When We Laughed at the Apocalypse

The sky cracked open at 2:17 p.m., Eastern Standard Time. Not figuratively. Literally. A jagged tear split across the clouds like someone had sliced reality with a cosmic box cutter. And what did we do?

We laughed.

Not the polite kind of laugh—the kind you offer during awkward silences or weak jokes. No. We laughed until our ribs hurt and our eyes teared up, standing under that fractured sky with its burning purple glow and unrecognizable constellations peeking through. We laughed because everything else—logic, hope, even time—had stopped making sense weeks ago.

You see, by that point, the world had already gone off-script.


---

It began with whispers of extinction-level events. Climate collapse accelerated so fast that the ocean started swallowing coastlines like a hungry beast. Fires danced across continents. The bees left. The birds stopped singing. And then—one day—the moon vanished without warning.

We watched it happen live on YouTube. A million people tuned in to see the night sky go blank. Comments ranged from terrified to absurd:

> "NASA’s hiding it in Area 51."
"Aliens finally repossessed their rental."
"Well, guess it’s time to start that apocalypse garden."



My best friend, Morgan, texted me that night:
“No moon = no tides = no surfing. The real tragedy.”
We laughed until 2 a.m.


---

As the days spiraled, so did humanity.

Governments held press conferences where world leaders looked like exhausted actors in a play no one wanted to direct. Grocery stores stopped restocking. Wifi flickered out like dying fireflies. People either panicked, prayed, or partied.

We chose the third.

We formed the End of the World Comedy Club—a group of misfits who believed that if laughter couldn’t save the world, it could at least save our sanity. We held open mics in abandoned diners, made memes under candlelight, and wrote satire while the earth groaned beneath our feet.

Morgan called it “tragedy CPR.”


---

The night the rivers turned to rust, we were performing in a darkened theater with no electricity, just glowsticks taped to the floor. Our headliner was a former insurance agent turned stand-up comic named Jasper, whose opening line was:

“You know it’s bad when the cockroaches start evacuating.”

The place roared.

Someone handed out stale popcorn from an old vending machine. Another passed around home-brewed “apocalypse ale” made from canned fruit and desperation. We laughed louder than the rumbling outside, louder than the static on our solar radios, louder than the approaching silence that was swallowing everything else.


---

Humor became our rebellion. Our last act of defiance.

When reality melted into absurdity, jokes became the only truth we trusted. Satire turned into scripture. We worshipped irony, toasted dark humor, and wore sarcasm like armor.

I remember one day, we found a stack of old newspapers. The headlines were almost comically naive:

"Economy Poised for Recovery"
"2024: Year of Renewal"
"AI Predicted Peace in Our Time"

Morgan read them aloud in a news anchor voice, and we all nearly choked from laughing. It was absurd. Beautifully, horribly absurd.


---

Eventually, we stopped counting the days.

Calendars were useless when seasons bled into each other and the sun rose in colors that didn’t exist before. Time fractured. Memories felt like borrowed dreams.

Still, we performed.

One night, under the cracked sky and a makeshift stage made of shopping carts and tarps, I stood up and told my first joke in weeks:

“You ever realize the apocalypse is just Earth’s way of ghosting us?”

A kid in the front—barely ten—laughed so hard he fell off his chair. His mom smiled. That was the moment I knew it mattered.


---

When the final broadcast hit, it was a single sentence looping over emergency frequencies:

"This is not the end. This is the punchline."

Some say it was just a glitch. Others believed it was the universe speaking.

Either way, we took it personally.


---

Now, years—decades?—later, the world is unrecognizable. Fewer people. Stranger skies. Plants that glow at night. Animals that hum instead of growl. We still don’t know what happened. Maybe we never will.

But we survived.

Not because we were the strongest or the smartest.

But because we learned how to laugh when everything else fell apart.

And somewhere, deep in the ruins of our old city, someone carved these words into a wall:

“When the world broke, we told jokes.”

That’s our legacy.
That’s our resistance.
That’s our truth.