I laughed, hard. The anecdotes the guy was telling me were really funny. It was almost hard to believe the stories were true, but they were. The fact that they were about the antics of the residents of a facility for Alzheimer’s patients made it all the more unbelievable. The guy who lived on the east coast believed that there was material here for a potential sitcom. The facilities, and I, were on the west coast, so the guy asked me to go check things out.

I got in touch with the owners, friends of the east coast guy, and arranged to tour their facility. I was
surprised to drive into a residential area. The facility was actually two homes next to each other. Inside there was no hospital feel, more like a dorm or hospice with some medical features. Each patient had his or her own room. I was impressed by the arrangement. One of the workers showed me around the facility. I asked about some of the stories I had been told and he assured me they were true and told me some I had not heard. Some funny stuff for sure.

We passed by a room and I stopped as something had caught my eye. The room was quite plain, neatly made up. There was a bed, chest of drawers and a night table. But on top of the chest was a suitcase. I asked if a new patient had just moved in. My guide told me no, this is Joe’s room. Joe is waiting for his family to come pick him up and take him home. My guide said that it had been Joe’s family that had dropped him off. I asked how long Joe had been in the facility. I was told, four years.

That piece of news hit me like a sledgehammer. It made everything else I had seen or heard a moot point. Because looking at everything now in CONTEXT diminished the humor of any individual event real fast. Joe wasn’t getting out of the place, ever. Barring a miracle or an amazing breakthrough in curing Alzheimer’s, there was no hope under these circumstances. In the face of that I didn’t much feel like laughing.

I reported back to the east coast guy that I didn’t see this as material for a sitcom. While I hadn’t thought about it before, I realized that isolated, funny stuff alone might get a laugh, but long-term, it needs to be couched in hope. Humor may very well be steeped in pain, but I need to know, I need to believe, that pain is going to stop.

A big, fat guy walking down the street slips on a banana peel and falls down – funny.

A big, fat guy walking down the street slips on a banana peel and falls down, breaks his back, greenstick fracture and starts leaking spinal fluid – not so funny.

Except maybe to a room full of comedy writers.