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In the Big Book, just after relaying the story of the “poor chap” who committed suicide in his house, Bill W. talks about all the fun experiences in AA. “I suppose some would be shocked at our seeming worldliness and levity,” he writes in “Bill’s Story.”

AAs do laugh a lot—at themselves, their drinking histories, and their initial stumbles through the Steps. We may not have felt much like laughing in the beginning. We may have been depressed, or physically sick. We may have caused a lot of damage that we knew would take a while to repair. And we may have felt agonizingly lonely.

But the first time we heard someone get up in front of a meeting and share about some embarrassing drinking event—or some embarrassing sober event—we couldn’t help but laugh along with them. If someone else did what I did and is joking about it now, we thought, maybe I’m not so bad.

Alcoholics “are possessed of a sense of humor. Even in their cups they have been known to say damnably funny things,” writes Fulton Oursler, a friend of AA, in the Chapter One story “Charming Is the Word for Alcoholics.” “Often it was being forced to take seriously the little and mean things of life that made them seek escape in a bottle. But when they have found their restoration, their sense of humor finds a blessed freedom and they are able to reach a god-like state where they can laugh at themselves, the very height of self-conquest. Go to the meetings and listen to the laughter. At what are they laughing? At ghoulish memories over which weaker souls would cringe in useless remorse. And that makes them wonderful people to be with by candlelight.”

“There is … a vast amount of fun about it all,” Bill W. wrote. “But just underneath there is deadly earnestness.”

This collection of stories from AA Grapevine shows how, in recovery, AAs have learned to laugh.