LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE.
The archway’s crumbling message passed unseen above the interns. The faded bus, already coated in road salt when the interns boarded in Boston, spat gravel as it turned down the winding drive. The passengers, nine men and five women, had been whittled down from an applicant pool of over two thousand, the largest and most competitive in the history of St. Murray’s. It was an assortment of raw talent as diverse as it was qualified.
The two Blue Collars sprawled across the bus’s back seats. They wore denim and flannel and beards that looked like dried silage. One had grown up dredging oil in Texas, the other raising Buckeye chickens on the Iowa plains. They both spoke with a slow, side-mouthed drawl. At their request, the driver had pulled over at a Sunrise Mart eighty miles back, and the bus now reeked of corn chips and teriyaki jerky.
The French Satirist perched two rows forward, a hook-nosed man who spent years wielding an acid pen at Charlie Hebdo. White-haired and approaching sixty, he observed the other interns with a cold objectivity, eyes unblinking as he peered over rimless spectacles.
The Improvisers were uniformed—blue jeans, Chuck Taylors, and solid colored t-shirts. The three women wore the primaries, the man plain white. Veterans of the N.Y.C. improv scene, they’d long ago convinced themselves that S.N.L. was only for sell-outs. The troupe tried in vain to get a suggestion from the identical twins that specialized in Slapstick. The brothers were impossible to tell apart, save for the bruises and faded scars that served as reminders of bits gone too far.
Behind the bus driver sat the Observationalist, a Chicago native who could squeeze hilarity out of the mundane like clear water from a moldy sponge. He scribbled new material in a spiral bound notebook (“Let’s talk about bus drivers for a second…”), but his thoughts were drowned out. The Parody Musicians, a husband and wife duo, had somehow managed to smuggle aboard a ukulele and accordion. They shared a seat in front of the Impressionist, a twenty-eight-year-old woman short of height and short of hair, with tattoo sleeves and the voice of a chameleon. She earned her living as a vocal counterfeiter, stealing the voices of politicians and movie stars.
The Cynic sat aloof, a Gothic reptile in his black knitted turtleneck and tortoiseshell glasses. Even the Impressionist could not identify his accent; it conjured images of Soviet concrete and rust-colored snow. He wore a permanent half-smile, as if daily existence was a private joke he shared with no one.
The bus jerked to a stop, ancient brakes screeching in protest. They had arrived.
St. Murray’s Institute for Comedic Therapy loomed overhead, a Victorian labyrinth of shadows, stones and spires. Tendrils of ivy slithered up the Institute’s face, burrowing into the time-softened grout. It seemed, at least to the Observationalist, that some giant squid was trying to drag the Institute into the depths of the moor. Apart from the thrumming of backup generators, St. Murray’s seemed displaced by two centuries and at least one ocean.
The slam of the bus door broke the interns out of their silence. Passengers scrambled for backpacks and duffel bags. The red shirt Improviser exited last and the door folded shut behind her. The four-wheeled monstrosity started crawling back toward the stone arch in the distance.
The fourteen interns gathered at the base of the Institute’s imposing staircase. Above them stood their greeting party—a single man in a white lab coat. His hair was full and neatly parted, and his athletic build could have placed him anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. At first sight, his face appeared creased by years of hard laughter. Looking more closely, it became hard to tell whether they were laugh lines or scars left by too many sleepless nights. A deep blue shadow, cast by the Institute’s jagged rooftop, reached toward the interns with ragged fingers. The host cleared his throat.
“My name is William Halsey. From this point forward, you will refer to me as Comedian Halsey.”
Plumes of breath blurred his face.
“Some of you may already consider yourselves Comedians. You are not. This is neither an insult nor an invitation to debate. It is a statement of fact. A Comedian understands what it feels like to have a patient die in your arms. Die because you weren’t funny enough.”
Comedian Halsey stared out past the interns, beyond the stone archway where the bus was only now turning off the drive. The trenches in his brow deepened. Somewhere in the ivy, a meadowlark whistled.
“Each of you has shown potential, a proficiency in some comedic discipline. But potential is not enough.
My job, over the next six weeks, is to push you to your breaking point. And you will break. Those of you that manage to put yourselves back together, those are the ones that stand a fighting chance of becoming a Comedian.” He checked his watch.
“Change into your scrubs and meet me in the East Wing in twenty minutes.”
The exterior still clung to a hint of Victorian grandeur, but the inside of St. Murray’s had been thoroughly gutted. The floors had once been clothed in a forest’s-worth of pine, a patchwork of dark and knotted boards that swelled in the summer and groaned at first frost. Now the nurses wheeled gurneys across green and white sheets of checkered linoleum. Comedians marched by with urgent frowns, one of them nearly trampling the tattooed Impressionist as she turned a corner. The place smelled of antiseptic and stale linens. Pagers chirped incessantly.
