Enter Crying, Exit Laughing

You enter this world crying. Not a sweet, delicate little whimper. A full-on, red-faced, snot-dripping banshee wail. And thank God for that, because if a baby comes out smiling, the doctors don’t call it “cute,” they call it “terrifying.” You scream because you’re alive. You scream because light stabbed your eyes, air burned your lungs, and some stranger in scrubs just slapped your ass. Crying is the admission fee. Nobody skips that part.

That’s how the whole show starts: pain and confusion. You’re not consulted, you’re drafted. You didn’t ask for life, but here you are. And from that very first howl, you’re already learning the baseline truth: life is not here to make you comfortable. It’s here to grind you down, test your mettle, and if you’re lucky, give you just enough absurdity to laugh at along the way.

The crying is guaranteed. The laughing, that’s the work.

The Long Crawl Between Cradle and Coffin

Somewhere between your first scream and your last breath, you’re supposed to figure out how to turn the crying into something else. Maybe laughter. Maybe wisdom. Maybe both. But nobody tells you that up front. You don’t get a manual, you get parents. If you’re lucky, they’re decent. If you’re not, well, congratulations—you’re now enrolled in Advanced Trauma Studies before you can even tie your shoes.

As a kid, crying is currency. Skin your knee? Cry. Lose a toy? Cry. Get picked last in gym class? Cry. But then society does that cruel thing it always does: it tells you to stop. “Big boys don’t cry.” “Don’t be dramatic.” “Shake it off.” They don’t say this because it’s true. They say it because adults can’t handle the sound anymore. It reminds them of their own crying they’ve shoved into the basement.

So you learn to shove it down. To laugh instead. But at first, that laugh isn’t joy. It’s armor. You laugh at yourself before the bullies can. You laugh at the joke before it lands on you. You laugh to say, “See? I’m in on it. You can’t hurt me.” That’s survival. That’s the training ground.

And maybe, after enough years, the fake laugh starts mutating into a real one. You start to find actual absurdity in this mess of existence. The humor of bureaucracy. The comedy of failed diets. The punchline of trying to plan your life in a world that clearly doesn’t give a damn about your plans. If you can laugh there—not just out of fear, but out of recognition—you’ve crossed a line. You’re starting to get the joke.

The Joke Nobody Gets Until It’s Too Late

What’s the joke? It’s that life isn’t serious. Not in the way we pretend it is. Sure, there are serious moments. Death, sickness, heartbreak. But the joke is that all the stuff we treat as life-or-death—jobs, promotions, bank accounts, status—is just cardboard scenery. A stage set for your screaming and your stumbling. You take it too seriously, and you’ve missed the gag entirely.

Think about it. We build entire lives around acquiring crap that eventually ends up in a Goodwill bin. We work jobs we hate to pay for houses we never spend time in, cars we sit in traffic with, vacations we Instagram so other people think we’re happy. That’s the tragedy and the comedy rolled into one. The crying comes from realizing how hollow it all is. The laughter comes from realizing it was always hollow—and somehow, that makes it lighter.

The best comedians know this. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers—they didn’t just tell jokes. They ripped the wallpaper off the walls of life and showed you the rotting drywall underneath. And then they laughed at it. That’s why they were prophets disguised as clowns.

My Own Scorecard

I’ve cried my share. More than my share. Childhood gave me trauma wrapped in a cheap bow, with an abusive drunk for a stepfather and no return policy. The Navy gave me hard lessons in just how small you are when the world really decides to shake. Cancer gave me the gut punch of knowing your own body can betray you.

Plenty of chances to cry. And I did. But I also learned to laugh in the middle of it. Not out of denial—out of defiance. When you laugh in the chemo chair, it’s not because the situation is funny. It’s because you refuse to let it have the last word. When you laugh at your stepfather’s pathetic drunken rage, it’s because you see it clearly for what it is: weakness masquerading as power.

The crying is automatic. The laughter? That’s where you reclaim control.

Why Laughing at the End is the Win

People talk about dying with dignity. Screw dignity. Dignity is overrated. What matters is dying with a smirk. Imagine the scene: you’re on your deathbed, tubes in your arms, family around you. Everyone’s weepy. The nurse is whispering. And then, right before you go, you chuckle. You mutter something ridiculous. You leave them confused and smiling. That’s victory.

Because let’s be honest: nobody gets out of here alive. Death is undefeated. The scoreboard reads: Death, infinity. Humanity, zero. The only trick left is how you walk off the field. Do you go out crying, clinging, bitter? Or do you go out laughing, knowing the whole damn thing was absurd from start to finish?

You entered screaming. If you can exit laughing, you’ve beaten the house.

The Middle Matters

Of course, the ending only works if you practice in the middle. You can’t fake it at the finish line. If you want to leave laughing, you have to build the muscle. That means laughing now—at your mistakes, your bad luck, your fragile ego, your own ridiculous body that creaks when you get out of bed. You practice not taking yourself too seriously. You practice finding the punchline before it buries you.

That doesn’t mean being a clown all the time. It means carrying perspective. It means when inflation spikes and politicians melt down and your boss sends that passive-aggressive email, you remember: this is the cardboard set. It looks serious, but it isn’t. The real stuff is the belly laugh with your wife at midnight, the dumb joke your buddy makes at the bar, the moment you realize you’ve survived another round of chaos.

The people who never practice? They’re the ones who end up bitter. They leave the world the same way they entered it: crying, terrified, unable to make sense of anything. They never got the joke.

The Final Punchline

So here’s the truth as I see it: life begins in pain, and it ends in silence. In between, you get to decide whether to keep crying or to find reasons to laugh. And the laughter is always there, even when it’s buried under grief and rage and disappointment. You just have to dig for it.

That’s the real prize. Not wealth. Not fame. Not even happiness, because happiness is slippery and unreliable. The prize is the laugh you carry to the grave.

You came in screaming. Try to go out laughing. Everything else is filler.