On the surface, it would seem that humor and death are literally opposites of human emotions and experience. I have found nothing really funny about death, although some of the most hilarious events in my life and career have indeed happened on funerals.

  There seems to be nothing funny about the painful emotions that death creates, namely deep profound acute grief – nothing funny about pain and grief. Grief hurts; death can be terribly untimely, unexpected, and inappropriate, even though the death rate is always 100%.

   I have long felt that people have a natural built in fear of death. This seems a good thing in a way. A respectful fear of death certainly teaches people to avoid needless dangers in life. However, learning about death’s fearful possibilities is not something we are born with, it is developed learning. In the absence of this type of learning people grow up with the meaningless idea that death has nothing to do with them, and if and when the subject pops up, humor is often used to distance a person from a subject that they are fearful of and hence causes them anxieties, and few if any people want to feel anxious. We have learned to laugh at death, laugh in the face of death, laugh at death’s power, and laugh at people whose calling in life is to minister in death’s world. Laugh, make sport, ridicule, make jokes, laugh, laugh, laugh.

  We have done an excellent job in making up an entire language that makes fun of grief and death. Add to this that certain comedians make big money and get big laughs on this subject, and the conclusion can easily be made that laughing at death makes people feel safe, secure, comfortable, and also totally deluded.

  I have found that in my seminars I can use humor, but only if it is directed at myself, and certainly if the humor concerning death and grief is not too honest, not too direct, not too disturbing. Interestingly, during breaks at my seminars, all kinds of people, hospice workers, clergy, funeral directors, and cemeterians, come up to me and tell me humorous jokes and stories about grief and death, but – oh my – if they are told in public, or shared with the group, most everybody seems to freeze.

  So humor abounds, jokes are told, people laugh, but concerning death and grief only under certain circumstances, which almost always mirror the basic concept of being afraid of death. This environment needs an atmosphere of being safe, secure, and comfortable – and don’t share the death jokes you heard during a break in a seminar. There is a dynamic which makes something funny between two people during a break time, but which is totally off limits being shared with a group.

  I once saw a Catholic priest give a seminar to the Association for Death Education and Counseling in Portland, OR on humor and death. He had collected an array of cartoons from a variety of sources and all of them were irreverent, candid, blunt, raw but terribly honest. The audience at first was stunned into absolute silence, and I thought to myself “How are you going to get out of this one?” However, by the end of the seminar most people were rolling in the aisles, while at the same time trying not to laugh too much in front of their colleagues. Such is the utter power of laughing at death, and this was a group of death professionals, the cream of the crop so to speak. When the priest finished, the laughter had vanished and people were judging the rashness, the boldness, the offensiveness of the priest. He was not invited back again, even though, or in spite of, the fact that people were laughing till their sides hurt.

  One hundred years ago sex was taboo. People were excellent at reducing the formation of babies to small sized bites, which they thought made the touchy subject of how every human being on the planet got here more manageable. Hence the story of the “stork,” or the story of the “cabbage patch.” Storks and cabbage patches were much preferred by many people over the honest and rational penis, ejaculation, vagina, sperm, egg – and look what happened. Unwanted, untimely, unexpected pregnancies abounded in this country. Sex was too large a life subject to be relegated to the stork or the cabbage patch. The same is true about death and grief: they defy reduction, and it can’t be done successfully.

  I believe that each person on this earth is in reality in a fight for life. Though conditions concerning this fight differ greatly, the fight continues. Part of this battle is the tension created by confronting a larger than life experience such as birth or death, and the necessary humor that we use to embrace these serious sobering issues and not become so overwhelmed by them that we are paralyzed. At times and at certain places humor has its place.

  My son has fights in his own life, serious sobering life issues which have taken time, love, more love and more time. However, as serious as his challenges are, the other night he told a story about one of his roommates in the place that is trying to help him and the story involved this chap using crack cocaine. Trust me folks, I have never ever thought cocaine was a humorous subject, but by the time my son was finished telling this ridiculous story I was laughing my ass off.

  It is not unusual then, based on the following analysis, that the more serious the human problem, the more likely it is to become a subject for humor. This I believe is the embryo of undertaker jokes. They hurt, they sting, and yes they are horribly boorish, but I believe they stem from something much deeper, much more profound than a knock knock joke.

  The other side of humor, while it can be caustic and rude, is that it also can be pure mental health. I had a professor in Boston once say that a good belly laugh was worth ten valium. I believe the good professor was correct.

