What’s Funny About It?
from Mary

Hello Ed:  My name is Mary.  I have had this awful skin condition since I was 7, I am now 33.  I know there are worse things you can have, and I do not feel sorry for myself. God does not give you more than you can handle.

I think it's great that you can find humor in this disease.  I have never been able find anything about it funny.  How do you do it?

I think being a woman definitely makes it tougher.  I hope your psoriasis improves.

Enlighten me with your humor.

*****

Ed’s Response:  Mary, humor in this condition is something you have to hunt for and always be prepared to accept when you stumble across it or it plops in your lap. 

I really don’t make up any jokes about P.

Most of the humor, or the stuff that I find funny, derives from irony. 

It’s ironic when what people say to us does not have its intended effect (check out Don’t Say This).

It’s ironic when the way we want people to perceive us is not the way they actually do — like when we hide our P under neck-to-ankle garments and people decide we’re prudish. 

It’s ironic when we feel so isolated about the way we must live — the things we must do to ‘manage’ our P — that we invent a jargon even if we just use it to talk to ourselves (check out Flaker Jargon).

And it’s ironic when love, compassion, joy seep through the misery and make us feel alive in spite of our disease. 

The biggest laughs here, Mary, don’t come from me, but from folks just like you.  You want a laugh right now?  Read this.  -Ed 

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