E. Johanna Hartelius

Cancer Is Funny

Counseling, Grief & Mental Health

“Jason Micheli’s sardonic yet truthful account is moving to those of us who dislike autobiographies, perhaps because it isn’t one. On the way to disclosure, Micheli lets readers engage with the most important questions of life and faith: What is suffering? What are moments of genuine encounters with another human? Why pray to God? When and how does love happen? As Micheli relies on humor in tackling these issues, he enacts the conceptual distinction set up in the introduction between deflective coping mechanisms and the shedding of pretense. Cancer is funny, in other words, not because your comedy evades sincerity more effectively with jokes about full-body hair loss, but because vulnerability is as inevitable, inescapable, and existential as your humanity. Micheli navigates this distinction deftly, weaving it with thoughts on the incarnation, and his self-deprecation never betrays him. Self-deprecating humor can easily become for the reader the doughy pancakes that lose their appeal and swell as you’re chewing them. But because Cancer is Funny sticks with the initial motif of a true rather than a resembling ontology, the exploration of human precarity remains compelling. Micheli is as equal to the task of writing a cancer pathography as to the task of writing an accessible treatment of human struggles with pain, love, fear, and God.”