Comedy: The Stuff of Tragedy

Fair warning: this one’s a doozy. It gets as dark as dark gets.

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child I, 1896. I have no proof that Edvard Munch is a distant relative, but it would hardly surprise me.

“Life is a joke, and death is the punchline.”

—Amigo the Devil

“Where do you get your ideas?” I get this question a lot, mostly from aspiring writers. They want to know if there’s some secret, some tool they haven’t accessed yet that will set them on a creative tear. I could offer a lot of bullshit answers, but the only answer I’m 100% confident in is this—it helps to come from a fucked-up family.

This is not a defense of the tortured artist. It’s just an observation that it helps to have a well of experience to draw from. In no particular order, what follows is a snapshot of my family tree, going back to my great-grandparents on either side: we have drunks, junkies, and pill-poppers; philanderers, floozies, cheaters, adulterers, adulteresses (and when they come up with a nonbinary term for this, we’ll likely check that box, too); gangsters, gang-bangers (wannabe and authentic), a Hell’s Angel, and Flea Brothers; thieves, fraudsters, armed robbers, and a stick-up man; racists, misogynists, and homophobes; wife beaters, child abusers, deadbeat dads, and bullies; gamblers, both professional and degenerate; and every shade of mental illness, from depression and anxiety to psychosis, borderline personality disorder, and schizophrenia.

Coming up with people like this in your line of sight leaves you with a lot of stories. After all, in the simplest terms, a story is about a character in conflict, and my family is pretty skilled in creating conflict. In the interest of not upsetting anyone, I’ll use the catchall term “relative” to share a few stories I’ve heard, witnessed, or experienced from this crooked family tree.

One relative spent a few days in LA County lockup after beating his wife. He had a full head of gray hair at the time, and he’d never actually done time, but he was also a practicing racist and homophobe, so jail was a good place for him. “When I was in the holding cell,” he said, “the biggest, blackest mother fucker in the joint walked over and looked me up and down. I thought I was cooked. Then he pointed at a skinny black guy on the bench and told him, ‘Get up and let grandpa sit down.’ I thought he was gonna kill me and instead he found me a seat. [Brothers] aren’t all bad.” He didn’t use the word ‘brothers,’ though, and he easily overlooked the fact that beating his wife led to his moral growth (however limited it may have been).

Other relatives hosted me one summer when I was 14. While at a mall, I casually mentioned that my head hurt. They dipped into their purses, which were basically mobile pharmacies, and gave me a couple of Valium, reasoning that the Ativan might be too much. After I passed out on a display bed in the Sears home goods section, they tipped a sales clerk to keep an eye on me so they could continue shopping.

Another pair of relatives—a husband and wife—got married and divorced seven times with the same ring. When it went to hell the last time, he tried to choke her. This was about the time the Atari 2600 came out, and she had put some time in on Ms. Pac-Man, so her grip was pretty solid. She managed to clench his thumbs and leave him with two broken bones. This led to two questions that he heard again and again: one, How are you gonna wipe your ass? And two, What did you do, ask for the ring back?

I’ve told my wife these stories (and so many more), and I’m usually laughing when I do so. To be clear, I’m laughing the way I laugh during Blazing Saddles or an episode of All in the Family. I’m not laughing with them, I’m laughing at them. “I don’t know how you survived all that,” my wife has said. The laughter is how you survive.

Pity, bitterness, rage, sadness, fear, dread, and, worst of all, hopelessness—these can kill you. I mean that literally. I’ve noticed that when I’m overwhelmed, when I’m dealing with depravity and dysfunction, I’ll stop breathing. I’ll involuntarily hold my breath. I’ve also noticed that when I do that, I’m often looking for a joke, a bit, or a wisecrack. Looking for the humor, however shameless or perverse, leads to laughter, and there is breathing in laughter, a stirring of life that reminds me I’m still alive.

