I think it's worth remembering that making jokes -- successful or otherwise, tasteful or not -- about painful, unpleasant, disgusting, and distressing situations is a normal human response to those very situations. The famine in Ethiopia, the Challenger disaster, the schoolhouse massacre in Lancaster county -- just to name a few. All of them were subjects of humor not long after they occurred.
And if you do the research and go look at the material in Joe Miller's Joke Book (1738), or the stories told by Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, or those from Boccaccio's "Decameron", what'll you find? They're making jokes about equally painful, albeit more personal, situations like unfaithful spouses. It's a coping mechanism, a way of deflecting the pain and stress and horror of events that are outside one's control...and also a way of saying to the uncaring universe that permits such things to happen, "Fuck you! Despite this, I will survive!" The human race has been doing it for centuries, and is unlikely to stop now. In a message dated 6/19/07 8:15:58 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > OK, I just got home and had a chance to login and read what everyone's been > up to. > > I have to say, I am disappointed. No, make that disgusted. > > Where is it "clever" to mock and make jokes about a 28 year old person with > their life ahead of them being brutally beaten to death. > ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
