Laughter, the Best Medicine

Today, after church, someone gave me a newspaper clipping of a joke they had particularly liked. Who doesn’t love a good joke now and then? I was on my way out, so I tucked the clipping in my front shirt pocket and headed for the door. As soon as I got outside, I quickly retrieved it from my pocket and continued for my car, trying to read this joke while walking. It was titled:

“Laughter the Best Medicine”

A person went into a bookshop to buy a sympathy card to be sent to one of his friends who had a bereavement in his family which the friend had not been able to attend.

He had been looking high and low in the shop going to almost every shelf for a sympathy card but having failed to find one inquired from a shop assistant as to where they stored sympathy cards.

“Oh”, the shop assistant replied, “In this shop we put them under wedding cards, because most sympathetic events follow family life.”

You probably didn’t laugh either. I read the first paragraph twice thinking it was just my thick-headedness impeding comprehension, but then after getting through the second obfuscating paragraph, and then to the third, I was left baffled. What a terrible joke. Who would take the time to cut this out? Okay, let’s try to maybe piece this together. The death cards are behind the wedding cards, and that’s funny because family events have death in hmph okay let’s not do this. I can recognize a futile endeavor when I see one.