Laura Linney: ‘Comedy is Culturally Necessary’

Laura Linney on Wednesday's Daily Show.

It was just before my mother died, after three days of hard-core deathbed vigil, that the deathbed crew finally took a break and headed to a diner in New Jersey for lunch.  I don’t remember what we ate, or if we even could stomach food. But I know we laughed. I don’t remember what the jokes were, exactly, except they were razor sharp and definitely bad, black humor.

We talk a bit, most of us, of the jokes we’ve shared with our colleagues, our war buddies, and sometimes with soldiers, cops and hospice workers, people who know what we know, see what we see, and get the same vibe.

On Wednesday’s Daily Show, Laura Linney discussed her new series on Showtime, “The Big C,” which merges cancer and comedy. In her interview with Jon Stewart, Linney describes so beautifully the necessity of comedy and humor after trauma: “It’s a way of dealing with truth,” she said.

 ”There’s something about the voice of comedy that clarifies things. It’s a laser-like sense of truth, if it’s true,” she said. “If you touch truth, it will inevitably be so either refreshing or astounding that people will just start to laugh.”