Laughter in the Dark: Humor Gets Us Through

Tough Times, Dead Relatives, and Ridiculous Ways to Keep Going

Grief is weird.

It doesn’t behave the way you think it will. Sometimes, it hits you like a freight train. Other times, it sneaks up on you in the grocery store when you see your dad’s favorite brand of coffee. And sometimes—when the weight becomes too much—you find yourself laughing at something so wildly inappropriate that you wonder if you’re a bad person.

You’re not.

Laughter has always been how we survive things that feel unsurvivable. It’s a pressure valve, a release, a way to acknowledge the absurdity of existence without being completely crushed by it.

Sometimes, Humor is All You Have

These days, I find myself searching for things to laugh about—not out of denial, but out of necessity. Humor has been my best defense against the weight of things, and lately, I need it.

And when I go looking for the funny things, I return to my father’s funeral.

If you knew my family, you’d understand.

We don’t just endure awkwardness—we collect it. My sister and I, in particular, have a talent for watching social disasters unfold like a spectator sport. And my father’s funeral?

It was the Super Bowl of awkward family gatherings.

It wasn’t just the sheer length of it—the endless mourning sessions, the parade of well-wishers, the bad food. It wasn’t even the absurd bureaucratic fight over his right to die, starring my uncle, a stack of DNR forms, and the delusional belief that paperwork could outmaneuver death itself.

My mother insisted on three full days of mourning for my father—open casket, day and evening sessions. By the end, my funeral suit had absorbed so much coffee, sweat, and floral fumes that it felt less like clothing and more like a used grief sponge.

But the real spectacle of the funeral was not my dead dad on full display in a small room, it was my oblivious funeral-cruising cousin, Richie.

While the rest of us were wading through grief, Richie was working the room.

And once we realized what was happening, we couldn’t stop watching.

The Last Thing

My father never met my wife.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot more than I expected to.

At first, I told myself it didn’t matter—he wouldn’t have liked her, or rather, he wouldn’t have let himself like her. And I wouldn’t have let him treat her with anything less than respect. So what would have been the point?

But then I think about the silly things. Would he have made her laugh? Probably. Would she have made him laugh? Probably. Would they have ever had that rare, unexpected moment of connection—something small, a thing on TV, one of those PBS specials that only people like her and my dad would ever watch… Something about the Amazon or some opera or something.

I don’t know.

And I never will.

Because the last words my father ever said to me were, essentially:

"She is not welcome in this house."

I remember that phone call. I had called to say that I was thinking about coming for a visit, bringing my girlfriend—who would later become my wife. I told him in advance because I knew what he was like. I was trying to give him a chance to prove me wrong.

He did not take it.

And that was it.

After that call, we didn’t speak again.

At first, I told myself I didn’t care. I had other things to focus on. I had a woman I loved, a life I was building, I was new to teaching and it was taking up all of my free time. I wasn’t about to waste energy trying to fix something that had already been broken long before that conversation.

But then, about a year later, the phone rang again.

This time, it was my brother.

"Dad’s in the hospital. It’s bad. You should come."

And here’s the stupid part:

I almost didn’t go.

Because what was the point? He didn’t want me in his house—why should I be in his hospital room?

But my wife—the same woman he had refused to meet—is the one who told me to go.

"You’ll regret it if you don’t."

And she was right.

The Hospital

When I walked into his ICU room, it smelled like hospital-grade cleaner, recycled air, and a few other things I couldn’t name: “hospital smell”. That vague, unsettling scent of a place trying very hard to keep death at bay but losing the fight.

My father was intubated. Hooked up to machines. His body had given up on him in pieces—first the cancer, then the infection he picked up at some terrible facility. In the end, it wasn’t even the cancer that got him.

MRSA took him down. A hospital-acquired superbug, one of those absurd little ironies of modern medicine. He went in to be taken care of, and the place itself killed him.

I don’t even know if he knew I was there.

I don’t know if he was trying to say something to me, or if I just imagined it, trying to write some kind of redemption arc for him where there was none.

