Mahanth S. Joishy is Editor

FUNNY

Gallows humor is a type of humor that makes light of serious, grim, or morbid situations, often involving death, tragedy, or disaster. It’s a way of finding humor in the face of hopelessness or suffering. – ChatGPT 4o

Gallows humor is the act of making light of or finding humor in serious, frightening, or painful situations. In essence, it’s the art of laughing at the grim reaper while he’s trying to tell you a joke. – Grok / X

When you have appointments at a cancer hospital 2-3 times per week for intensive treatments, tests, and physician consultations as I’ve been experiencing for more than the last year, you are bound to spend many hours anxiously waiting in grim waiting rooms overflowing with sick patients, mostly on the older side, and their loved ones. Possibly followed by hours of very unpleasant treatments and multiple days of nasty side effects. The hospital I frequent (including for 8 hours last Friday) is incredibly busy, and I can’t remember the last time the parking ramp wasn’t so stuffed to the gills that I could park anywhere lower than the very top floor.

Business is booming in the healthcare industry!

Unfortunately not all the customers are going to make it. This concept is not foreign to me. I spent the summer of 1995 at age 16 volunteering at an excellent hospice program run by the Trappistine Sisters in Parma, Ohio with my cousin Rahul. My dad referred patients to the Holy Family Home from the Palliative Care ward in the famous Cleveland Clinic nearby, and he deposited us teenagers there one fine day before we had any idea what we were in for that summer. Our primary job would be patient care, but the experience was ultimately defined by death above all else.

Everyone in there we were nursing was quite frankly a terminal patient in the process of dying sooner or later. We worked only in the male ward shadowing the full-time male nurses. A number of the mostly elderly bedridden men we were bathing, shaving, feeding, pushing around outside by wheelchair for a stroll in the fresh air, and talking to throughout those activities, died one by one that summer. I’ll never forget that experience, not just because of Yama, the God of Death haunting the halls where we did our rounds each shift, but because of how great the adult male nurses who supervised and mentored Rahul and I were to work with. Seeing the eerily empty beds where new friends had just lay on my previous shift, I learned hard lessons that summer about death and suffering, along with the awesome power of compassion and dignity for people who were down. I learned at the time that nursing was one of the most noble and respectable professions humanly possible, but the emotional toll would be too much for me for wanting to pursue a longer career in the medical field.

One of the ways both patients and staff coped with the morbidity hanging over the place was with gallows humor, which flowed like a waterfall every single time I was at the Holy Family Home. I’d like to believe the full-time staff, despite a wide variety of personalities between them, enjoyed having us teens shadow them as much as we liked shadowing them due to the change of routine, and they would ratchet the humor up a notch.

I have promised to fight to the gates of Hell to win this ordeal, but that’s not the point. Little did I know at the time that I’d become a cancer patient myself in my early 40s, but the lesson about humor during difficult situations definitely endures. I’m now on a mission to create a ruckus of laughter in every situation I’m in, including at the hospital. Just for kicks, I’m going to share a few go-to jokes that seem to work well to elicit laughter beyond just the obligatory polite chuckles. WARNING: PG-13 :