Lynn Sharpe
It’s a Funny Story
When I got home that night, I checked Instagram. My friend had screenshotted my Snapchat from earlier that day—though the morning already felt like weeks ago—and posted the photo on his Finsta. “Lynn got blackout and lost all her shit and slept in the library,” the caption read. “And then she found her shit tonight. Iconic.”
My grim expression from less than twelve hours ago stared back at me. I wasn’t pouting in exaggeration or looking off to the side with my lips pursed as if to say “oops” or “yikes.” I just looked depleted. Sad. Sick and fucking tired.
“This pic is the lowest point of my life not gonna lie,” I commented. I knew my comment would be taken in jest, an act of dramatizing for comedic effect. I was already turning it into a joke, creating the narrative of a funny story to be retold for years to come.
My cousin left a comment underneath mine: “Ok but this is a classic lynn move.” That’s how it would come to be remembered. Classic. Iconic. Funny.
O
It’s been four years since then, and in that time, the story of that night and morning after has turned into one of my go-to anecdotes about university, one of my most ridiculous, hilarious chronicles of drinking to date. It lives on in its retelling by myself and by friends who consider themselves familiar enough with the key points to bring it up, often told in conjunction with other tales of my antics. The Greatest Hits of “that time”s: that time I left the club and came back with a slice of pizza in my pocket. That time I ran around the metro station barefoot. That time I fell off the stage at TRH Bar.
That time I got locked out of my apartment and slept in the university library blackout drunk.
It’s often met with laughs and disbelief and exclamations of “Oh my God!” But that version—the condensed, abridged version—is not the whole story. None of it is untrue, or even exaggerated: I did black out. I did leave my keys and wallet at a bar. I did get locked out of my apartment. I did pass out at my school’s library. I did return to the bar the next day and recover my belongings. All of that did happen. I don’t lie—I just omit. I leave out certain details, I downplay some and amplify others. I focus on what’s funny to other people—like the three-minute Uber I took from my friend’s residence hall to the library after attempting to call her and discovering her phone was in my pocket. I mold it into a story packaged for retelling, easily digestible and lighthearted. I make it feel OK to laugh about it; after all, a lot of funny stories aren’t funny when they happen—they’re humiliating, painful, miserable, until they’re over and all is well and you fold them up and slip them in your back pocket to be retrieved at any moment.
But the way I choose to tell this story is no accident, my omission no victim of oversight or forgetfulness or mere failure to mention. It is calculated, intentional. What I’ve chosen to never reveal is that the next morning, when I woke up under the fluorescent lights amid the stacks of books and students cramming for exams, splayed out like a starfish on the leather booth in that library, I was drenched in my own piss.
O
In her 2018 Netflix stand-up special, Nanette, Hannah Gadsby dissects what makes jokes and, by extension, funny stories work. Early on in her set, she tells a story about a guy mistaking her for a man trying to flirt with his girlfriend. “Do you remember that story about that young man who almost beat me up? It was a very funny story,” she says later. “But in order to balance the tension in the room with that story, I couldn’t tell that story as it actually happened.” She then confesses that she’d left out a crucial detail: the man later realized she was a lesbian, and actually did beat her up. By intentionally excluding this ending, the story was able to be funny, not only because of her delivery and emphasis on certain details, but because we are led to assume that the mild discomfort or insult she was subjected to is the worst of it. What Hannah omits is more explicitly traumatic: when we find out what really happened, it kills the joke.
My omission serves the same purpose, to balance the tension in the room when I tell that story. Though to someone who does not know me, does not know my history, it would seem impossible and even insensitive to compare: we understand why homophobia and violence are painful and thus too painful to recount. But pissing yourself while drunk? It seems a mortifying accident that lends itself to become the stuff of legend once the immediate damage has been remedied. To include that detail would serve only to raise the stakes, to increase the outrageousness of my escapades and the shock and amusement in my audience’s responses.
But this urinary incident cannot do that in my story, because it is not an anomaly: it is among many of its kind. In telling this story, I can’t include the part where I pissed myself in my sleep on that couch in the library in front of countless people, because I’ve pissed myself on dozens of couches before, on beds and chairs and air mattresses and floors and the cement on the sidewalk, in bathtubs and sleeping bags and many not belonging to me. More times than I can count have I woken up dazed and dreary on the verge of a hangover, only for panic and dread to be triggered by the warmth and dampness coating my body from underneath, the smell that can’t be mistaken or masked or ignored, and the sight of a wet yellow pool or half-dried ring, threatening to stain and ruin for good. And in this panic and dread, the shame breeds. The reminder of all the times before that I have woken up to this cry from my body to slow down, to stop drinking myself sick, to get myself under control—but the understanding, too, of how little control I have—over my body and myself—that I could let this happen, time and time again. And where the shame lives, beyond these events independent from one another, is in knowing that it will happen again, and again.
“This pic is the lowest point of my life not gonna lie,” I’d commented on my friend’s post, what made that true unknown to everyone but me. In reality, I’ve come to know plenty of “lowest points of my life,” the potency of my misery fading more and more as time pulls me further away from it, tending the wound but not healing it. All of these lowest points took place hungover, catalyzed by piss-soaked mornings. All the result of a drunken lapse in judgement or a reckless decision the night before. All avoidable, had I been sober.
During her set, Hannah tells another story, a hilarious—though, ultimately, very upsetting—story about how she came out to her mother. Afterward, she explains why her telling of that story is harmful. “The way I’ve been telling that story is through jokes,” she says, “and that story became a routine, and through repetition, that joke version fused with my actual memory of what happened. But unfortunately that joke version was not nearly sophisticated enough to help me undo the damage done to me in reality.” Hannah’s painful lived experience became fodder for her stand-up sets. She turned her trauma into material to get laughs, and in doing so, she altered the shape and significance of what has caused her harm, rendering her unable to heal from it.
If I didn’t tell the story about the library the way I do—by minimizing, summarizing, trivializing—I would be forced to recognize it for what it was: another piss-soaked morning, another lowest point. In my strategic telling of it, I have changed how I let myself remember it; it has allowed me to buy into the farce instead of facing the trauma I endured and continue to endure every time my body betrays me. If I tell it the way it really happened, I am telling on myself, confronting myself, admitting to myself that there’s nothing funny about this.
About the Author
Lynn Sharpe is a nonfiction writer from Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from Concordia University in 2019 with an Honors BA in English & Creative Writing. She has worked as a staff writer and editor for various publications and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University.