You will die. I will die. Nature prepares us for death by affording a lifetime of experiences which make us wish we were dead. A week before Christmas in 1977, I laughed too hard at a Cub Scout meeting and pooped my pants. The Duchess of Cambridge has, no doubt, made trouser chili in her panties at some point. If the Fates allow, she will someday grow old and wrinkly. She may very well become Queen of England, but she, too, will die.

When Tessa was 17, she was diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Now in her fifties, she sees an ophthalmologist once a year to make sure her eyes are functioning properly. She and her ophthalmologist are the same age and have become friends over the years. Once, he told her, “Back in residency we had a saying, ‘Embrace the suck, or the suck will embrace you’.” He was born in Hays, Kansas, but he grew to adulthood in Iran. When the Islamic Republic took over in 1979, he and his parents and sister sewed money into their clothing and rode mopeds across the mountains to Armenia. He has experienced the suck of life amid epic danger.

He refuses to marry and have children because of a congenital heart defect that he does not want to pass on to anyone. So, he passes his free time rebuilding high-performance engines. He is a driving instructor at the local speedway. I guess that’s called “coping.”

In my drinking days, I coped with the horror of existence by drinking. Next day, I coped with the hangover by doing speed rounds on the heavy bag until I did the technicolor yawn in the grass under the maple tree. After that, I coped with the muscle soreness with ibuprofen or aspirin which sometimes helped . . . sometimes. Every old fart knows where this is going: Eventually, your coping mechanism fails. And then what do you do when the coping mechanism that copes with the coping mechanism that failed fails? Your system topples like the three stooges.

While you’re working up the nerve to commit suicide, you channel surf to The Three Stooges and maybe laugh a little if no one catches you. When it comes to coping, the Stooges get it right: embrace the horror of your existence, and desensitize yourself to the pain. Why are the Stooges still popular on DVD and streaming services even though the critics pretty much gave them thumbs down for eighty years? Laughter. Laughter against your will. Three chronically unemployed nit-wits are shooting each other in the ass with upholstery tacks. A negative experience becomes a positive experience.

Okay, sure, Shakespeare could tell a good fart joke. And nobody could expose the folly of the moral high ground like Mark Twain. But all too often “great” works of art make us too sensitive. Coping with the general horror of existence requires a good deal of desensitivity training: Kind of like conditioning the hands and feet for breaking bricks.

Trying to avoid depression or boredom is a negative experience. Accepting depression and boredom is a positive experience. And next comes desensitivity training. Women go through this during childbirth. But men have to get lucky and wait for something horrible to desensitize us. Tessa’s grandfather was a quartermaster on an LST in World War II. One afternoon, he got his three-hundred-foot ship stuck on a beach in the Pacific Ocean. He had no choice but to keep wallowing back and forth hour after hour until the ship came free. That horrible experience prepared him for lots of things, including the cancer that eventually took him. Two weeks before he died, I asked him, “What is the secret to life?” Stupid question, and I was sort of joking, but he replied, without missing a beat, “Ignore it.” Ignore it? He meant, “Don’t be too sensitive.” Moe konks Curly in the head with a step ladder, and Curly spews out a stream of Yiddish and moves on to the next joke.

Laughter is only the second step. The vital first step must come first. What is the first step? When you have figured it out, send me a message on your phone or facebook or e-mail, and let me know what it is.