How often have we witnessed tragic events and then, not too long thereafter, heard jokes about those events.  What this teaches us is not disrespect, but it continually reminds us that humor is often the only way we can grasp and understand tragedy.  That humor and tragedy are, even as Shakespeare understood, two sides of the very same coin.
In the ability to find the absurdity in life’s misfortune,  we are helped to see the world as it is, not through the lens of a “reality distortion field.”   
Writer and artist Matt Freedman has applied this idea to his own life, his own battle with cancer and graphically details it in his book Relatively Indolent but Relentless: A Cancer Treatment Journal.
My conversation with Matt Freedman:

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