Laughter in the Catholic Worker: The Great Disarmer

A version of this essay originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of The Catholic Agitator.

Over this last month or so, as our California summer finally loosened its hot, dusty grip on the city, I have been pestering my housemates to tell me about any funny incident—accidental or otherwise—worth sharing with the general Catholic Worker audience. Why? These relentlessly sunny days have already brought with them their fair share of calamity: more sickness and suffering on Skid Row, the casual horrors of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and of course, the general panic and dismay around the national elections. On the personal level, community members carried their own private griefs. Life changes and exhaustion came knocking. For my part, I’ve been nursing a months-long mysterious skin condition that renders me mostly useless for the first four hours of any given day. It’s a hard time to be laughing into the void but it feels like one of the few options left.

In light of all this, perhaps it’s gauche to focus on moments of levity here at the Catholic Worker when so many are despairing about the state of the world. But I have found that it is impossible to be in the throes of grief all the time. Or you can be, but at great personal cost to your body and mind. In this reality, finding humor becomes a kind of survival tactic, as much strategic as pleasurable.

Dorothy herself knew this, often referring to John Ruskin’s “duty of delight.” So much did she believe in this duty that her collected diaries bear that title. And I hope I never forget the first time I read about Stanley Vishnewski, lifelong Catholic Worker in New York, and his unforgettable quips, most memorably that “here at the Catholic Worker, we don’t have a single cockroach – they’re all married with children.” I still remember letting out an audible yelp of laughter. That being said, I must confess that no cockroach’s marital status has ever stopped me from squashing it.

It feels true that the Catholic Worker attracts a certain self-serious type: philosophers, dreamers, doers, who have steeped their minds in the evils of the world and come to the Worker for a chance to try their hand at putting things right. I count myself first among them; after all, I am the child who, in fifth grade, when we were instructed to draw what came to mind as we listened to Gustav Holst’s “Mars, The Bringer of War” from The Planets, scrawled furious circles of red and black crayon so intently that I tore the page and then cried when my teacher wouldn’t hang up my mangled creation alongside the far more legible drawings of my classmates. (I am uniquely qualified to write this article.)

But I have also met another type: the joker, the holy fool, the teasing party host who leaves everyone laughing. In fact, these two types often reside in the same person. It’s just that the first one tends to smother the second with a pillow so he doesn’t ruin the moment or distract from the work. I say we let him breathe.

No Room at the Inn

I’ll start with self-deprecation. Several of us got a good dose of helpless laughter the last time I dropped off a round of donations at our local St. Vincent de Paul. It was hot; Josh and I had shoved several heavy furniture items into the back of the old white van. St. Vincent would not take our stuff—no room at the inn. We drove to Goodwill. Same story: apparently Friday is when everyone in Los Angeles decides it’s finally time to move that old La-Z-Boy. I breathed through my nose and prepared to drive us back home and take the loss.

Upon turning the key in the ignition, all I heard was a faint wheezing sound. Again: same thing. I tried to pull the key out but it wouldn’t budge. I jiggled the steering wheel, tried finessing the bolts like an amateur lockpicker. Nothing. We were stuck in the Goodwill parking lot under the blazing sun. I called Jed—not the first time he’s had to bail one of us out of car trouble—and he was there in a few minutes, popping the hood and hooking up his multimeter to see if the battery was to blame. I wandered off to sit in the shade and closed my eyes.

After a long while, I heard the signature chug of the van starting up. “Jed!” I ran to the driver’s door. “It wasn’t all the way in park,” he said, poker-faced. “It was stuck between gears.” I swore, remembering how the van’s slippy gearshift liked to resist clicking fully into a particular gear. As I apologized for making him come all the way out here just to remind me that I was, in fact, sometimes oblivious, he shut the van hood, squarely on the screen of his new multimeter. You have to laugh so you don’t cry.

The Clown’s Secret Power

What else? Halloween fell on a Thursday this year, a perfect excuse to dress up a little at the soup kitchen and have some fun with our guests. Megan wandered the garden in a chicken onesie. I put on a comically large green velvet witch hat. Josh merely had to don an eyepatch and the rest of his typical getup—bandana, loose white shirt, unruly beard—made for a perfect pirate costume. Ann managed the clinic door with a pink flamingo hat atop her head. But it was Matt, with his usual MacGyver flair, who took the prize for most harebrained and strangely effective costume. He taped two orange pill bottles together and stuck them through the front of a white N-95 mask, pulled the whole contraption over his head, and threw on a too-small fuzzy white sweater from the donation pile to become a kind of pharmaceutical snowman, the pill bottles evoking a carrot nose.

I remember the way our guests smiled and chuckled at the sight of us, but most of all I remember Matt, still in his snowman getup, spreading his hands wide in his tried-and-true peacemaking gesture, trying to calm a guest who was having a hard time. This tableau was awkward and foolish—here we were in our various clownish forms, still face-to-face with suffering. But maybe our costumes didn’t take away anyone’s dignity. Maybe it just highlighted the absurdity that was already there, ever-present in the human condition, which is the clown’s secret power.