  Humor reduces stress. This is clearly evident in funerals. I remember once a woman came running into the narthex of the church. The place was packed, and she saw me and came running over and in a loud voice said, “Do you have a car for the ball bearings?” I had no earthly idea what she was talking about. I asked her to repeat her question. She yelled in a loud excited voice “My son is one of the ball bearings, do you have a car to take him to the cemetery?” Okay, now I got it. Pall bearers, were, at this particular funeral, transformed into ball bearings. Everyone in hearing distance started to laugh, and finally the woman blurted out, “Oh my God, I mean the pall bearers car – good God what did I say?”

  Here were people in grief, and out of the blue humor popped its head up, and people released their tension. Looking closely at community rituals and practices one realizes quickly that there are many ways that people try to manage their anxiety about death – and usually some form of humorous acting out is a silent yet powerful companion to such activities. Let’s take Halloween for instance.

  I used to love Halloween when I was a child. I still love Halloween and relish staying home and handing out all the goodies to the goblins, witches, ninja warriors, and Star Wars people who ring my doorbell. Great fun and I get a great laugh out of it.

  The theme and history of Halloween, no matter how well it is disguised, is unquestionably death. Interestingly, on Halloween parents can – without even knowing it – act out their death anxieties in a socially accepted manner. They dress their children up in the symbols of death – skeleton suits, death masks, and ghostly dress. They send their children out into the dark of night, fully aware of the hazards, but willing to take that calculated risk (on a temporary basis) so as to have it all over with and then the little ones return back to normal, safe, secure ground in only a few hours. Once again, risking death culminates in safe and secure ground, but with the accompanying delusion still present. The delusion, of course, is that the reality of death is ever present. On the serious side, we all know that some little ones every year never make it home from their night of trick or treats, some are poisoned, some are kidnapped, and some are murdered. Yet the risk is still taken, and to be sure it is a calculated risk on the parent’s part, for unquestionably they are skirting death. It is a powerful silent symbolic death lesson whether people are aware of it consciously or not.

  If a person were to stand back and take a rational and objective look at the strange and bizarre behaviors that take place on Halloween night, one would have difficulty making sense of it – unless that person sensed its deeper meaning, which many people do sense to be sure. All Soul’s Day, after all, is one of the major events in the Christian Church calendar. I believe that when parents accept the events of Halloween and take the calculated risks involved, they are probably expressing their need for a symbolic, socially approved way of getting close, and possibly dealing with, albeit temporarily, their own death-anxiety.

  Certainly our behavior at Halloween is lighthearted and humorous. The holy drama of the death and resurrection of Jesus lacks humor, yet its function may also be related in a big way to the emotional needs expressed in its sportive counterpart. At Easter and Halloween, the theme of both is precisely the same: death.

  While I personally do not like undertaker jokes, I believe that when anybody confronts death honestly, whether it is in jest as in Halloween, or in all seriousness as in Easter, one may very well reduce the intense anxiety that surrounds the emotional hazard of personal death, personal grief, and personal dying.

   I believe that in laughing we tend to reduce the magnitude of the perceived threat. I suspect the worst approach is to not laugh at death or take death seriously – but instead to be indifferent to the subject. That possibility and today’s reality frightens me. Death illiterate, death indifferent people I believe can and do dangerous things, for if one is numb, desensitized, neutral, immune, and utterly indifferent to death I believe they will be the same to life. I have a suspicion that it is better for young people to use humor with each other than to kill each other.

  Grief and death are sobering subjects. Sex is a sobering subject. Financial security is a sobering subject. Health care is a sobering subject. These subjects are so sobering that if humor is not injected, if some light hearted comment is not made the reverse of healing and help will certainly occur. Fear will take over, and while this might be a great motivator, too much fear stops the human experience of questing for personal peace and contentment in its tracks.

   When the humor eventually comes my way about my job, the endless undertaker jokes, I try to understand, have a laugh, and not take it too seriously. Not too long ago a man came up to me and said “Todd do you know the definition of self-control?” I did not know the answer, so the man replied, “It is the undertaker trying to look sad at an $80,000 funeral!” He laughed and laughed. I patted him on the back and said “That is a good one.”

  Emotionally, physically, spiritually and socially it is just possible that the humor people employ to face death and grief may be a useful and necessary device for reducing one’s own anxieties to small sized bites which are palpable and manageable. What I used to view as offensive and inappropriate is, I believe, in context, quite valid and helpful.