When life gives you “lemons,” what should you do?  Make lemonade, right?  Wrong! If you have any brains, you’ll ditch the lemons, maybe in your neighbor’s backyard. But suppose you can’t possibly do this?  Then, and only then, should you make lemonade. 

The problem with cancer is that when life gives it to you,  it’s almost impossible to unload on somebody else.  So the best you can do is make yourself a big jug of “Cancerade.”  There are many fine recipes for the above, but the minutiae are not important: what matters is that you mix in lots and lots of humor.

One person who made “Cancerade” *and sold it for big bucks* was Marisa Acocella, who worked as a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine.  When our story starts the lady’s life was going swimmingly: she had a job that she loved, a family that she loved (with reservations) and, most important of all, she was *in love* with the perfect man. 

Then one day, as she was getting ready to go to work, Ms. Acocella found a tiny lump in her breast . . . and you know the rest of the story.  The poor woman was just three weeks away from marrying her dashing, rich boyfriend.

I’m not going to tell you the rest of the story, but I will say that Ms. Acocella ended up writing a funny and popular book about her run-in with disastrous fortune.  (If you can’t read, don’t worry about it, this is a “graphic” book.  No, it’s not filthy, that’s what they now call an adult comic book.)

The book was called “Cancer Vixen”. Why? Because the author liked the sound of it better than “Cancer Victim.”   (Have been struggling to find a male counterpart for above! “Male Cancer Fox” just doesn’t cut it.)

If you ask me, prostate cancer is anytime as funny as breast cancer.  Probably more so.  That’s because in cancer-related humor as in property, personal included, “Location is everything.”  South of the waistline helps.

So I said to myself, maybe I’ll write a book of Prostate Cancer Humor someday.  After all, I already had some PC-related jokes squirreled away, a few of which I’d heard from other people, but most of which I’d actually lived through myself.  I posted these jokes on PC newsgroups.

Is it in bad taste to joke about cancer? A legimitate question, perhaps.  But tragedy and comedy have always been in an incestuous relationship.  Otherwise why would there be a word like “tragicomic”?

So, in the future I hope to present a lot of humor, of all topics.  That’s what I most prefer to talk about.

Cheers.