20 July 2021

Last week, I attended a football game where my team were thrashed. Annihilated, even. It rained persistently for half of the game and we sat huddled in our ponchos watching our team get totally outclassed.

My jaw hurt, from the laughter. The girl who sits next to me shares my rather warped sense of humour, and rather than get worked up about how badly the team looked, we decided to enjoy the experience. We set a very small target score that we wanted our team to get (ignoring what the other team were scoring), and loudly cheered and enjoyed every moment our guys got anywhere near the ball. We applauded missed attempts, kicks directly to the opposition, and other things that were having the other footy fans groaning. We offered a coffee to our players who got near us on the boundary, we offered haircut advice to opposition players, and alternative career paths for the umpires. All while laughing our heads off.

We chose to look on the bright side of life. Thanks, Monty Python. Now you all have an ear worm to keep you company throughout the next hour or so.

There’s a very familiar saying that goes along the lines of “In the future, you’ll look back and laugh at this”. I’m not a big fan of waiting, so I’d prefer to get to the laughing now.

When tasked with answering the question of “What’s your superpower?”, I would probably (eventually) come up with “Cracking highly inappropriate jokes at the worst possible time”. I don’t mean to, always, but they just jump into my mouth without my brain questioning whether a friend collecting her recently euthanised (and frozen until collection) cat is the time to crack jokes about “Popsicle Pussy”.

It just happens. Some people make polite responses that it was good to break the tension and so forth, but others probably just mutter about ‘some people’ and move on.

Will we laugh in the future about lockdowns, and mask wearing, and immunisation rollouts? Will we laugh about air travel becoming a rarity? Will we laugh about the amount of toilet paper people rushed to buy at the hint of a lockdown?

Absolutely. And we are doing it already.

We don’t have to wait to find humour in a situation. No matter how dire, how tragic and how utterly miserable something is, there is always something, no matter how tiny or insignificant, that can make us smile.

Let’s face it – none of us are getting out of this alive, so let’s all enjoy each moment that we can find a rainbow in our rainy days.

Let’s find something funny in something horrendous. Choose to be happy.

If you can achieve that, I’ll bring you with me to the next footy game 🙂