What I do remember is his eyes.

He looked surprised.

Not afraid. Not even in pain. Just... genuinely startled, like he hadn’t expected to die.

And honestly? That might be the funniest thing about all of this.

After all those years of being so certain about everything—so inflexible, so righteous—he managed to look like a man who had just walked into a surprise party for his own death.

It was all so earnest, everything so sincere, but for just a second, in that moment, I had an odd thought.

I imagined his intubation tube as a kazoo.

And worse—I thought I heard it.

A thin, reedy little BWAAAAHHHHHHHHNNNNNNN slipping out between the rhythmic hum of the machines.

His eyebrows shot up again.

I don’t know if he was seeing The Light, meeting God, or just realizing that hospital air smells like lemon disinfectant and boiled sadness.

He gestured toward the window. Eyebrows. Eyebrows! Kazoo!

BWAAAAHNNZZ!

BWAAAAHNNZZ!

I think he wanted it open.

Maybe he was ready to go.

Or maybe—just maybe—he just wanted one last breath that didn’t sound like a sad, dying party favor.

Maybe he thought he saw a light. Maybe he just wanted some damn fresh air.

Either way, I didn’t know what to do. The windows were covered in plastic, his bed was inside of a plastic bubble inside of that plastic bubble.

So I just said, "I can't."

And a few minutes later, he was gone.

My Uncle, The Walking DNR Violation

My uncle—my father’s stepbrother—burst into the room like a man who had just been told it was Black Friday for resurrections.

He dragged my mother out of the room in a frantic attempt to reverse my father’s DNR.

My father had been actively dying for hours. He was now dead-dead.

There was no CPR happening, no paddles, no drama. Just a long, sustained flatline beep that had been going on for so long that the hospital staff hadn’t even reacted to it anymore.

Or maybe it was 20 seconds. I’m not totally sure.

But my uncle genuinely believed that if he filed the right form fast enough, convinced my mother to change her mind, then my father would just… snap back to life. Or they could just bring him back, throw the switch, get him back.

Like he was applying for a refund.

To make it worse, my uncle’s desperate legal maneuvering robbed my mother of a proper goodbye. Instead of standing by her husband’s bedside in those final moments, she was out in the hallway, arguing over paperwork.

Dad’s wake

My father wasn’t a perfect man. He wasn’t even always a good man, but he was loved.

And he loved absurdity.

He would have enjoyed his own funeral – or the wake, at least.

The funeral itself felt like long drive to deliver a gift to someone, only to leave it on the doorstep because they weren’t home. None of that movie closure. A minister said a few words, almost seemed to shrug, and then we all walked back to our cars.

It was, of course, sad. But death is predictably sad, even when it comes at the end of a long illness. Even when it’s for someone you weren’t really speaking to anymore.

But my family has a particular relationship with awkward social situations. We don’t just endure them; we delight in them. Some people collect coins or baseball cards. My sister and I collect uncomfortable moments. The weirder, the more socially excruciating, the better.

And my father’s funeral?

It was terrible.

My cousin Richie comes from a long, proud lineage of Men Who Do Not Read The Room. It’s practically a family heirloom, passed down like a battered old pocket watch—except instead of telling time, it just ticks loudly in the middle of deeply inappropriate moments.

His father, my uncle, is the man who tried to overturn a DNR after the fact.

Richie isn’t confident, exactly, but he moves through life seemingly impervious to embarrassment, a human foghorn blaring through moments that demand subtlety, oblivious to the fact that everyone around him is cringing.

Richie spent my father’s funeral trying to get laid. He was, without question, my favorite living person in the room that night.

At first, we didn’t believe it.

But then we saw him zero in on one of my sister’s friends.

She arrived alone—something that should have guaranteed her safety. Because who the hell flirts at a funeral?

We watched as he leaned in, flashing all 32 teeth at once in a way that felt less charming and more oddly biological, and delivered his signature nasally drawl.

