Laugh? I Thought I'd Die

"Death is easy. Comedy is hard." These words were spoken to me by Peter O'Toole on his death bed. Well, okay. It wasn't his death bed. It was in a movie: "My Favorite Year." He wasn't dying then. Not in the sense that he died earlier this year. He was dying in a much more metaphorical sense. Dying in the realm of comedy is a death much worse than, well, death. I carry with me the times that I have stood in front of a group of faces with confused or angry stares: Was that supposed to be funny?
Like the time I was at a party in the warehouse of my former employer. Bookpeople from days gone by had come to revel in their collective past and to catch up on the way things turned out. At some point, our cook (yes we had our own cook and now figure out how the company eventually went out of business) brought out a tray of her very chocolate frosted brownies. At that moment, a little girl, who would have been a next-gen Bookperson if the company hadn't folded, tossed a beach ball that landed squarely in the middle of the pan, leaving a dull imprint of beach ballness on the entire dessert. "Well," I intoned in my best parental tones, "it looks like you're going to have to eat all those brownies."
A little jest. A bit of silliness. Then came the voice of the little girl's mother, shocked and dismayed. "She's diabetic."
And this is a moment which I am alternately extremely proud and periodically ashamed of: I turned to this woman, who I did not know, and said, "Actions have consequences. I guess she should have thought about that before she threw the ball."
The look of horror was not reserved for the mother's face. Several others gathered near had the same reaction. I had rendered them speechless. No one laughed, but inside, I was celebrating the scene which I had just created.
Was it funny? To me. Would I rather be dead? No, but it would have been a lot easier if someone would have laughed. So maybe Edmund Kean didn't have it exactly right. Maybe it was Steve Martin who had it pegged: Comedy is not pretty.