Can Cancer Cause a Cackle?
Written by Rob Cleaver
We’ve all seen comedians skirt around jokes about illness, tentatively pressing their toes against the line before recoiling back to the safety of Michael McIntyres malleable face and useless impressions of nothing in particular.
This week heralded the release of 50/50, a film written by a man wholly justified in finding the lighter side of a deeply unpleasant situation. Will Reiser based his hero in the film on none other than himself, and his best friend in real life, Seth Rogen, portrays the same best friend in the film. It follows the story of a young, healthy man, and his struggle with a rare form of cancer.
It doesn’t sound like the most obvious source for a heartwarming comedy centred around a strong and lovable ‘bromance’, but it is. It’s not the sort of hour long tirade that Frankie Boyle would meander through, aimlessly pointing his gun in the face of anyone and everyone like along the way. Here is a comedy about strength through adversity, and how even the worst of situations can have it’s uplifting moments.
There are moments of sadness, and of hopelessness, and they are portrayed deftly, believably and heartbreakingly by Joseph Gordon Levitt, but it’s the comedic moments that are positioned throughout to break up the tears with beaming smiles and outbursts of laughter that really make the film an instant hit. The scene where he goes out on the pull for example, is a sequence in film-making that should be looked back on as a masterpiece.
It triggers in me a thought about the comedy in care. The bumbling medical student in the film who is so instantly recognisable could easily be me; struggling to know the difference between the creepy physical contact of a drunk wedding relative and that hand of reassurance we strive for throughout our clinical communication courses.
Maybe the taboo on jokes about serious chronic illness should be lifted, and that passing references to it could be expanded to scripts as equally applaudable as this. The hit and miss comedy in Scrubs often centres on extreme characters stolen from much greater comedies and dumped into scruffy medical gowns. It never deals the emotional punch, or indeed, for me, the emotional punchline itself. It’s pastiche and bland form of comedy is often void of any genuine humour not already seen in a superior form.
We can all share invaluable anecdotes of moments in our medical education that are funny. Be it outbursts of panic in a clinic when a friend is shot down with a serious bout of Medical Student Syndrome, convinced that they’re suffering from an incredibly rare form of familial illness. Or the hearsay story of a medical student who treated himself for alcohol poisoning on a particularly busy night at Guy’s Bar. Or the nights we’ve woken up shivering next to someone we think we’ve never met before. Then there are the stories of the patients themselves, speaking about times in their lives that you never knew you’d need to know about, but you feel strangely better for knowing it. There’s more than enough comedy in medicine to be mined, and it’s prime for the taking.
I’m not even going to talk about those lecturers who are in such a world of their own that they’ll forget to give the lecture they’re meant to, By Rob Cleaver Can Cancer Cause a Cackle? and instead give you an insight into the strange and wonderful world of ‘Lecturing: After Hours’.
Certain lines are drawn for a reason though, and I think that that is an important thing. There’s a balance between this film and other films that touch upon the topic of cancer. Wit (starring Emma Thompson), for example, is a heart wrenching tale of terminal disease experienced by a lonely intellectual, absorbed by books and her own extravagant mind. It’s dark, it’s moving and it’s powerful. Even this, though is not without it’s lighter moments, but it tips the scales and tugs the heartstrings in a different way to Will Reiser’s screenplay does.
What 50/50 brings, above all other things though, is the message that cancer can affect anyone, and that, although it’s hard, it’s beatable. As well as that thing that everyone goes through life looking for, companionship, and that friends are shown to be priceless when you need them more than ever before. It’s not just pain relief you need, it’s the comedic relief that only good friends can bring that keeps your spirits high.
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