The day before I took my MCAT, I chose to not study (as is smart) and just watch movies and catch up on all the movies I wanted to watch and neglected on Netflix. Naturally, I gravitate towards extremely sad, extremely profound movies, and I chose "Schindler's List".

There's a scene near the very end of the movie when a Soviet soldier stumbles upon the Jews in the camp, liberating them from their work camp.

"You have been liberated!" the soldier shouts.

"Where should we go?" one person asks the soldier.

"Don't go easy. That's for sure. They hate you there."

I don't know why, and perhaps it makes me a terrible, heartless person for laughing at that sentiment, but that was one moment, in the darkest parts of life, where there was humor in spite of the worst of circumstances. And there were other moments in my life, where even in the darkest moments, in the pits of despair, I found light, laughs, and humor in the darkest of my own circumstances. I remember in early September when I went to church with one of my friends.

"I feel really bad, absolutely horrible," I said. "I thought I did everything by the book."

He pulled out his Bible, the English Standard Version, and held it up to me and pointed to it.

"Not by this book," he said.

The interaction, in spite of the heavy topic of conversation we were engaged in, had me laughing hysterically.

There is humor in life's darkest moments. We need to find humor in those times. Trevor Noah once said, about his mixed-race family that lived through apartheid, humor helped his family heal. When Trevor Noah's mom got shot by her ex-husband (in the middle of a drunken rage), he lamented to her "Mom, I'm gonna cry, you were shot in the head!"

"No, no, no, look on the bright side," his mother said.

"What bright side?"

"At least now, because of my nose, you're officially the best-looking person in the family."

Finding humor in life's darkest hours is essential. Aimee Foster once echoed the sentiment when her second daughter, Grace died, and said that "there's no point trying to be solemn for solemnity's sake." She tells us if something's funny, laugh at it. Seize an opportunity to release and escape a dreadful situation.

Her daughter, Grace, lived for only a day, and although Foster doesn't know who Grace would have become, she's certain that "she would have loved me and she would be happy that my laughter helped me endure the pain of losing her." At Grace's funeral, Foster heard her husband sing for the first time and described his singing it as "the poorest display of tone-deaf screeching I have ever been subjected to." She started bursting out laughing, everyone else at the funeral thinking she was crying.

"You may think me heartless -- how could I laugh at my own daughter's funeral? Believe me, that day was the saddest and heaviest of my life."

Laughter helps us heal, and allows us to bond with the person or thing we're laughing with. I try to suppress laughter when going through tough times because it doesn't seem appropriate, and maybe I shouldn't anymore. As long as humor is not at someone else's expense (or as long as my humor is at my own expense), we should be allowed to laugh when something is funny, even during life's darkest moments. "Humor may accidentally find you. Embrace it."

There's a reason why comedians tend to be writers, and why there is so much comedy in tragedy (and vice versa). James Belarde of Synapsis, a health humanities journal, uses anecdotal evidence of comedians who went through tragedy and found humor in those events. Richard Pryor tried to kill himself by covering himself in rum and lit himself on fire. Tig Notaro battle a life-threatening illness, lost his mother, and went through a breakup. Patton Oswalt's wife died in her sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition. For each of them "shared pain becomes the driving force behind laughter." Laughter in misery, for these comedians, is a necessary and beneficial coping mechanisms.

George Bonanno, a psychology professor at Columbia, found that people who smiled and laughed when they talked about their loss coped better over time. "This tendency to find humor in dark moments facilitates healthier outcomes by providing a reprieve from constant gloom." A big benefit, Bonanno found, was that experiencing happiness also put people around the sufferer at ease. Yes, I have been sad and down a lot recently, but that hasn't completely dominated my life. I do still know how to laugh and poke fun at my persistent melancholy.

"It's taxing to be around someone with a perpetually sad affect," Belarde writes. "If it becomes too strenuous, friends and family may pull away to spare their own feelings." Occasional laughter and joy in the middle of grief allows our friends and family to distance themselves less, and allow people to maintain support networks.

Now, I do not agree that we should isolate people who can't find any joy in their suffering. I believe in unconditional love and not giving up on people, especially when they go through unrelentingly hard circumstance, and that's one thing I've gotten much better at throughout college and life. That's why I volunteer on the Crisis Text Line, why I try to reach out, every day, to the friends that people in my circles and community have largely given up on. But that isn't to say it's easy, and I'm not as effective as I'd like to be, and I assume many who are close to other people who are grieving feel the same.

Humor is a fundamentally social phenomenon. Richard Pryor, at the end of one of his shows, struck a match and asked the audience: "what's that? Richard Pryor running down the street!" It was a joke made by many about him, and it eased a lot of tension in the room and absolved them of trying to be sensitive and strengthened Pryor's ties to his own support system.

When we cope with tragedy, crisis, and grief, it's usually not constant depression all the time. I have felt that I feel everything, from overwhelming sadness to peaceful joy, and Bonanno tells us that coping with tragedy is "an oscillation of many emotions, including joy." Psychiatrist Anand Desai told Belarde that the grieving experience multiple "visions of reality". "Patients can experience tragic visions, angry visions, ironic visions, comedic visions and more, all about the same event." To cope in a healthy manner, we have to be flexible. It's not just one vision of reality that we're living, it's all of them.

Tig Notaro, shortly after her diagnosed with invasive bilateral breast cancer, opened her show on August 3, 2012, with the line "good evening, hello! I have cancer, how are you? Hi, how are you, is everyone having a good time? I have cancer, how are you?" Seeking help and finding humor are not mutually exclusive events. "To some degree, I was asking for help," Notaro said. "Even while I was trying to make light of it." That helped her become comfortable with herself to the point where she took off her shirt in a show, after having a double mastectomy. "This is my brief and spectacular take on healing through comedy," Notaro ends. In her first performance after the diagnosis, she received all the oscillation of emotions that accompany tragedy.

And the interaction between comedy and tragedy isn't a one-way street. Sadness facilitates humor as much as humor eases the sadness. Notaro went on a tear writing after her diagnosis. "Sadness helps us focus and promotes deeper and more effective reflection," Bonanno writes. A comedian's jokes rely on making thoughtful observations, and through sadness, comedians realize things they didn't know before.

"No one chooses suffering as their primary route to laughter." That much is sure, but there is so much comfort in finding the humor when tragedies do come. We have to let ourselves live the whole range and oscillation of emotions, the joy, the pain, and, yes, the funny. A messy grieving process is chaotic and confusing by nature, and in that chaos, that humor is our hope.