This isn't funny. But it is about having a sense of humor. Even things that are traumatic and tragic can, in time, yield a few laughs from a safe distance. Think of high school.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to New Orleans for the annual conference of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. We gathered in New Orleans in 2004, and we usually don't try to revisit a city we've already been thrown out of.

But the next summer, hurricanes Katrina and Rita wrecked the place. And three years later, the story about all that has happened since the storms -- and all that hasn't, still -- isn't getting out much anymore. New Orleans is coming along, verrrrrry slowly, and you can still stagger down Bourbon Street with a high-octane beverage in one hand and a colorful skein of beads in the other, but everything is not all better.

In fact, outside the unsinkable French Quarter, the devastation will make you queasier than bad crawfish. I'll be writing more about that, but not in this space; I don't like to be angry in my column. I'm struggling to write about what I saw in a way that will be printable in a family newspaper.

For today, a silver lining: the only Katrina survivor who made me laugh.

At the end of our first full day of conference activities -- panels, speeches, mental illness, Ray Nagin and "Why the Wetlands Matter to You" -- we shuffled, slightly stunned, onto the sidewalk outside the Hotel Monteleone. We were told to bring parasols (some of us had umbrellas) and kazoos (some of us had combs with wax paper because kazoos weren't dorky enough).

We were redeemed by the Storyville Stompers, a very Nawlins brass band that led us in a little parade down Bienville Street. A whole convention of kazoo-blowing, Hawaiian-shirted, rhythm-challenged newspaper columnists: the second-biggest natural disaster to hit New Orleans.

Our destination was the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas, where we enjoyed a dinner buffet of Cajun food (first you wave at the tanks of shellfish, then you eat them with beans and rice) and the reminiscences of Tom Dyer, senior aviculturist. He's the bird guy. He does penguins and macaws, but he also has a sideline in turtles and otters.

He loves his charges and knows all the penguins so well he can actually tell them apart. It must have been agonizing for him when the floodwaters cut off the aquarium, the last staffers were evacuated, the generator eventually broke down and increasingly warm and toxic water poisoned and smothered thousands of creatures: sharks, fish, seahorses, rays. When aquarium staff were allowed back in, they found the macaws almost roasted alive but hanging on, and the penguins dirty and freaked out but OK. The cops who'd stayed to guard the aquarium from looters had found frozen mice for the owls but had also improvised with bits of sausage, which must have come as a dietary shock.

In the stinking necropolis the aquarium had become, everything with a pulse had to be relocated pronto. And you can't exactly put penguins in your spare room. They'll leave fish in the dresser.

The sea turtles that had come to the aquarium for rehab -- for injuries, not for drinking too much Abita spilled by boaters -- needed to be released, so Tom put them in his car.

"Some of these turtles I practically breast-fed," he explained.

A state trooper escorted Tom through jammed traffic, over medians -- at first, the aviculturist was too terrified even to look at the speedometer, but when he did, he found it hovering around 95.

The turtles could be released, but the penguins and otters needed another aquarium; the one in Monterey, Calif., chartered a plane to airlift them from Baton Rouge. Tom called around until he found a refrigerated truck and a willing driver (in the week after the storm "no one wanted to drive here," he said) to pick up the critters and haul them to their flight.

Tom grabbed a couple of T-shirts, a pair of shorts and a toothbrush and got his passengers ready. The cabin of the plane had to be kept at 50 degrees for the animals. There was no beverage service. There were no seats.

It wasn't the most comfortable flight for Tom.

"My penguins were angels," he remembered, "but never fly with an otter."

Of all the lessons from Katrina I heard that weekend, "never fly with an otter" is the only one that makes me smile.