screaming at each other while I walked away down the highway? Have you heard the one about my mom mailing her journal entries to me because she was so scared to have a copy of any of her honest thoughts somewhere Dad might find them? Have you heard the one about my dad re-marrying a woman he just met, then her leaving him and maxing out his credit cards? Actually, that was a good one. 

The point is, after a few years of relaying everything I was going through to those girls exclusively in an absurd jokey voice, I looked up and realized they barely knew me. And it wasn’t their fault – it was mine. I’d been so ashamed to admit how much I was actually hurt and scared, that I’d essentially lied to their faces.

I swore after that I would be more honest, and for the most part, I did get a little better. It helped that I had friends who were good at both, who could be funny and vulnerable at the same time, and who also saw through my attempts to mask a wound with a joke. 

There were still times, though, when humor felt like the only way to get at the reality of something dark. This is why there are so many depression memes, I guess. There have been times when the jokes felt like a life raft. Really.

A joke assumes an audience – it assumes that you can’t be the only one in the universe with this experience, that somewhere out there in the dark, someone’s gonna get it, and laugh. Otherwise, you’re just a sad sack on a stage, giving a soliloquy. 

Which is maybe what I’m really getting at. Maybe I joked so much because I really believed it was the only way people would listen. Who wants to listen to someone talk about being sad? I thought. It was like I was my own heckler, inside my own brain. Shaddaaaaup! I yelled from the back of the bar. Tell a joke or show your tits! 

It may come as no surprise that this year, and the grief that has defined it, has been nearly impossible to joke about. I have no quips for you about miscarriage. I do have a few bits about some of the poor, innocent pregnant women I have come to despise this year – those might be good for a chuckle. But there is just no hiding from it. People, I’ve been sad. Maybe this time I’ll just admit it.