Some people laugh at the worst possible time. During a wake. Maybe somebody says something at your spouse’s memorial that was so perfectly them, so exactly the kind of thing they would’ve said, that you laugh before you can stop yourself.
Then the guilt hits. Like if you were devastated enough, you wouldn’t be able to find anything funny. Like the grief should be total, should fill every corner, should leave no room for a laugh or a smile or the memory of something ridiculous they used to do.
Research on grief says that’s not how people work. The laughter doesn’t mean you’re not grieving. It might mean your mind is doing exactly what it needs to do to get through this.
The people who laughed while talking about their loss did better over time
George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University, and Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley ran a study that changed how researchers think about grief and emotion.
They interviewed people who had recently lost a spouse and videotaped what happened while they talked about the person who died.
Some people cried. Some showed anger. Some smiled. Some laughed.
The researchers coded every facial expression, focusing on what’s called a Duchenne smile, the kind that reaches the eyes and can’t be faked. It’s the difference between a polite smile and one that involves the whole face, and it’s one of the most reliable markers of real positive emotion.
And the people who showed warmth while talking about their loss, including laughter, had less grief later. They adjusted more easily over the following months and years.
The laughter wasn’t replacing grief. It was happening inside it.
The same person who cried while describing the death could laugh two minutes later while remembering the way their spouse used to sing in the car, badly, with complete confidence. Both were real. Both showed up in the same interview, sometimes in the same sentence.
The laughter gives the mind a little room to breathe
You can be talking about the worst thing that’s ever happened to you and suddenly remember the way your husband got lost every single time you went anywhere. Or the ridiculous phrase your wife used to say when she was frustrated, the one that made no grammatical sense and cracked everyone up.
For a few seconds, the person isn’t only the person who died. They’re the whole person again.
The funny one, the stubborn one, the one who always burned the rice and never admitted it. The loss doesn’t disappear, but it shares the room with everything else the person was, and that room feels different from the one where there’s only pain.
That little shift matters more than it sounds. It pulls you out of the version of grief that’s all pain and nothing else, and lets you sit with the version that includes everything you loved about them alongside everything you lost.
It shows up in all the places you’d expect and a few you wouldn’t.
Siblings laughing while sorting through a parent’s kitchen, holding up the jar of something expired since 2019. Someone cracking a joke at the reception that the person they lost would’ve been the first to laugh at.
The first time something funny happens in your regular life after a loss, and you feel guilty for enjoying it, like your sadness should’ve been more airtight than that. None of those moments mean you’ve stopped grieving. They mean grief isn’t a sealed container.
Laughter can also make grief feel less lonely. Someone laughs with you, adds another story, and suddenly you’re not sitting in the pain by yourself. You’re sharing a person, not just mourning one.
That’s what happens at the kitchen table after the service, when somebody brings up the time your dad wore the wrong suit to a wedding and didn’t notice until the photos. Everyone laughs. Nobody loves him less for it.
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Grief was never supposed to be one emotion held at full volume all day
Bonanno’s broader work has shown that the most common response to loss is what he calls stable low distress: grief that’s real and painful but doesn’t prevent the person from functioning or experiencing other emotions alongside the sadness.
That movement between emotions isn’t avoidance. Bonanno calls it oscillation, and it’s how most people process a loss this size.
The grief comes and goes. Other feelings come and go alongside it. And the people who can move between them, who aren’t locked into sadness every second of every day, tend to do better over the long run than people who stay pinned in one place.
Dale Lund, a researcher at the University of Utah, and colleagues found a similar pattern in a study of recently widowed older adults.
Laughter, humor, and moments of happiness showed up surprisingly early in the grieving process, sometimes within the first weeks, and the people who experienced them had lower grief and depression scores, not higher ones.
That finding surprised a lot of people, because it runs against the assumption that early laughter means shallow grief. The opposite turned out to be closer to the truth. The people who could laugh were just as connected to the person they lost. They were just able to hold more than one feeling at a time.
The shame you felt about laughing is the only part that doesn’t belong
Bonanno’s follow-up work made one thing clear: the people who showed more positive emotion early on didn’t turn out to be people who weren’t that sad. They were still bereaved. They’d still lost the most important person in their daily life.
They just seemed better able to access something besides the loss from time to time, and that ability, that capacity to move between pain and everything else, was what tracked with better adjustment later.
So if you laughed at the memorial and immediately thought what is wrong with me, the answer may be nothing. Your mind was doing what minds sometimes do when the pain is enormous: letting in one small thing that makes it bearable for a minute, so you can keep breathing.
Laughter is allowed, not required
That said, laughter isn’t required for healthy grief, and someone who doesn’t laugh isn’t grieving wrong. Everyone moves through loss differently. Some people are stoic. Some cry for months. Some go numb. None of those responses is broken, either.
People also laugh because they’re nervous or uncomfortable, and that’s a different thing from real amusement. Laughter during grief was never proof of disrespect, denial, or a lack of love.
You don’t have to apologize for the laugh that came out in the middle of the worst week of your life. Grief is big enough to hold the service, the tears, the terrible story somebody told at dinner afterward, and the fact that for ten seconds, you laughed.
All of it belongs. Especially the laugh you didn’t expect.