Heaps of copper chandeliers—magnificent, hundred-armed behemoths—oxidized slowly in the dark of unused supply closets. The ceilings were now paved with banks of humming fluorescents, tuned at just the right frequency to trigger a migraine in the French Satirist. In a cruel twist the stone hearth remained, forced to preside over feasts of microwaved soup and over-wrapped sandwiches. Only one other had survived the Institute’s interior-decorating purges: a six-foot longcase clock, the dark walnut sentinel which guarded the East Wing. As the brass hands struck one-thirty, Comedian Halsey appeared from around the corner.
“With me. Keep up.”
The interns trailed behind, a line of ducklings following the falcon that ate their mother. A narrow window gave the Observationalist a half-second snapshot of a surgery in-progress. A masked surgeon bent over a spotlighted incision, gloved hand outstretched as an orderly reached for a rubber chicken. The anesthesiologist stood at the end of the operating table, tickling the patient’s foot with a long purple feather.
Around another bend the hallway terminated, a dead-end which marked the Institute’s easternmost point. Comedian Halsey turned into the last room on the left. The interns filtered in behind, but one of the Slapstick twins (impossible to tell which one) wobbled at the doorway, rubbing his nose like a mime who’s found an invisible wall. Comedian Halsey administered a two-fingered poke in the eyes and pulled him into the room.
The room was spacious, but fifteen left little room to maneuver. A large metal cot stood outlined against a latticed window. The beveled glass offered a distorted view of the east garden—wild roses, waterless fountain, a stone cherub sounding a broken horn. A saline drip and oxygen tank flanked the upper bedposts, and an E.K.G. monitor pulsed quietly in the corner. The faint scent of jerky still hung about the Blue Collars.
The bed’s occupant was asleep. An old woman, with tumbling, graying curls was propped into a sitting position by a mound of pillows. A plastic tube ran from the base of her nose to the aluminum tank at her bedside. Steady droplets rippled the clear reservoir of I.V. fluid. Comedian Halsey unhooked a clipboard from the foot of the bed.
“Margaret Suffolk, age sixty-eight. Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College. Unmarried, no children.”
The Parody Musicians squeezed hands, tapping a silent tempo in each other’s palms. If Comedian Halsey saw, he chose not to comment.
“Transferred over from Maine Medical four days ago. Suffering from non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema, attributed to acute respiratory distress syndrome. Blood oxygen hovering at eighty percent. Anything lower and we’ll have to intubate.” He looked up.
“Am I going too fast for anyone?”
The Parody Musicians dropped hands. The Gothic tortoise wiped a non-existent smudge from his glasses. Comedian Halsey frowned and flipped the page, although the clipboard was little more than a prop. The Observationalist wasn’t the only one who could see that Comedian Halsey was reciting from memory.
“The team at Maine Medical ran her through a full cycle of preload reducers. No improvement, so they passed the baton to us. We’ve had her on a twice-daily dosage of sitcom laugh track— Seinfeld and Frasier , nothing too fancy—in addition to a rigorous knock-knock regimen. Not so much as a snicker.”
Comedian Halsey looked down at his patient for the first time since they’d entered, watching her chest rise in stilted, erratic breaths.
“Two days and she’ll be drowning in her own lungs.”
The interns crowded together in a half-circle, sharing an unspoken and unanimous decision to avoid all eye contact. A stream of oxygen hissed gently into Margaret Suffolk’s nostrils. The French Satirist, whose migraine was approaching high tide, closed his eyes and massaged his temples.
“So,” he said, “you want us to…?”
Comedian Halsey rounded on the Satirist.
“Make her laugh , goddammit!”
Twitching of the eyelids, a tilt of the head. Margaret Suffolk was awake. She scanned the fourteen unfamiliars, moving from the tangled Blue Collar beards to the Impressionist’s shiny, heart-shaped face. Her eyes refocused when she reached Comedian Halsey, and any lingering traces of dream were released in shaky sigh.
“Hello, Comedian.” It sounded as if she were speaking through a tin-can-telephone, one whose string was old and fraying.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Suffolk,” said Comedian Halsey. “How are we feeling today?”
When she spoke, Margaret Suffolk’s lips balanced on a beam of perfect neutrality, never tipping toward smile or frown.
“Give me an hour…to catch my breath…and I’ll let you know.”
The E.K.G. blipped softly, and Margaret Suffolk sank back into the pillows. Her nostrils flared, and between shallow pants she sucked at the oxygen line. Comedian Halsey leaned in to adjust the I.V. flow rate, waving his other hand at the small crowd.
