How can we cry without laughing?

Wednesday night, I couldn’t help but vomit. We were at war.

After flushing the toilet,… Wednesday night, I couldn’t help but vomit. We were at war.

After flushing the toilet, I said, “I never thought I’d draw a comparison between war with Iraq and half a fifth of Tullamore Dew.” To understand the comment, you’d have to know that, the previous Saturday night, I drank half a fifth of Tullamore Dew whiskey, then spent an hour vomiting.

At this point, I vomited again.

“Well, my grandfather always said, ‘If you can’t cry, vomit.'”

So that’s my response to war, now that I’m an adult. Vomiting, and perhaps no less appalling, a string of awful jokes. There was, however, plenty of crying later.

I needed to laugh then, and I need to laugh now, horribly inappropriate as it may seem, when people have died and are dying.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, one of the first coherent things I said was a joke, and one that wondered whether the Afghan rebels that Rambo aided in “Rambo III” were future Taliban leaders.

It may have only been funny within the confines of my family, where the latter two Rambo movies (which cannot be taken seriously) are a longstanding tradition. But, insensitive as the comment may seem, it was about all I could do to keep from simply going catatonic from sour emotional reflection. And I couldn’t cry until I had first laughed.

Perhaps it is my family history that leads to this. On the paternal, Irish side of my family, funeral services end with a trip to a bar, where everyone of age gets loaded and repeatedly recounts every funny story they know about the recently deceased relative. “Check your mourning at the door,” they seem to be saying.

It’s not a very apt comparison to war, but I remember when Douglas Adams, my favorite author, died, and fans from around the world logged on to his Web site and wrote little notes reflecting on the matter. A friend of mine suggested I do the same. But when I got to the site, I read some of the responses, and every one that I read was very somber and poignant. It struck me that, if Douglas were reading these responses, he would have wanted some jokes to take his mind off the fact that he was dead. I never wrote a response, because I didn’t think I was funny enough to make Douglas Adams laugh.

In his posthumous book, “The Salmon of Doubt,” one of Douglas’ essays notes that Monty Python made him realize that, “comedy was a medium in which extremely intelligent people could express things that simply couldn’t be expressed any other way.” I would say that it doesn’t necessarily require intelligence to do so (although, as Douglas proves, it certainly helps) and that one of those “things” is grief.

It turns my stomach to make jokes at a time like this. Perhaps that’s why I must. We can’t understand good except in terms of evil, can’t truly appreciate how lucky we are until we’re not. And in that dichotomous vein, I can’t be solemn without understanding mirth. Or maybe I just need to be distracted.

For whatever reason, I needed to laugh, and, more importantly, I needed someone to laugh with me. Seeing a smile last night may have been morbidly inappropriate, but at times like this, it reminds me why the world makes sense, even when events defy understanding.

Marty Flaherty cringes to think that this column will be printed next to a picture of his smiling face, and doubts that his smile will make sense of anything for any of you. E-mail: xgrp@hotmail.com.