What's So Funny?

Q: What’s so funny? A: Everything!

Judy and Sherri (co-authors of the Parkinson’s Journey blog; see my blog list on the right) came to visit me and Karen this weekend, and we had a ball! We stayed up late, we laughed, we played, we ate ice cream for breakfast (well some of us did ), we laughed some more. In fact, I laughed so much this weekend, it got me thinking about why we laugh. I have a theory that laughter is partially defiance. We laugh to dispel our fear of something, and when we’re not afraid, that thing has no power over us any more. What was it Frank Herbert said… “Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the little death”? Something like that. Well, laughter is the best way to chase fear away that I know of.

So there we were, 4 grown women, sitting around Karen’s kitchen table, playing with Play-doh, (I kid you not), playing charades, taking goofy pictures of each other, and basically laughing till we cried and our stomach muscles hurt. And what do we 4 have in common? Well, a few things, but mostly we share the experience of having an incurable, chronic, degenerative brain disease that is slowly crippling us and eating away at our quality of life. Not very funny. Scary, in fact. So, we laughed at it (and everything else!) and the fear disappeared; it was like when Harry Potter and his friends waved their magic wands and yelled “Ridikulus” at a truly terrifying bogart and it turned into something silly and disappeared.

So here I am, wearing the bright pink and lime green socks that Judy gave me, and a t-shirt that says "Will Work For Dopamine". I’m going to keep laughing, and never let anybody tell me I should be more serious. “Serious” gets me nowhere, but “silly” delivers me from fear.