THU
Something happened today
I called it the truth laugh. There is a kind of absurdity where you laugh because the thing is so recognizably true that the only other option is to bang your head against the wall. Customer service is a gold mine for this. You tell somebody you have been robbed, metaphorically speaking, and the response is a six-step procedure requiring two forms, three phone calls, a verification code sent to the device you no longer have, and a reminder that the department handling your problem is currently experiencing unusually high call volume.
The hitchhiker joke worked because the driver’s response was so grotesquely inadequate to the catastrophe he had just heard. A long explanation of the suffering would have made the scene more solemn. The tiny understatement captured the absurdity so perfectly that I had to laugh, even while recognizing that the situation described was awful.
The truth laugh had a peculiar quality. It wasn't necessarily loud. Sometimes it was the small involuntary laugh that escapes when a sentence captures exactly how absurd something has become. The ridiculous hitchhiker scene worked because the understatement came after something so terrible that a conventional expression of sympathy would have seemed impossibly inadequate. I was laughing at the mismatch, not at the suffering.
That distinction mattered to me. Humour is not automatically kind because it is funny. A joke can make somebody feel smaller. This kind of laughter, when it works, does almost the opposite: it recognizes a truth that people have been struggling to name. The laughter says, I see it too. I found that more companionable than a grand lecture about why an institution or a situation was ridiculous. There are days when a perfectly timed little sentence carries all the understanding I need.
I know the particular laugh that comes from hearing something so absurdly recognizable that the laughter arrives before the explanation. In a frustrating exchange with an institution, a piece of language may expose the whole problem more efficiently than five paragraphs of complaint. It doesn’t solve anything, but for a moment the situation becomes visible in a different light.
That mattered because humour had become a way of staying engaged without being consumed. Laughing at an absurdity isn’t necessarily avoiding reality; sometimes it’s how I manage to look directly at it. I still needed to check that the joke was fair. The pleasure of recognizing something didn’t exempt me from understanding it.
That mixture interested me. The laughter wasn’t evidence that harm had become harmless or that I enjoyed somebody’s suffering. It came from recognizing the gap between what the situation deserved and the almost comically small response it received. I began thinking about moments in my own dealings with institutions when a serious problem had been answered with a routine instruction. Sometimes the distance between those two realities was so large that laughter seemed more precise than another paragraph of outrage.
At some point, the situation crosses a line. You laugh. Not because it is funny in the ordinary sense. Not because you stopped caring. Not because the harm is harmless. Because the absurdity has become a perfect little sculpture of the truth. I thought about an old joke where a hitchhiker has been robbed and beaten and left half dead on the side of the road. He manages to stop an eighteen-wheeler and tells the driver everything that happened. The driver listens sympathetically and then basically says, Boy, it just ain’t your fucking day. Horrible.
