I don't think anyone truly escaped the tragedy of Sept. 11th. Most of us were left alive, but none of us were left untouched. Many had family or friends who perished during the day's events, and those of us who didn't still noticed the country come to a stop. The stock market closed, the sports games went on hiatus, the airlines all stopped flying for a day, etc..

Yet through all of this, I still managed to maintain some degree of denial. I think many people tried, because the shear magnitude of that day's events was beyond anything most of us were capable of dealing with. Certainly beyond anything I was capable of dealing with. And so after the horror of the 11th I managed to stay in a self-absorbed shell of denial for a over a week until I finally cracked.

What broke me was seeing Jon Stewart cry on the Daily Show. Their first episode since September 11 was aired on the following Thursday, the 20th. It began not with the usual headlines and feature story but with a speech, an unscripted and serious speech by Jon Stewart. The Comedy Central logo was displayed as usual in the corner of the screen, but seemed eerily out of place. And after a week of watching tape of rescue workers amid the rubble, footage of the second airplane crash, and shots of the tower falling from every conceivable angle, this little speech is what made me break down.

Now, this certainly wasn't the first speech I'd seen on the topic. And while it was a good speech, it wasn't that much better than one or two others I had already heard. No, what got to me was the context. I'd already numbed myself to the shots of the wreckage showing non-stop on every news channel. But this was no news channel, and the logo still read Comedy Central in the corner of the screen.

Comedy Central, the one repository for humor, which I expected to be a source of mirth and merriment, a merciful mirth during troubled times, and yet the tears it made me shed were not of laughter. How can I describe it? It's like turning on a fan to escape the summer heat and having it shoot hot air at you. And then you realize it's not just your fan, but the gentle breeze of comedy is nowhere to be found. A comedy show I was going to go see in Rhode Island got cancelled, the Daily Show went on hiatus, a satire journal about to start publication in Washington DC was delayed indefinitely, the Onion stopped printing for a week, and across the country, comedy as a whole just disappeared.

All of this may not seem to effect the world as much as unilateral sporting delays or airline stoppages, but for me it's much more terrifying to think that the comedians of the world have given up, because they think they can't make people laugh now. People aren't in the mood to laugh-- life's events seem too serious now for laughter to have any place. Some people even told me that I should lay off the funny stuff for a few weeks until things got better. I told them that they were wrong.

We need to be able to laugh, especially now. Things won't get better if we sink into a depression so deep that humor has no place in our lives. The recent events have been very tragic, and it is unfortunately within the realm of possibility that future events will continue to be tragic. We cannot change this. But what we can do is to stand up to it. Everyone's heard the old saying that laughter is the best medicine, but they forget how powerful it really can be.

Laughter has long been a refuge from things too terrible to comprehend, a way that we deal with things that can't be dealt with, and above all, a sign that we have not given up. Mel Brooks once said, "Humor is just another defense against the universe." It is a way for us to heal our pain, a way for us to react that is cathartic without being harmful. We can clamor for violent revenge, or drink ourselves into a stupor in an attempt to forget our troubles-- and I have friends who have done both-- but this tends only to make things worse.

Humor is a way for us to stare the worst parts of life in the eye, and not blink. We may stick out our tongue and roll our eyes, but we do not blink. We have long sent comedians like Bob Hope to entertain our troops. Even during the Holocaust, the survivors survived by keeping a little bit of laughter in their hearts. Without laughter, there would be nothing.

Truly, I believe a lack of laughter to be one of the most awful things imaginable. Lord Buckley made this point long ago when he said, "Humor is the absence of terror, and terror the absence of humor." I just hope that the country can find the will to laugh again. When we have lost laughter we have lost hope, and when we have lost hope, we have been defeated.