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TO THE EDITOR.— I was at once amused and chagrined to read the commentary by Elgee in the August 1990 issue of the ARCHIVES, entitled "Norman Cousin's Sick Laughter Redux."1 It appears to me that Elgee uses the very tool of black humor that he so decries in all of comedy. What Elgee provides us is a vehicle for attacking medical care that is not in the mainstream of "traditional American medicine."I believe that there is healing to be found in our response to humor, and so does Norman Cousins. He readdresses the potential medical benefits of laughter in his most recent book, Head First: The Biology of Hope.2 We have been provided bright humor about medicine and physicians by authors through the ages, including Chaucer, Lewis Thomas,3 and Richard Selzer.4 Perhaps the most moving and enlightening example of the power of humor to facilitate

This epigraph is from a tale told by Mark Twain in A Subtreasury of American Humor,1 a volume recommended by Norman Cousins in his best-selling book, Anatomy of an Illness.2 You will probably recall it was touted that he laughed his way out of a crippling sickness, possibly a collagen disease, which his doctor had expected to be fatal. Anatomy endorses treatment with clean-living sorts of things, like laughter and healthy attitudes, vitamins and nutrition, and has nothing good to say about preservatives and white bread or poisons like aspirin, so it's something of a surprise to discover the advocacy of black humor. Twain's carpet caper is surely a black bit of amusement, but as long as the crepe is hung for someone else, we get relief. We feel better by comparison. That is humor at work, putting "us" ahead of "them." It seems harmless enough: he is dead, the