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Humor is a hemorrhoid cream for the hemorrhoid outbreaks of life. Growing up neurotic, laughter was my drug of choice in coping with pain/anxiety. I recall getting sick with the stomach flu at 11 years old; the nausea, chills, body aches, and dry vomiting caused intense panic. Particularly the dry vomiting. Intense, uncontrollable pain has a way of narrowing and disfiguring your worldview. As Jamie Mayerfeld comments, “In severe pain we are deprived of the world. Our pain begins to occupy all our thoughts, and to the extent we remain conscious of any other reality, it seems to us disconnected, unintelligible, false, empty, absurd.”1 In those desperate moments when my world was cold bathroom tiles and shivering I would think, ‘I do not want to go to hell, if hell is anything like the gasping, burning, asphyxiating pain of vomiting’.

In between capital E emergency trips to the bathroom (the crevices of my teeth caulked with regurgitation) I would stagger back to the couch, dazed and exhausted, to watch my VHS2 of “SNL: Best of Adam Sandler”. The relieving pleasure of laughter felt extra good compared to the twisted pain of dry heaving. I felt like Socrates, who after taking prison chains off his legs in the Phaedo said, “What a queer thing it is, my friends, this sensation which is popularly called pleasure! It is remarkable how closely it is connected with its conventional opposite, pain. . .I had a pain in my leg from a fetter, and now I feel the pleasure coming that follows it.”3 Sure, there can indeed be a “pendulum effect” when a person transitions from suffering to pleasure, but that doesn’t mean the subject always deems the whole process to be “worth it”. It’s perfectly reasonable to say “I felt terrible! Now I feel better. And I wish none of it had happened. . .”

That sort of panicky suffering makes you feel for people with Chronic Pain Syndrome. One could only hope that the estimated 1.5 billion people who suffer from CPS4 manage to find some intermittent relief in their sea of pain. The world is loaded with agony, and I guess in my idiosyncratic mind humor is the exasperated, symbolic, only-way-I-know-how way of standing with all those suffering beings and saying ‘fuck the world’ with all its pain and misery. Unfortunately (and pretty clearly!), this page of cartoons and humor art cannot satisfactorily address the issue of global ill-being. That’s up to the philosophers and scientists, those with cognitive ammunition. This page is just for those so inclined to lean back and for just a moment, smoke a cigarette with homeless, down-on-his-luck Ronald McDonald, or witness the first urination of a species.

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Citations

  1. Mayerfeld, Jamie. Suffering and Moral Responsibility. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.
  2. Disclaimer: For any younger people who aren’t familiar with “VHS”, it was a magical scotch tape that Nostradamus clearly predicted in Quatrain 73, line 3.
  3. I’m not telling.
  4. Sandro Galea. “Chronic Pain and the Health of Populations”. BU School of Public Health. Contributions by Gregory Cohen and Shui Yu. Posted on Sept. 24 2017. https://www.bu.edu/sph/2017/09/24/chronic-pain-and-the-health-of-populations/#:~:text=Globally%2C%20it%20is%20estimated%20that,with%20prevalence%20increasing%20with%20age. Accessed on Oct. 18 2020.

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