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If you have ever been at a Billy Joel concert, you may have seen me. I'd have been the one belting out the lyrics to "Only the Good Die Young" with much intensity and gusto, reaching a feverish crescendo at the line "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun!" I would have followed that up by howling, "Wooo!" (Remember me?)

As a Catholic girl, that song was my anti-Catholic anthem, summing up in one line the crux of my complex girlhood theological argument against the church: they were a bunch of uptight prudes. I don't know if you all have seen many saints, but you've certainly seen portrayals of Jesus. And they tend to be a grim bunch on the whole. At their best, they possess a sort of transcendent calm; at their worst, they are famine thin and bloodied by oppressors. I've never seen any of them kicking back and enjoying a good belly laugh: slapping a knee, wiping tear-filled eyes crinkled with joy and hardly able to draw breath through the peals of riotous laughter. That behavior is strictly for hardened sinners.

That was the dichotomy in my eyes, proven out by Billy Joel (and of course, Footloose) on the one hand and by Father McDougal on the other: one could be spiritual or one could enjoy life, but not both. Or in a similar dichotomy, summed up as one of those pithy bits of wisdom posted on the wall of one of my high school classrooms: "those who feel, cry and those who think, laugh." And oh, do I think! I left the saints to cry in church, while I laughed, in a very sinful way: laughed with tears of delight streaming down my face.

Nothing makes me laugh harder than cleverness, flipness, sarcasm, irony, exaggeration, absurdity, mocking the ridiculous (and with it, authority). When I laugh and I revel in the intellect of the joke teller, or if I am the witty one, I delight in crowing, like Peter Pan, "Oh, the cleverness of me!" At my witty best, I am laughing less at the subject matter than I am delighting in that cleverness; in fact, the subject matter doesn't figure in much at all. I laugh at the ridiculousness of strangers and celebrities and friends and myself. I laugh at things that should offend me. I laugh with a group of women whose name alone is so offensive that some of my real life friends can't bring themselves to say out loud. And when others mock me or things close to my heart, if they do it cleverly and well, I laugh too.

Of course, one person's ridiculous and absurd is another person's deeply and seriously held belief. When I lampoon someone's cherished beliefs (whether it be in the solidity of their own mental health or in the reasonableness of George Bush's policies), I shut down dialogue and close the door on understanding. I'm also easily misunderstood and apt to unintentionally misrepresent myself. Therein lies the danger in laughter for me: as someone prone to hyper-intellectualize, it lets me wall myself off from my feelings and from other people, and view my life, and everyone else's, with a detached, seemingly unkind, smile. Laughter lets me hide. Even having left Catholicism, I sometimes find it hard to reconcile my particular brand of humor with the spirituality and compassion in my life.

I have a real life friend (who doesn't read this blog) who is an active sex addict in denial. Her therapist has told her she is a sex addict (which she complained to me was "ridiculous"); she's been through three failed marriages, each failed due to her sexual behavior. She's a well educated, intelligent woman, highly respected in her field, with a variety of interests, but her career is starting to suffer as she spends time at work focusing on meeting new men online in the wake of her most recently failed marriage. I visited her MySpace page recently and noticed two things: she is currently dating yet another man who is supposed to be "the one," and her one and only listed interest was "men." I love her and have genuine compassion for her, but her single listed interest was so true and yet so absurd that I could not stop laughing.

When I shared it with my husband, he was too pained, too sad for her and for himself, to talk about it. And that brought me up short. I know she's in pain. I know I feel compassion for her. I know I love and care about her and wish there were a way to make the pain stop, a way that didn't involve masking it with man after man. Yet, even so -- even though my chest gets tight with sorrow when I let myself feel where she must be to write that -- when I take myself away and look at all the puzzle pieces of her life in their absurd array, it's just deliciously, wickedly, ridiculously absurd, and so funny.

Years ago, when I was college age, I was traveling in Asia and saw happy Buddhas out on the mats and tables of every street vendor. My friends and I would bargain for them and regale each other with tales of "Buddha bargains": how we got the cheapest price on a (faux) jade Buddha or what our Buddha's imaginary provenance might be. Gautama Buddha may have gone out and starved himself like any good acetic, but that little guy, whether reclining in chortles or throwing his hands above his head in glee, looked like someone not averse to a little good fun. All life may be suffering, but my happy Buddha was riding the suffering in style.

What I liked most about him was that he didn't seem like the kind of guy who would begrudge me denigrating his religion by taking him home as a cheap souvenir. My own little Buddha came home, happily chuckling, in a carry on bag and has found a proud place to sit in every home since, while crosses have slipped off to Goodwill or pawn shops. I look at him now, sitting on a shelf in my room, reclining in fat resplendence, tickled at his own enlightenment. And I think it's possible -- that balance between compassion and bemusement, feeling and intellect -- I think he's figured it out. He sees the world as it is and laughs at it and loves it tenderly at the same time. I'm working on getting what that guy has: spirituality with a good belly laugh.