Won’t Get Fooled Again

Given our publication date for this edition, I’ll admit I had some dastardly April Fool’s Day plans—like printing definitive proof that Petaluma Junior High is built on top of a portal to Hell and that my entire tenure in local media is a prolonged performance art piece by conceptual artist Kit Fergus.

And though I’m deep in the trickster hero phase of my professional aspirations, I couldn’t fathom publishing stories that could be perceived as a willful indulgence of “fake news.” That’s not to say I don’t think we all need a laugh right now, given the profound absurdity and horrors of our present moment. As they say, laughter is the best medicine so long as one doesn’t overdose. 

Yes, laughter can kill. The most common way is through laughter-induced syncope, in which a person loses consciousness while laughing and then dies by some other means, i.e., falling, choking, or if they happen to be laughing at ICE.

A famous case from antiquity occurred to Chrysippus of Soli, the noted stoic ph…