Speaking of Clowns…

Speaking of clowns, this past month of electoral grandstanding also brought politicians to our doorstep, in some cases literally. A couple of weeks ago I heard a clamor near the entrance to our garden. Abandoning my post, I went to see, spying a group of suits walking down Gladys Street, looking ill at ease among the trash and noise of Skid Row. Midwest transplant that I am, I didn’t register what was going on until I saw Matt brush past me and start to speak loudly in their direction. “That’s Governor Newsom,” someone said.

Oh! Just the commander of the fifth-largest economy in the world strolling down our ransacked block. It was like something out of Monty Python. Here was Matt, sporting a t-shirt with more than a few holes, calmly reading our governor the riot act regarding street sweeps and the value of a Jesuit education (Gavin went to Santa Clara University; Matt to Holy Cross), while the governor’s media team scuttled like a kicked anthill, one woman frantically waving Matt off like a persistent stray dog. I should have felt despair that this was clearly just a photo op, should have felt rage at our state politicians’ indifference for the housing crisis unfolding across our wealthy California cities. And I did feel that, somewhere, but over it all was an overwhelming sense of mirth. The scene was just too funny.

A similar scene occurred on Election Day when we came home from the kitchen to see our own disgraced city councilmember, Kevin De Leon, standing on our front porch like the neighborhood kid who’s lost his ball in your yard and has to come ask for it back. They spied us parking and came around to the van. Matt engaged them in spirited conversation while I emptied the compost buckets and eavesdropped. What is he doing? I thought. He can’t think he’s gonna change their minds about the sweeps.

It didn’t occur to me until our dinner conversation that Kevin de Leon was probably working off the same database that all the poor canvassers were: one that made it seem like upwards of thirty people, ripe for the organizing, lived in our house. But the vast majority of those names belong to folks who live on the Row and merely receive their mail at our house. I laughed out loud thinking of Matt stalling, wasting the councilmember’s time, giving the media team soundbites he’d later withdraw permission for them to use. Sometimes humor is a kind of aikido move: use your opponent’s power against them by simply sidestepping their great show of force, leaving them to topple forward onto their own faces.

‘That’s One Big Cake!’

And sometimes, humor is nonsensical. Allow me to tell you about this cake. This cake had no right to be so funny. A friendly donor had dropped by the house while I was on duty and left us with some treats from a get-out-the-vote fundraiser, which explained the smeared mass of red and blue frosting I saw upon opening the cake box. “Careful,” she said, as I stared slack-jawed at the full-sheet, double-high behemoth carefully wedged into the back seat of her car. “It’s really heavy!”

Dear reader, I’ve lifted a lot of middling heavy objects during my year and a half at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, and I’d like to think my powers of estimation are pretty accurate. This cake must have weighed at least 25 pounds, or the weight of an average two-year old. Jed found me in the kitchen an hour later, rolling my eyes like a spooked mare, unable to process what I should do with this cake. “You have to see it,” I told him. “I don’t even know where to begin!”

“It can’t be that bad,” he said, disappearing into the dining room where I had left the cake. He came back a minute later, eyes wide. “Okay, that’s a big cake.” I lost it. A long day of facing down my burning skin, spam phone calls, all the house chores, and now this cake that I wasn’t even sure would fit in our fridges, and luckily the deranged trolley operator in my brain threw the switch for hilarity instead of meltdown. I laughed till I cried.

All’s well that ends in dessert. Housemates gathered round, going at the cake with utensils and eventually fingers, trying to figure out just exactly what kind of cake it was. There was chocolate, yes, and vanilla, but also…pudding? Maybe an entire strawberry? Some kind of chunk of canned peach? The red and blue frosting streaked together into a kind of hair-dye brown. Eventually I trimmed off all the mangled bits, carried the cake to our back house basement fridge, and with Megan’s level-headed help, managed to balance the cake on a sheet tray perched on three beer cans that put it at the perfect height to allow the fridge door to close. The whoop we let out when the door finally stayed shut rivaled that of the neighborhood going up when the Dodgers won.

Delighting in Each Other

Laughter makes us for one another. It is the great disarmer. I’ve been thinking about exactly the way it feels when an argument breaks, like a thunderstorm, and suddenly the mood switches from anger to mirth. It doesn’t mean the provocation was any less serious, nor any less deserving of attention—only that now limbs are looser, breath comes more easily, and the mind is somehow more imaginative, more open to play, to possibilities. Laughing with someone—really laughing together, not at each other— implies trust. I believe you won’t hurt me if I let go. Again, I maintain that this kind of delighting in each other is not a refusal to look at the world’s evils but a strategic stance in the face of them. After all, Dorothy herself said, “Certainly none of us are trained social workers, none of us know how to run a house. We have talents, we believe, in the line of communication.” May we communicate in seriousness and in laughter as we face this next chapter of the struggle together.