“These are our new interns, Ms. Suffolk. Not much to look at, but there might be a funny bone or two mixed in somewhere. How do you feel about a couple jokes?”
A rumbling, fluid-laced cough seized Margaret Suffolk as she opened her mouth. Hunched over the starched white linens, her thin frame heaved under a wave of wheezing tremors. It wasn’t until the aftershocks subsided that she gave Comedian Halsey a tired nod.
Handing the clipboard to one of the Improvisers, Comedian Halsey lowered himself into the room’s only chair. He swept out his arms, palms facing upwards, inviting the interns to begin. For an instant, the fourteen interns—from the turtlenecked gargoyle to the Iowa farmhand—all shared the same expression. It was the look given by a two-bit comedy hack, one who’s used to performing half-drunk at places named The Giggle Cave or KomedyKabana , who suddenly finds themselves dragged out of bed by masked intruders and shoved onstage at The Apollo. In the last room on the East Wing of St. Murray’s Institute for Comedic Therapy, the fourteen comedians remembered what it was to feel stage fright.
The Observationalist stepped forward. The other interns retreated a half-step, carving out a little linoleum stage at the foot of Margaret Suffolk’s bed. The lanky comedian cleared his throat, wishing for a stool or a mic-stand, any sort of crutch.
“So, uh, what’s the deal with this hospital food?”
Five laughless minutes later, the Observationalist abandoned his set and slunk to the back of the room. The Slapstick twins were next. Their vaudevillian antics made frequent use of a chrome bedpan and an old banana peel they found in the cafeteria. Margaret Suffolk did not so much as snort, and even dozed off during the climax of nose tweaking and head bopping.
The Parody Musicians re-imagined a classic from Pink Floyd’s The Wall , their version titled “Another Poop in the Stall (Pt. 2),” but earned nothing more than a noise complaint from the patient next door. The Improvisers, after performing a series of trust falls to ensure they were in a collaborative mindset, asked their bedridden audience for a suggestion. Margaret Suffolk was either unable or unwilling to give more than a cough, and the resulting sketch—four hypochondriacs waiting in a doctor’s office—was stale and overly self-aware. The Impressionist, tattooed serpents peeking out from under her scrubs, did manage to get a laugh, just not from the intended target. The Observationalist cracked-up at her uncanny impersonation of Comedian Halsey, but the two were quickly silenced by an authentic glare from the man himself.
The Blue Collars went up together, but their set soon devolved into bouts of competing flatulence. The cloud of rancid sulfur threw Margaret Suffolk into her most violent coughing fit yet, and Comedian Halsey kicked the offenders off-stage. For his part, the Satirist uncapped a fountain pen and drew a series of political cartoons on unused napkins. He handed the finished stack to Margaret Suffolk, but an episode of labored hacking and wheezing crumpled the paper and smeared the ink with pale gray mucus.
Only the Gothic tortoise remained. The nihilist in Soviet-era spectacles had been poring over the patient’s medical records with a singular focus, oblivious to the humorless failures of his fellow interns. Only when the Satirist elbowed past, muttering French expletives, did the Cynic return the clipboard to its hook and approach the patient’s bedside.
“You are a doctor of philosophy, no?”
Margaret Suffolk regarded the dark, near-sighted specter with a frown. It was the frown she adopted when fielding questions from her brightest and most mischievous students. She nodded.
“Focus?” The comedian’s accent echoed of the Old Country, of forests and snow and eyes that glowed in firelight. Comedian Halsey leaned forward, hands clasped together.
“Continental,” she answered. “Nineteenth century.” Each syllable made a slow sucking sound, like mastodon bones being dragged from a tar pit. The tortoise smoothed a spot on the bed, next to the blanketed hills of Margaret Suffolk’s knees, and sat down.
“A story for you, then,” he paused, making sure his class was listening. She was.
“Friedrich Nietzsche is walking down the street. He is looking…distraught. A troubled man, Nietzsche. A friend approaches and notices that something is wrong. So the friend asks of Nietzsche, ‘What is the matter?’”
The storyteller stared at his patient, waiting. She inhaled through bared teeth. Pockets of fluid popped and crackled.
“What. Did he say. Was the matter.”
The tortoise smiled.
“‘Nothing.’”
Above the bed, the punchline mingled with the scent of rubbing alcohol and lemon floor cleaner. A saline tear fell through the I.V. drip chamber. The Cynic stood, leaving behind a bony depression. The oxygen tank gave a mechanical sigh.
And Margaret Suffolk laughed.
