Slapstick always gets me, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing:
Do I enjoy others misfortune and pain? Is slapstick an extension of a hidden sadism?
Or, perhaps, it's an extension of a gregarious or empathetic nature, "They goof up just like me!" (You know that thing you do when you trip and fall? ...that frantic glance over your shoulder to make sure that someone saw how funny you just looked?)
It may, however, be something else...
When my three-year-old son puked on my neck and it ran down my back, into my ear--he screamed. He woke up my infant daughter who started screaming. It was thundering out, so my dog lapsed into a generalized clonic seizure and peed on the floor. I laughed. It was so bad, so un-serendipitous and uncomfortable, it was absurd.
So when
staffing is absurd,
their untreated pain is absurd
the thunk of a corpse on the morgue cart is absurd
the crack of ribs during CPR is absurd (however expected)
when they hit the call light the exact moment you cross the room's threshold in exit--not once, not twice, but every time...
we laugh.
Do not mistake your nurse for the Heath Ledger Joker from The Dark Knight! On the contrary, their dark laughter is the single mark of their sanity in the midst of a world on fire.
A patient revived only to sit vegetative, staring not into nothing but from nothing, all but brain dead and only existing because a spouse demands the machines pump his bodymachine through time against his express wishes... It is absurd. So we laugh.
You're right, it is decidedly not funny, it the furthest from. But it is not serious: it is beyond serious.
You see, the continuum of funny to serious lies not on a plane, like a blended rainbow, but in a three-dimensional band, like the equator on your wrist.
When you push the envelope of funny, you invariably cross over into serious (the kind of serious that demands apologies at a national press conference); when you push past the most serious thing, you invariably end up in laughing territory (not for mirth, but to survive the horror).
Laughter is our sanity, it keeps us moving--it is our expression of hope that the situation is indeed absurd, that it goes against reason, that our efforts are not in vain.
We laugh to reassure each other, to help us to keep working.
We laugh to defy a world on fire.
