"Oh shit. Should I be joking at a time like this?"

When I first called my therapist to tell her the news of my diagnosis, I could not stop laughing. "Oh it is not funny," I said before another fit of manic giggles, "like this is really not funny, wow."

Except... it definitely is.

Cancer is absurd. Even just conceptually, it is dumb that my body has spontaneously decided to make immortal mutant cells that are killing me from the inside. It is so silly that I sit in chemo wearing giant frozen mittens and slippers on my hands and feet so that they don't fall asleep. The fact that the doctors told me I was "perfectly healthy" in the same breath as telling me I have cancer is hilarious.

Most of comedy is just a game of playing with tension and release. Dark comedy is the same game but with higher stakes, and what stakes are higher than life and death?

When you have cancer, or when you love someone who has cancer, the tension is constant. Cancer is literally inside me but also all around me: the calendar of endless doctor appointments; the pile of care packages from kind friends and family and neighbors; the bottles of medication labeled with names I can't pronounce; the hair left behind on my pillow in the morning; the tired faces of my family that clearly haven't slept well in weeks.

In my experience the only way to relieve the nonstop tension is to a) cry or b) laugh. There's been plenty of a) happening behind closed doors, don't you worry. But b) is the one that I actually care to document and share with people. Maybe in time this blog will become option c).

Sometimes I worry that me making dark jokes has the opposite effect on people, that it creates tension that then isn't relieved at all because to them the punchline isn't funny. There's a real chance that some of my family and friends are included in that list of people. I can't convince anyone to suddenly like dark comedy, but hopefully you can at least understand a little better why it seems like I can never not make a joke. It's the only way I can get any distance from my situation to process it. It's as if cracking stupid jokes is letting a little bit of steam out of a pressure cooker - except the pressure cooker is my brain and it will explode if I don't.

The mathematic equation for comedy is supposed to be tragedy plus time. We've got the tragedy part covered. Frankly, I really don't know what kind of time I have, and I am not an especially patient person who can wait around to find out. I hope it's lots of time. So much that it outweighs the tragedy and I can move on to joking about other things because "that time I had cancer" is a distant memory.

In the meantime, I intend to laugh my way through "that time I had cancer" (or die trying.)