It was a high-pitched laugh, the delighted shriek of a ten-year-old caught in a warm, blue sky rainstorm. Her eyes widened, surprised at her own amusement, and crow’s feet blossomed from their corners. White molars flashed at the back of her mouth.
“Nothing,” she repeated, before another spasm of laughter overtook her. She snorted so hard that the oxygen nosepiece fell into her lap. Comedian Halsey reached for it, but she waved him off. She was cackling now, casting a mist of spittle across the bedspread. Her shoulders trembled, and her diaphragm bowed, and her laughter deepened as it crawled further within. The E.K.G. whistled.
“Ms. Suffolk?” Comedian Halsey was standing now.
Margaret Suffolk howled—a wolfish, full-mooned laugh. Then she snickered, low and dirty, the kind of laugh that festers in the damp of middle school locker rooms. She chortled and she guffawed, her laughter twisting and writhing and growing, always growing, in volume. The Cynic was at Comedian Halsey’s side.
“I didn’t think…” The bed frame rattled; something was stirring far away or deep inside. The Cynic shook his head. “It wasn’t that funny.”
“Must have a…agh, goddammit…delicate sense of humor.” Comedian Halsey grappled with his patient, struggling to pin her thrashing figure to the bed. The E.K.G. whined like a hornet’s nest. The Cynic lent his weight to restraining Margaret Suffolk, whose face shone with tears of laughter. Comedian Halsey lunged for the intercom above the bed.
“Get an Un-Amusement Unit to Room 198! We’ve got a patient in Class III Hysterics!”
Something in Comedian Halsey’s tone struck Margaret Suffolk as unimaginably funny, and she lashed out in uncontrollable joy. Her flailing limbs sent the Cynic’s glasses flying; he fell to his knees, groping blindly across the checked linoleum. Margaret Suffolk curled into the fetal position, twitching and hiccupping as if being tickled by an invisible feather duster. A crunch—the Cynic found his glasses. Margaret Suffolk’s hoots of delight were joined now by the faint whiff of urine. The Un-Amusement Unit was nowhere to be seen. Comedian Halsey made for the door, elbowing the unresponsive Satirist out of his way.
The laughter faded as Comedian Halsey sprinted down the fluorescent tunnel, white coat flailing behind. He passed the silent clock at the opposite end of the East Wing. Turning the corner, Comedian Halsey could no longer tell whether the echoing voice was laughing or choking.
The Satirist, the Blue Collars, and the Improvisers were on their way back to Boston. The remaining seven sat scattered around a long cafeteria table, swirling their yogurts and spearing limp salad with plastic forks. The Parody Musicians were tucked into a corner booth, leaning on each other with closed eyes and listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash through a shared pair of headphones. The Observationalist scribbled in his earmarked journal, stealing occasional glances at the Impressionist. She sat across from him, chewing ice from a Pepsi cup and balancing her chair on one leg. The Slapstick brothers practiced origami, folding Institute brochures into delicate paper fauna—swallows, giraffes, and stately Belugas.
The Cynic ate a popsicle. A wad of black surgical tape held his glasses together, and his lips were stained a deep blue. He bit down and slid the last piece of ice into his mouth, leaving it to melt on his tongue. Closing one eye behind his cracked left lens, the Cynic read from the popsicle stick.
“What is a musician’s favorite type of pastry?”
He took a silent survey of the table. The husband and wife shrugged in unison. The Observationalist shook his head, and the Impressionist crunched loudly on an ice cube. One of the Slapsticks opened his mouth in an ‘O’—the other knocked on his brother’s head, making a dull, hollow sound. The Cynic read the punchline to himself. A rosy shadow crept up from beneath his turtleneck.
“A drumroll.” His accent failed to disguise his embarrassment.
A wet, sputtering cough erupted from the corner. The interns turned to see Comedian Halsey, seated alone at a small table, wiping milk from his chin and upper lip. The lines that framed his face seemed rounder and fuller than before, but they narrowed and deepened when he saw he was being watched.
“Can I help you?” Comedian Halsey shouted from across the room.
When no one answered, he picked up his tray and crossed to the nearest trashcan. Tossing out his empty carton and milk-soaked sandwich, Comedian Halsey fixed the interns with a long stare. Then he whistled and pointed to his watch. As the table rushed to clear their trays, the Impressionist thought she caught a quiet chuckle.
“Drumroll. Ha. That’s pretty good.”
Collin Van Son is a member of the class of 2018. He is majoring in physics with minors in English and mathematics. Outside of writing, he also enjoys performing with the on-campus club No Refund Theatre. His fiction has previously appeared in the Hofstra Journal of Literature and Art.