The old adage goes that comedy equals tragedy plus time. Let’s unpack that. Tragedy is chaos. It’s when order falls apart. It’s when the banana peel leads to a broken hip. When the man betrays his family. When the young woman succumbs to a mental illness she never asked for. When you add time to chaos, you get distance, perspective, and point of view. You can reframe the tragedy to highlight what went wrong and move in a different direction, unburdened, driven by that levity.

All this to say, my sister died a couple weeks ago. She was 42. She hanged herself in a closet with a furniture strap. She had attempted suicide several times before this, so it wasn’t a surprise. But at the same time, it was. When I got the news, the world seemed to shift all around me, shaky and unstable. And every day since, I’ll notice myself not breathing. I look for a laugh, but my body and mind seem to be bracing for an earthquake, and I can’t find so much as a crooked smile. Sometimes, it seems, there is no punchline.

Over the years, we’ve gotten bits and pieces of her diagnoses. The doctors will only tell so much for legal reasons, which seems to work directly against the needs of someone with mental illness, but that’s a tragedy to deal with another time. When it came to my sister, we heard these terms: depression, anxiety, any number of personality disorders—narcissistic, borderline, bipolar— as well as paranoia, schizophrenia, and psychosis, many of them treatment-resistant. Suicide seemed inevitable.

When she was younger and healthier, she was charming, quick with a smile and brimming with charisma. Her freshman year of high school, she straightened and bleached her hair, decided she didn’t like it, and dyed it back. It fell out in clumps. So she was baldheaded in the mid-90s, pretty much just her and Sinéad O’Connor. Still, she tried out for cheerleading with a bald head and made the squad. And it wasn’t charity or pity. At her best, she could stoke enthusiasm from thin air, and clearly, they felt it.

Still, I struggle to conjure good memories of my sister. My mental health struggles are inward—depression and anxiety that make me beat myself up. Hers were inward, too, but mostly outward. She lashed out. She attacked and bullied. She manipulated and gaslit. She twisted the fabric of reality until it snapped back and cut everyone caught in the bind. My relationship ended with her, legally and spiritually, when I had to obtain a restraining order against her after several episodes in which she threatened my family. It was the right thing to do, and I don’t regret it, but it complicates grief.

As I struggle to grieve her, I come back to old faithful—to laughter. She did share my sense of humor. With our family tree, how could she not? And she did have a great laugh, the kind that shakes the whole body and nods to the joy in the absurd and the sacred in the profane.

As mental illness consumed her over the years, paranoid delusions became a larger part of her reality. She believed them with such conviction that she could make you question your own sanity. She was so possessed by them that I could hardly see the sister I once knew in the muck and mire of what was left of her. Before she hanged herself, she wrote a slapdash suicide note on the walls in black marker. The note accused all manner of forces that were conspiring against her—her family, the legal system, the local police, the FBI, and the Kardashians.

I’ve been reflecting on why I do this, why I write with an angle on humor and laughter. A good friend of mine, a man who, along with his wife, has endured more trauma and tragedy than anyone I’ve encountered, read one of my stories and sent me a text that said, “You’ve got me laughing my balls off over here!” Profound suffering is no match for someone open to joy and laughter.

It’s easy to write off my sister’s suicide note as nothing but tragic insanity, but that last bit about the Kardashians gives me pause. My sister was drowning in illness, no doubt crippled by dread and paranoia, but the utter silliness of the Kardashians paired with the FBI, the ridiculousness of it, it makes me smile. Imagine a cancer patient, one who winks or gives your finger a squeeze just before passing, a gesture to let you know she’s still in there beneath the pain and degradation. I can see my sister in that context. Swap cancer for mental illness, the wink for a wacky reference to lip fillers, butt implants, and pop culture shenanigans, and she’s in there, wrestling with the demons of her life, alive in that last moment, fighting to find the punchline.

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Note: this was published with the blessing of my mom who loved my sister as much as the mental illness would allow, and then some.