THE BEST
OF YOUR LIFE
FAMILY
Laughing
Legacy
Actress and activist
Marlo Thomas uses
humor to keep friends
and family close
PHOTOGRAPH B Y MA TTHEW HRANEK
B Y DAVID DUDLEY
L
IFE IS FUNNY, EVEN—or perhaps
especially—when it isn’t. Case
in point, from the funny files
of Marlo Thomas:
“A friend of mine called me the other day and told me his mother had died,”
says the 72-year-old actress. Thomas asked, “When is the funeral?” Her
friend replied seriously, “Well, it can’t be for a few days because they’re really
backed up.” And then, Thomas recalls, “We just started to scream laughing.”
Dark humor? Maybe. But the friend, Thomas notes, is the son of a comedy
writer. And she, of course, is both a daughter of the comedian Danny Thomas
and a comic performer in her own right since the days of her popular 1960s
sitcom, That Girl. As fellow products of the gag factory, she and her pal shared
the same understanding—that life is fundamentally crazy, and a traffic backup
at the mortuary is fair game for a joke. “If we didn’t grow up in a world of com-
edy, we might have seen that as tragic. It is tragic. It’s terrible and tragic. But
it’s also so ridiculous that it’s funny. And this is in a moment of grief!”
Easing life’s woes with laughter
has become something of a mission
for Thomas lately. It’s a theme of her
new book, Growing Up Laughing, a
memoir punctuated by interviews
with comedians, including Jerry
Seinfeld and Conan O’Brien. The
book serves as both a coming-of-age
story and an inquiry into how—and
why—funny people got that way.
BETWEEN
FRIENDS
Watch Marlo Thomas and Bette Midler discuss life’s
more amusing moments at aarp.org/marloandbette.