Richie doesn’t wear suits often, but when he does, it’s clearly an event. He adjusted his cuffs with unnecessary flair. Checked himself out in every reflective surface. After each rejection, he did it again as a kind of reset, moving with the confidence of the truly oblivious.

And so, in a dimly lit Long Island funeral home, while my father lay in an metallic blue open casket, as if, in death, he had become some new optional feature on a high-end major appliance, he was surrounded by mourning relatives and the overwhelming flower store smell, Richie started hitting on people.

Not subtly. Not accidentally. He was working the room like a wedding reception or a singles bar.

At first, we thought he was just making conversation. But then we saw the look.

The slow, appreciative up-and-down glance.

The slight forward lean.

The grin that somehow showed all of his teeth at the same time.

It was happening.

Richie was cruising the funeral.

The Playbook

We couldn’t hear every word, just catching bits of sound, like voices in the distance, random words floating over the air. We didn’t need to. His approach was painfully clear and very repetetive—a four-step process we watched unfold in real-time, lip-reading from across the room.

Step One: The Opener

"Sooooo, uhhhhh, how did you know my uncle?"
Starts innocent enough. Unassuming. You could mistake it for small talk—until you realize it’s not.

Step Two: Find Common Ground

"Yeah, uhhhh, funerals, man. They’re so weird, right?"
Yes, Richie. They are weird. Even weirder when you’re trying to get laid at one.

Step Three: The Compliment

"I mean, I know this is, uhhhhhh, kinda weird to say here, but… you look really good in black."
Because nothing screams emotionally available like hitting on someone in the presence of an embalmed relative.

Step Four: The Pivot

"Soooo, uhhhh, do you, like, go to a lot of these?"
Richie clearly did not.

The Fun in Funerals

Frank Malone was our funeral director, and Frank is a funny guy. An oddly tall man, his typical pose was a kind of beatific fist-in-hand kind of gesture that wouldn’t be out of place with Catholic saints or kung fu movies. He loomed like floor lamp that had been turned off and put out of the way. He was invisible until you needed him. We got to chatting anyway.

I’d known Frank for years—not just from the usual small-town familiarity, but because I used to work for a friend’s florist and those businesses are pretty close, for obvious reasons. On holidays and big orders, I’d help deliver arrangements, and I got to know the people who exist in the small, strange ecosystem of funeral services. Many florists, a few embalmers, one or two limo drivers and, of course, several funeral directors.

Frank was one of the good ones. Everyone else just seemed to play death events in one note, all sad-face emoji, all down notes.

He was sharp, kind, and had a deep, almost philosophical understanding of grief – and a great sense of humor. Not in a disrespectful way, but in the way that only people who deal with death every single day can afford to.

Because if you don’t learn how to laugh at that job, it will swallow you whole.

Frank had a way of reading the room (unlike some people), and when he laughed, it somehow made everyone else feel like it was okay to breathe again.

And he had stories.

The last Strike

My favorite funeral arrangement that I ever worked on—by far—was the bowling funeral. For Frank, it was just the best and one of the few things he and I had in common.

The deceased was a man who had spent most of his free time at the lanes and had very specific requests for how he wanted to go out. His wife, God bless her, made sure every single one of them happened.

I had helped make the arrangement and delivered it, but I never saw the actual funeral. It was years ago now, but Frank had pictures of it in a small portfolio he brought out for us from his office.

Okay – that did feel a little weird. Seeing pictures of another wake while you’re at a wake, but…

It was a masterpiece.

The centerpiece? A custom-built floral arrangement that turned the coffin itself into a bowling lane.

It took three of us to assemble the arrangement, and it was nearly to scale. The entire surface was covered in perfectly aligned carnations, arranged to look like a gleaming, waxed bowling lane. The deceased? A bowling ball on his chest, also positioned as the bowling ball himself, on his way down toward a spray of gladiolas and lilies shaped like a set of pins.

