There was a man who found everything funny. He laughed constantly. He saw the funny side of funerals, earthquakes, airplane crashes, plague, famine...you name it.
``There's a funny side to everything,'' he used to say, ``you just have to find it.''
Sometimes it was a very good thing. When he and his family were stuck in the desert with a broken axle he managed to keep his children laughing even as they became seriously dehydrated. A local rancher rescued them. He resented their merriment and tried to impress on them the seriousness of their situation.
``You could have all died,'' he said, ``it's happened out here.''
``We know, we know,'' they shouted gleefully. And they rode cheerfully away packed in the tow truck cab chugging down soft drinks brought them by the rancher.
When he lost his leg in an accident the jokes he played with his fake leg were innumerable and often in poor taste.
``You can't stop laughing,'' he told his daughter when her boy friend died in an accident that could have been suicide.
Then he got viral meningitis. He awoke one night with the fever gone and a sense of such profound exhaustion that he found himself weeping. He was so weak he could hardly get out of bed, but somehow he found a Benny Hill video and got it in the VCR.