Remember the line from the Bare Naked Ladies song 'One Week', “I’m the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral, can’t understand what I mean, well you soon will.” Well, I’m the kind of girl who laughs at a funeral. I know it sounds so dark and cruel, but if you know me, you know I’m not like that. It’s a nervous reaction, just another part of the human condition. Some folks cry, some folks are blank, some folks laugh. I laugh, sometimes cry, but mostly laugh.

Today I had to attend a funeral. It was no one I knew personally. I was there in support of one of my students who had lost her father very suddenly. It was in a rather old funeral parlor. I sat in my chair and it let off a loud creak as all four legs bent in a highly precarious angle. I envisioned myself crashing to the ground right in the middle of a prayer or something. As it were, the chair held out, my laughter did not.

I was doing fine. In fact I thought I might make it through my first funeral laugh free. Yes indeed, laugh free, right up until the moment the preacher started giving a speech about how Jesus was commanded to rise from his grave. He read Psalms 23, talked about how we are all God’s children and how Jesus was God’s only son. Then he gets to the bit about rising from the grave when suddenly he screams out, arms flailing in the air, “When’s the last time you went to a funeral and shouted at the man in the casket, GET UP!”

I’m sure you’ve all experienced the laughter infection. It spreads. First you laugh to yourself. Then you realize you’re laughing and it’s not appropriate, so you begin to laugh harder. Soon you can’t control your heaving. I lost it. I imagined myself running up to the casket of a man I never knew and screaming, GET UP! I grasped my mouth with my hand to try to cover it up. The kid next to me thought I was crying and asked if I was ok. When I turned to him it got worse, then he started laughing when he realized I was laughing. I started the laughter infection. I felt bad, but I couldn’t stop.

Sometimes I just don’t care when I laugh. It’s a perfectly natural reaction. We’ve just drilled it into ourselves over the years that funerals should be all morbid and teary eyed. I know I can't truthfully claim this particular case of hysteria to be a nervous reaction, it really was just because of what that man said. I started to feel guilty, and it was not 10 minutes later I received my punishment for it, or so I’m convinced.

The wife of the man asked for everyone to pass the casket and pay their last respects. I had never even had the opportunity to meet this man, but of course I would say farewell. Then she says to start with the back left row. Oh yah, you know it, that’s ME! I froze like a deer in headlights. You’ve got to be kidding me. Clearly I am the one individual in this room with the most distant tie to this whole scenario and I’m supposed to go first!? So I nudged the kid next to me (yes I know him) and said, “You go first”. The counter, “No way, you go first, I’m not going first”. To which I replied, “Absolutely not, I’m not going first, you go first”. This banter went on for a moment and then we realized the entire congregation was staring, waiting for me to begin. I felt very, very awkward in that moment in time.
Ciao.