The team came by during early morning rounds, when the hallway lights were still dimmed and the night shift was only halfway gone. Our daughter was hooked up to long-term EEG monitoring, her head wrapped in gauze and wires. We stood around her bed, watching her sleep through a silence so loud it felt deliberate. A cough echoed from the hall and someone closed the door. Closing a door in a hospital is its own kind of diagnosis.
The neurologist scrolled through the results on her tablet, paused, and said almost conversationally, “Her background looks terrible.”
I said, “So you’re telling me she’ll never pass a DOJ screening.”
She blinked.
“What?”
“You said she has a bad background,” I said. “That’s going to be a problem for a background check,” and then, dramatically hanging my head, “there go our hopes for her getting a job with security clearance.”
The silence returned as the room recalibrated around my joke. The doctor looked back at the tablet. I looked at my daughter, whose fingers were curled over her thumb the way they always did when she slept, a habit that had survived every medication change. The feed pump chugged a few times.
Then the doctor stopped, looked up, and said, “Wait. Actually… that’s hilarious.”
I’ve replayed that moment over and over, not because the joke was particularly good, but because of what followed it. Relief, connection, maybe. But also something more complicated. A guilt for having joked at all. For not bearing the moment properly. For not suffering well.
Many people use humor in awkward situations to smooth things over. To clear the air when it gets thick with discomfort, the way you might crack a window. Sometimes that discomfort belongs to you. Sometimes it belongs to the room. Sometimes it’s shared, but unevenly distributed.
In other words, we joke because we feel guilty.
When I joked about my child’s EEG sounding like a criminal record, it was because I felt awful. As a parent, I had failed at the one job parents are not supposed to fail at: keeping their children safe, intact, progressing along the expected arc of things. I was not all I could be. I was not all I should be.
Guilt.
But the joke didn’t end there. Almost immediately, it turned back on me. Guilt for saying something so dark. For not being reverent enough. For not performing composure the way we imagine grief should be performed. Initially, when the joke collapsed in on itself, it became further evidence of my inadequacy.
This is bound up with a belief we rarely name but often enforce: that those who suffer are responsible not only for carrying their suffering, but for carrying it nobly. We praise the parent who remains gracious. We admire the ones who speak softly, who never seem sharp or strange or inappropriate. We tell stories about strength and resilience and grace under pressure, as though grief were a performance and composure the yardstick by which it should be measured.
By that standard, humor is suspect. Especially dark humor that announces just how poorly we are shouldering our suffering.
And yet, parents will tell you that they joke in these moments because it helps them cope. Because the weight of the moment is too heavy to carry straight on. Because exhaustion has stripped away the energy required for decorum. Because humor offers a brief exit ramp from a reality that feels otherwise inescapable. ‘You’re funny!’ ‘Thanks, it’s my trauma.’
All of that is true, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. These situate humor only as a reaction against crisis, as something that negates or briefly erases what is happening. Humor as disappearance or denial.
I think humor can be something else entirely.
I think it can be one of the clearest expressions of hope.
We often imagine hope as dignified. Upright. Calm. The kind of thing done with steady hands and a composed voice. Hope, in this telling, is clean and forward-facing and noble. It photographs well.
But hope rarely looks like that in practice.
More often, hope is clumsy. It slips. It misjudges the angle. It trips over its own good intentions. There is a slapstick quality to it that rarely makes it into the stories we tell later. It’s a physical sort of comedy born of being too close to the ground to maintain any illusion of grace.
The work of hope, especially in medical settings, is full of these moments. You set out to do the right thing and end up apologizing to someone on the phone who keeps transferring you to another department. You fill out the wrong form. You miss the deadline. You bring the wrong supplies. You do everything with sincerity and still manage to look ridiculous.
Humor is the controversial admission of this fact.
It is the acknowledgment that sometimes, while doing the work of hope for our children, we don’t look brave. We look foolish. And instead of pretending otherwise, we laugh. This is where humor begins to do something important.
Hope, when it appears beside hospital beds or in discussions that start with “I’m sorry to tell you…,” is often treated as a sacred, solemn obligation. Something to be handled with hushed voices and appropriate reverence.
But hope does not live in the abstract. It does not hover above the room. It lives here, in the present moment among IV poles and medication schedules and bad coffee and conversations you hope to never hear the end of. Humor brings hope back down to this level. A laugh in the middle of a serious chat doesn’t always cheapen what’s being discussed; it reanchors it. It reminds us that we are still here, still embodied, still subject to timing and gravity and fatigue.
Humor, then, is not a distraction from the work. It is one of the ways we stay in it without being swallowed.
Not every joke counts as hopeful though. Some humor keeps things exactly where they are. It relies on cruelty or stereotypes. It narrows rather than opens. It releases tension by pinning someone else in place.
Hope cannot live there.
Hopeful humor has movement built into it. It leans forward. It refuses to treat the present as a prison. It acknowledges reality without embalming it. It makes just enough room to keep going.
For me, that humor often uses the materials of missed sleep, long nights punctuated by alarms, numbers that matter more than they should, the ever-disparaging look from my daughter. It doesn’t deny the darkness. It doesn’t float above it either. It stays close. It works with what’s there.
A well-timed laugh can interrupt grief mid-sentence. It can loosen a body that has been braced too long. It can turn observation into participation, paralysis into action. Not because it solves the problem, but because it allows movement through it.
That movement is what makes humor hopeful.
When the doctor laughed that morning, something shifted. We were no longer performing “seriousness” for one another. We were simply there, together, attending to what was unfinished.
By keeping us here, together, and moveable, humor, like the hope it expresses, refuses to let suffering have the final word. Humor does not deny the darkness. It insists that even here there is still room to act, to respond, and to choose one another again, and again.
Those who hope will always have the last laugh.
Stephen Hager goes by his second middle name (he has three), Bud, because it’s easier to remember and baristas never misspell it. Along with his wife he is a caregiver for their 8-year-old daughter, Emma, who has pachygyria, a rare neurological disorder. He believes in taking an active approach to advocating for his child and others like her. To this end, he sits on various advisory councils at Children Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), volunteers on consulting and directing boards for various non-profit centers and lends his writing skills where he can. Experiencing a lack of support for parents of medically complex children, Bud founded a support group through CHOC focusing on parent-to-parent interaction. He is also a professor of psychology and has a small private psychotherapy practice.