Losing a loved one is devastatingly sad ― but grieving doesn’t only involve tears. Sometimes, it’s not just nice but necessary for grief to include laughter.
“My dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and then a year later he passed away, and then the next day I went to a cafe, and they were all out of oat milk, so it’s like, ‘Pile! It! On!’” is how Los-Angeles based comedian Alyssa Limperis hard-launches her recent Peacock special “No Bad Days,” a wonderful tribute to her fun-loving, positive father, Jim.
Limperis’s show is part of a rise of recent comedy specials from comedians who are recognizing our appetite for joking through one of the most un-funny topics there can be: The death of a loved one. Marc Maron and Michael Cruz Kayne are two other recent examples of comedians, among many, who have been making grief the topic of their specials.
The COVID pandemic might be one reason for the recent rise, according to Limperis. “We’ve all experienced grief on such a massive scale that I think everyone’s worlds got shaken up that I’m sure everyone started wanting to talk more about what they were feeling and what was going on in their life,” she told HuffPost.
In this way, grief comedy recognizes that sadness is not the only way to process loss. “A lot of what we all do every day is avoid thinking about death because it’s so scary and big,” Limperis said. “Comedy just helps to be like, ‘Well, we don’t have to go all the way there if we don’t want. We can just laugh and joke about it a little.’ Which maybe just lightens the entryway into talking about it. And then once you’re talking about it, you’re like, ‘OK, now we can be more serious.’”
In Limperis’ special, the show’s pace changes physically when she describes her dad’s death in detail. Limperis goes from jogging to slowly walking in a circle to lying on the ground as she describes her dad entering a coma for seven days before dying. Limperis then talks about how she still feels her dad in the sky and the places she visits. The audience is completely hushed at this point, but then Limperis goes into the audience and asks an audience member if they happen to feel the presence of her dead father next to them in an empty seat. The person laughs and agrees, and the rest of the audience starts laughing and clapping.
“Going into the audience was always a way of being like, ‘I’m not going to let you sit. You have to be a part of this with me.’ And it was always very fun ’cause it kind of broke the tension of that soft moment,” Limperis said.
If we’re laughing about it, that likely means we’re also feeling and relating to it.
- Comedian Alyssa Limperis
Ben Wasserman also explores grief through comedy, particularly in his show “Live After Death,” which takes place in a funeral home in Brooklyn, New York. Wasserman lost his father, grandfather, uncle and four friends within three years. At a funeral director friend’s suggestion, he started doing his comedy about grief in spaces we normally associate with sadness and death.
Wasserman said the setting could be a way to try to transform those spaces both for audience members and the death institutions themselves. “A lot of funeral homes and cemeteries, whatever they are, want to build a relationship with their community that exists beyond you come in when you’re dead or when you’re about to die,” he told HuffPost.
Wasserman’s show relies largely on crowd participation. One of the bits is Wasserman spinning a wheel of vulnerability with topics like “Last Will and Testament” and “Final Words” and inviting people to start sharing where the wheel lands. Those unexpected reactions people share about their losses keep the show honest.
“Death is real and comes for us all, and you don’t actually know how it’s going to shake out,” Wasserman said. “In that spirit just sort of flowing with the energy in the room and just calling on someone like, ‘Hey, you in the glasses, who are you thinking about tonight?’ And, like, that lets me start. Once I get them to start talking about who they’ve lost, then I can be like, ‘Do you remember their final words?’”
It also serves as a reminder that the comedic-vulnerable interaction can be a two-way street, and sometimes all you need is someone giving you permission to laugh so that you can start being more open about your grief, too.
“If we’re laughing about it, that likely means we’re also feeling and relating to it,” Limperis said. “It’s good. It means people are seeing themselves in it, relating to it and getting some catharsis and feeling of not being quite as alone.”
Making jokes about loss can be a way to find community with fellow grievers who get it.
Grief humor can happen across other mediums, as well. In Jason Roeder’s 2023 book “Griefstrike! The Ultimate Guide To Mourning,” the former senior editor and writer at The Onion has created a parody of a grief self-help manual that includes sections titled, “How Much Am I Allowed to Blame God?: A State-By-State Breakdown” and “Breaking The News To Planet Fitness: Your Postmortem Notification Checklist.”
Roeder said his goal with the book was for it to act as a friend in a difficult time. “When you’re looking for resources, like in the weeks and months after someone dies, you come across some really excellent ones for sure. But there’s a sort of solemn or nurturing tone that has kind of a weight of its own,” he told HuffPost. “I thought, ‘OK, well, let’s just come up with something that is really irreverent for someone who is still in the midst of their grief but just wants to deal with it a little bit differently for 150 pages.’”
Roeder’s humor book does what I’ve seen a lot of comedians do when talking about grief: Balancing the jokes with moments of vulnerability that are not played for laughs and reassuring the audience that their jokes are grounded in personal stakes.
Throughout his book, Roeder has “sincerity corner” footnotes where he reveals that a lot of the humor is drawing from real-world experiences of his mother’s death, Phyllis, in 2019. Roeder said the sincerity corners were a way to communicate “that the person behind all these jokes is an actual person who knows what you went through.”
It’s not just professional comedians and humor writers who use their platforms to make jokes about personal tragedy, either. For example, if you are on TikTok long enough, you will encounter #Deathtok, including hospice care providers, morticians and young people using the comedic audio and visual effects within TikTok videos to share darkly humorous insights about what it’s like to see someone you love die.
It’s also a call to other people who have been there to say like, ‘I see you. Do you see me?’
- Jesse Moss, Experience Camps' senior marketing manager
For example, one of the TikTok trends last year was to disclose a personal trauma like losing a loved one set to the tonally dissonant soundtrack of PSY’s “Gangnam Style.”
Ashley Eisenbraun, who is based in Memphis, Tennessee, and goes by @reallycoolgirl29 on TikTok, said she posted a video as part of the trend a few days after the funeral of her father, who died from COVID. Her TikTok video begins with Eisenbraun’s face captioned with “Dad gets Covid but he’s healthy and not too old, so he’ll be fine!” Then the video suddenly transitions to spinning images of her father’s casket as the chorus of “Heyy sexy lady” from “Gangnam Style” plays.