It Hurts To Laugh!

By Helen E. H. Madden

At the beginning of this week, Lisabet paid me a humongous complement by calling me funny. I'm glad she thinks I'm funny. Actually, I hope lots of people think I'm funny. I make my living, such as it is, by being funny. And let me tall ya, being funny is a lot of hard work!

Being sexy is also a lot of work, but not like being funny. Being funny is worse. People will put themselves through all sorts of torture to look sexy - think corsettes, high heels, bikini waxes, the hours spent in the gym with some sadist named Hans to get those bulging biceps and six-pack abs. All that stuff hurts, right? But humor exacts a far more painful toll. Mel Brooks once said, "Tragedy is if I cut my finger. Comedy is when I fall into an open sewer and die!" He was not joking about that.

Think about the last thing funny that happened to you. It probably wasn't funny when it happened, was it? But memory and the passage of time have a way of bringing out the humor in the most painful moments of your life. I often like to relate the tale of how I gave birth to my second child some years ago. Now that was painful, probably more painful than anything else I've ever done in my life. It was like pushing an object the size of a bowling ball out of a hole in my body the size of a grape. I tore of course, right up the front into the naughty bits. Any of that sound funny? No, you're probably too busy wincing over the whole tear-into-the-naught-bits thing to laugh, right? How about if I also mention that the drugs I was given for pain management did NOTHING for the pain, but did allow me to communicate with my dead grandmother and Attila the Hun? Yeah, that was a fun conversation. I'm trying to squeeze out a baby, I'm tearing into my clitoris, and I've got my dead grandmother standing to one side of me saying, "Honey, get off your ass and push!" And Attila the Hun is on the other side nodding and shouting, "Listen to Babushka! Push, woman, push! You must give birth to the entire Hun army" To this day, my husband and my obstetrician still wonder who I was talking to when I screamed "Will both of you fuck off!" in the delivery room.

Now in spite of the fact that I made specific, explicit mention of my genitals in that previous story, we still haven't achieved that which Lisabet praised me for earlier this week - sexy humor. It's not a hard combination to achieve, however. Remember, if comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die, and your mind already lives in the gutter, it really is a short trip to Ha-Ha Land. Still need a road map to get there? Start by recalling the most embarrassing moments in your sex life. Like the time the Hubster and I were trying out a complicated new sex position that involved him holding me upside down while kneeling so we could perform 69. I ended up with my head trapped in the nightstand, bare ass shoved in his face, legs splayed everywhere. And I couldn't get out of that position! It was humiliating, and even worse, my then-fiance, love of my life, couldn't stop laughing at my predicament and pointing at my exposed behind. Naturally, I blew up at him and it was a week before we had sex again. But that was years ago and nowadays I look back on that night and have to chuckle myself. I mean, it was kind of funny. And of course I remember that while playing racquet ball later that week, I did inadvertently get revenge on my husband by smacking him in the genitals with the ball. Twice. It was an ACCIDENT, I swear!

Other funny moments in my sex life. How about the time my husband and I were having sex in my college roommate's lazy boy and we broke the chair? After untangling ourselves and crawling out from the splintered remains of wood and upholstery, I found a dusty can of hash rolling around on the floor. Apparently someone else had broken the chair previously, knocking off a leg, and my roommate fixed it by propping it up with the hash. When I, still picking debris out of my ass, demanded to know why my roommate simply hadn't replaced the stupid chair, she stated, "First off, I'm cheap. Second, I don't have sex, so **I** certainly wasn't going to break the chair. Third, I sure as hell wasn't going to eat a can of hash, so what else was I supposed to do with it?"

It's amazing the things that I find funny about my sex life. I have suffered through broken condoms and infertility, quiffing and squirting breast milk into my husband's eye at the height of orgasm. I have fallen off the bed, out of the chair, and even once been dumped by a recalcitrant and poorly balanced coffee table, all while doing the nasty. I had a tent collapse around my ears while I screwed a man senseless. I even killed my husband once during a multiple-screaming-orgasm. Best sex of my life, I swear. But then while I basked in the after-glow, the Hubster's eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he collapsed on top of me, and suddenly I was screaming again as I tried to wriggle out from under him to grab the phone and call 911. Fortunately, he was only stunned, not dead ("He got better!"), and when he came to, he said, "Gee, that was great. I guess I should get up now, though, and get ready for karate class."

None of these events was funny at the time, but I'm betting you're all laughing now, and I say go ahead, laugh. Because A) turning my personal pain into humor is part of what I do for a living, and B) when it happens to you, I'll be laughing right back at ya. I promise };D

For more quotes on the definition of comedy, check here.

If you want a taste of my sexy funny writing, go here.

And to really see how funny I am, take a look at this place!