His actual bowling shoes and favorite bowling ball were placed at the foot of the casket. His trophies lined the perimeter like victory markers. There was a pair of small tabletop bowling games that people played sadly at the back, saying kind words about the deceased. They had score cards, which people then put into his casket as a final farewell. The wake had games to play. According to Frank, they stuck around longer because they had something to do.

And, in perhaps the greatest touch of all, every attendee was given a funeral card redeemable for a free game at his home alley.

Frank loved it. You could see it in the way he talked about it, in the way his eyes lit up as he admired the floral craftsmanship, the interactive placement of the body. The man genuinely loved his job, and nothing delighted him more than when a funeral really committed to a theme.

"I mean, the guy LOVED bowling," he said. "Why wouldn’t he go out like a perfect strike?"

And why not? People throw themed weddings all the time. You can get married as pirates, in a galaxy far, far away, or in full Renaissance garb at a castle that doubles as a laser tag arena. But the second someone wants a themed funeral, suddenly it's weird?

Some people prefer celebration to mourning.

And I think my father would have liked that.

Keeping an Eye on Richie

Speaking of wedding behavior: Frank, for all his jokes, was also keenly aware of when something needed intervention.

Richie was still making the rounds with every woman who wasn’t actively sobbing.

At one point, Frank pulled me aside.

"Hey… uh… do I need to step in?" he asked, eyes flicking toward my cousin, who was mid-lean, flashing a concerning number of teeth at one of my mother’s friends.

I shook my head. This was family entertainment now.

"Just let it play out," I said.

Frank gave me a look like a man who had seen some shit, but nodded.

"Alright," he said. "But if he starts leaning on the casket like it’s a singles bar, I’m throwing him out myself."

Spectator Sport

What made it wonderful wasn’t Richie himself—it was everyone else.

Some women nodded awkwardly and slowly drifted away, finding urgent conversations to start with literally anyone else. I even heard a few of those strained, overly cheerful "Hey!" sounds that women use when they need to escape an awkward moment at a bar. Some gave polite but firm shutdowns. One woman burst into incredible fake sobbing.

This happened 6 times.

Our favorite moment was when Richie turned his attention to one of my mother’s friends.

Ellen was in her 60s, but the kind of 60s that people describe as "looking great for her age." Ellen looked greta for any age. Elegant, perfectly coifed, and effortlessly put together. But - she was also dressed for a funeral—somber black dress, understated heels, and, notably, one of the only women in the room wearing a brooch besides my mother, perhaps in some quiet gesture of solidarity with her mourning friend.

Richie approached her, his nasally voice quacking just above the sound-absorbing quiet of the room. He began moving through the Playbook he’d practiced several times that night.

And then it happened.

She smiled.

Not in the polite, strained way that said, Oh honey, no.

No—this was bemusement.

She was flattered.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Richie, the human social wrecking ball, had somehow hit on the one woman in the room who was actually into it.

My sister and I were shaking with silent laughter. If there was not a dead body in the room, it would have been impossible to ignore us, shuddering, sweating, crying - and staring at my cousin wander around a room that could not have been more than 40 x 40 feet.

My ribs hurt.

And then—because of course—Richie’s girlfriend walked over.

The girlfriend who had been there the whole time.

The girlfriend who, somehow, had no idea what Richie had been doing for the last hour.

She smiled at all of us, oblivious. She thanked us for coming.

Yes—she thanked my sister and me for attending our own father’s funeral.

And Richie?

Richie suddenly appeared beside her, smiled like a man who had done nothing wrong.

When he finally left, he made a point of saying goodnight to each of us, walking back to my mother - and giving a sly nod to her friend, then sliding across the room like he had won the night. I remember grasping his hand, my own face red and teary, my jaw in pain, suppressed laughter finding release however it could.

Letting go of my father was, in some ways, much easier than enduring three days of black-suited mourning.

My face hurt.

Richie simply had no idea that his behavior was the main event.

I thanked him—so much.

Then I turned to his girlfriend, a woman who would later become his wife, and thanked her too.

---

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