Depression Is (Kinda) Funny

Mental illness is tough. It’s also utterly absurd.

The American Public Media podcast The Hilarious World of Depression asks every guest the same question at the top of the show: Is depression funny?

I’m not very funny and I’m definitely not well known enough to be invited to be on the show, but I have an opinion and damn it, it’s the Internet, and the Internet is going to hear my story! (Actual human beings, probably not. That’s up to them.)

So… Is depression funny?

Yes. It is.

I don’t mean that suffering from depression is funny. I’m in the midst of the worst episode I’ve had in years, and the trifecta of exhaustion, anxiety, and an absence of any will to live is kinda sucky. If someone confides in you that they’re having a really rough time and are contemplating killing themselves, you don’t respond with “Omfg that is the most hilarious thing you have ever said to me, you are cracking me up right now lmao!” That is very rude and you are a monster and in desperate need of therapy yourself.

But the very concept of depression itself is pretty amusing, in a theater-of-the-absurd, Monty Python sort of way.

Here are some possible symptoms and results of major depression:

• Inability to eat
• Inability to stop eating
• Inability to get out of bed
• Inability to sleep
• Inability to work
• Inability to play
• Inability to engage in sex
• Intentionally dying

If you’ve already forgotten what I said a couple of paragraphs ago, I’ll reiterate: Those things aren’t much fun, and actually going through them is not funny to the sufferer, or to any outside observer who is not a psychopath.

But on paper, they all look pretty absurd, from a purely biological standpoint. Leaving aside for the moment all our modern (and very reasonable) cultural and behavioral expectations, we’re supposed to eat and take care of our bodies so we can live as long as possible. We’re supposed to enjoy our lives so that we want to live as long as possible. We’re supposed to live as long as possible so that we can fuck as much as possible so that we can make as many babies as possible, because that’s what we’ve all been doing since organic molecules first started making more of themselves. (My Internet hero Allie Brosh sums some of this up far more eloquently and hilariously than I ever could.)

Taking all that into account, how can you not say, “What the fuck, Mother Nature? What were you thinking? You made so many people who are perfectly capable of living and eating and fucking and not killing themselves, did you make us broken just to fuck with us? Do you think this is funny? You’re an asshole, Mother Nature.”

But we humans still laugh at those cute little cartoons of the T-Rex struggling to perform tasks because his arms are tragically and comically short. We laugh at (and swoon over) Corgis and their short little legs and their unintentional but totally adorable sploots. We laugh at the Black Knight for being perfectly happy to lose his limbs and bleed to death out of sheer spite.

And if the proliferation of mental health-related Facebook memes is any indication, we’re learning to laugh at the sheer absurdity of our mental illness as well.

Laughing at it doesn’t make it any less scary for me, but having a few seconds’ break between bouts of self-loathing is better than nothing.

This post originally appeared on Medium. It's now here because Medium is bullshit.