What I Learned From Laughter

I am old enough to remember when Rush Limbaugh, the shock-jock conservative radio host, celebrated the deaths of gay men, bisexual men, and trans women from AIDS on his show. In a segment called “AIDS Update,” he would read the names of the queer deceased while playing sound effects: whistles, bells, and other celebratory noises. He introduced the segment with Dionne Warwick’s “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” a cruel flourish that made clear exactly whose deaths he was mocking.

I was an ineffectively closeted teen growing up in a tiny farming community in rural Minnesota. My friends were shaped by a culture that was proudly anti-queer, anti-feminist, and openly racist. For them, it was funny to hear queer people mocked for the deaths they were said to have “earned.” Much like the Reagan administration in the 1980s, adults in my life would say, “Let the gay disease wipe ’em all out,” with a wink. Sometimes it was said with a nod in my direction. Other times, I was told outright: “You reap what you sow.” They may not have known exactly where I fell on the rainbow spectrum, but they knew enough to strike.

I learned lessons from this.

The first was that love was a disease. In part, this was literal. Queer men and trans women were dying from a virus transmitted through acts of intimacy and affection. But it went deeper. Expressing love, caring for others, standing beside the sick and dying were also painted as weakness. The nurses and lesbians who cared for those predominantly gay men were said to have been rendered stupid by love. The minister at my church told our youth group, “Their love should be reserved for God, but they squander it on gays and junkies who will lead them to death.” Not just physical death, he warned, but spiritual decay. He insisted their souls would rot for aligning themselves with the damned.

The second lesson I learned was that grief is a joke. One of the teachers at my small-town high school would play The Rush Limbaugh Show during study hall. Maybe he thought he was teaching us something about the world. Maybe he had decided we weren’t worth teaching and used the time for his own entertainment. But one of the few times he asserted any authority was when the “AIDS Update” aired. He would silence us, turn up the volume, and laugh. He was a thin man, but his bass laughter sounded like it rolled up from the depths of a cavern. Sometimes he laughed so hard we couldn’t hear Limbaugh’s own laughter.

The callousness of adults and friends around the loss of community members I was too afraid to claim as my own burrowed into me like a fire ant—aggressive, burning, agonizing.

And yet, there was a third lesson I took from these experiences: empathy.

In a world that offered me plague and broadcast cruelty, I learned that mocking another person’s pain is the shortest route to severing ourselves from our humanity. This is why the jokes and memes that so often follow senseless violence rekindle the embers of old burns. Whether it’s the racism that killed George Floyd, the tragedy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, or the violent end that Charlie Kirk met, the quickest way to hollow ourselves out is to laugh at the pain of others.