In everyone's life, there are ups and downs, days when they are happy and others when they are sad or upset. Everyone has moments that they cherish for the rest of their life, and others that bring them nightmares. No matter how life treats you good and sometimes bad, everyone wants to live a happy life. In the fiction “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” by Sherman Alexie, Jimmy, a character in the story, faces difficult situations in life. To cope and survive life's tragedies and difficult situations, some people use humor and pretend to have the life they never had. First, everyone faces challenges in life, some greater than others. The life difficulties one faces could be illness, for example. Alexie uses humorHumor was an antiseptic that cleansed the deepest personal wounds. Jimmy said (208). Throughout Alexie's story, many jokes were performed as effective humor because they made people laugh "Well, I told him that the doctor showed me my x-rays and that my favorite tumor had to about the size of a baseball..." (204) Jimmy said jokingly about it. the tragedy of his illness and imminent death. Dr. Gill Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, said "humor can help people cope with tragedies." Humor is therefore effective and a very good way to cope. Alexie uses pretense as a strategy to please his imagination and hide pain, e.g. “And look at the children…And they have your eyes.” (203) Said Jimmy, pretending to have the perfect family. Jimmy also pretends to have a healthy relationship with his wife, after leaving a fight between them he responds, "Didn't you miss me?" I've been gone for so long and it's good to be back home. Where I belong. (203). Additionally, people pretend to be who they are to not feel comfortable around others, for example in Alexie's fiction, Jimmy and Norman pretended to share a cigarette to feel comfortable with each other “and shared a cigarette. I should say we both pretended to share a cigarette since neither of us smoked. But we both did and wanted to have much more in common. (206). So people pretend to be something they're not to please themselves, hide their pain and feel comfortable.