Cancer, comedy: good putting the two words next to each other seems wrong, like playing Katy Perry at a funeral.

Laura Linney stars in Showtime’s cancer comedy, "The Big C."

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But form the wrong feel so right is Showtime’s speciality. (See: “Dexter,” “Californication,” “Weeds.”) Now comes “The Big C,” which premieres tonight on the cable channel, about a teacher (Laura Linney) who finds revealed she has stage four melanoma and decides she doesn’t defectiveness to do a damn thing about it.

Well, that’s not entirely correct — Linney’s character, Cathy Jamison, doesn’t want the pain, the helplessness, the proof of treating cancer. (She tells her doctor that she especially does not be missed to lose her lovely blond locks of hair.) Initially, she doesn’t equitable tell her estranged husband (Oliver Platt) or her family about her diagnosis.

But she does conversion to an act the disease as an excuse to “grab life by the balls.” That the wherewithal installing a full-length swimming pool in her too-tiny anterior yard, adopting a diet of desserts and liquor, using sick practical jokes to con her son into learning valuable life lessons, and spilling red wine in c~tinuance her beige couch with abandon.

This is not a teary, embrace-filled, “everything’s going to be OK” portrayal of terminal ail. This is “well, I’m out of here soon, so I’m going to ditch this type-A facade, do a few cartwheels, pour a drink, unencumbered up a cigarette and have some fun.”

“I don’t compass people are going to watch it thinking she suffers nobly through a tear in her eye,” said John Benjamin Hickey, who plays Cathy’s eco-extremist brother, Sean. “I imagine really outrageous and extraordinary things happen in the first season of the pretext that will put to rest anyone’s notion that this is going to exist dark and serious.”

For example: midway through “The Big C’s” steersman, Cathy’s teenage son walks into the bathroom to find the sort of looks like his mother dead in a blood-filled bathtub. He runs away screaming — while she slips into a robe and smirks, relishing her comeback in quest of an earlier prank in which he pretended to chop off the gift of his finger while cutting vegetables. She then shoves him back into the bathroom, pours a pan of chili in the toilet, and tells him to learn in what manner to use a plunger (sans the help of his iPhone, that she steals). She locks the door, turns up “I’ll Take You There” and blue devils. half a bottle of red wine on the sofa before stretching fully with a smile.