Have you ever watched Jerry Seinfeld’s web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee? Each episode is framed around a specific car (often vintage) that Seinfeld is driving while spending time with a fellow comedian. They go out to eat and get coffee along the way. It’s a simple and wonderful premise. The episodes are short-ish – usually around 15 – 20 minutes.

They make me laugh out loud. I saw a link to the latest episode with Sarah Jessica Parker (who is very funny) and that led me to another and another. Then I got Don involved and he was watching episodes on his laptop. Picture both of us in front of our laptops wearing our earbuds, laughing out loud.

In the list of qualities I feel are absolutely essential in a boyfriend, a husband, a colleague or a friend, a sense of humor is at the very top. If Don hadn’t had a sense of the absurd, a streak of funny coursing through his veins, that first meeting I told you about would have been the beginning and the end of our relationship.

It’s that important to me. In all modesty, I’m a really funny person. I can make people laugh. It’s always been that way. And Don, oh my goodness, is he funny! He can make me laugh so hard and long that I end up gasping and begging for mercy, usually ending with “Stop! Stop! I’m going to pee in my pants!!”

And I make him laugh. There’s nothing better than making someone who has a fabulous sense of humor laugh out loud.

My sister and I have been known to laugh so hard that we literally – and I do mean literally – fall to the ground. One such situation comes to mind. I was living in Boston and Meredith was visiting with her boyfriend, who I was meeting for the very first time. We were in Fanueil Hall looking at a rack of cards and I said something that struck us both as funny. We started laughing and we couldn’t stop. This went on for several minutes with both of us eventually falling to the floor. John, the boyfriend who ended up being my future brother-in-law, took it in stride and quietly walked away from us while we were causing quite the scene.

Little did John know that was the first of many laugh fests. In fact, one of the first conversations John and I had was about Seinfeld episodes that we loved. We couldn’t stop laughing.

(It might be time to share the Henna from Hell story with you – yet another adventure with my sister. Maybe this week…we’ll see.)

I think you have to be able to filter life through a lens that sees the humor in things, that captures that sense of the absurd, the silly, the farcical, the satiric. Lord knows, it’s saved my sanity more times than I can count.

Is there anything better than laughing so hard you have tears rolling down your face? It’s cathartic. It cleanses. It releases.

I’m going to go watch some more episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. There’s a few I haven’t seen yet.

New post today on Just Let Me Finish This Page. It’s a book review of Cop Town by Karin Slaughter. (Loved the book.)

Happy Monday.