i only laugh...

It's odd how people use humour as a defence mechanism. Me and a friend were talking about it at new years's, how everything seems a thousand times funnier when you know you shouldn't be laughing. Ever seen the episode of Coupling, with the giggle-loop? It's so true.
It's an awful habit. And, incidentally, one of my oldest tricks. If you're making people laugh, they can't see how you're really feeling. Which is why I couldn't stop making jokes when my granny died, why I got the giggles when I broke up with my boyfriend, why I have to take the piss out of scary films when I'm chicken-shit underneath.

A woman from my drama group was on holiday in Thailand over the holiday season (can you see where this story is going?) and she got caught in the tsunami. Having swum out of the swimwear shop (they were shopping for a snorkel, the irony was apparently not appreciated) and clambered up on to the roof, her and her husband were left with a group of Thai locals, trying to find things to laugh about. They sat there, with bodies bobbing past them in the water, and told silly jokes, to try and distance themselves from the shock of it all.
Another friend of a friend was out there at the time, and in reply to a frantic "are you alive?" message, he txted the phrase "Surf's up!" to his friends and family across the world. Why? It seemed damn funny at the time when half the island he was staying on was submerged.

I guess you have to deal with things somehow. People bottle stuff up, they tell their friends, they tell complete strangers, they write it on the internet where they're not even sure if anyone will read it. We have these defense mechanisms, like puffer fish. We make inappropriate jokes and laugh like crazy when we know we shouldn't. We all have our shit to bear, all have to learn to laugh it off.