Skip to main content

Making Fun of Tragedy -- Invitation to Write #74

For Writers:

I was in study hall when I first heard the rumor that the Space Shuttle had blown up. Was it true, we asked the teacher? And soon enough, we discovered it was. The entire school felt like a very sober place for the rest of the afternoon.


By next morning, the jokes started. Someone asked where the Challenger astronauts vacationed. The punch line: All over Florida. This was just one of the jokes, and this was 1986, way before high speed Internet made being tasteless uber-easy.


Looking back on it now, it’s amazing to me just how quickly jokes like this spread. Some of the jokes were morbidly funny, and I’m sure people used the tasteless humor just as a way to cope with the tragedy. Others probably just repeated the jokes because kids will be kids and don’t always know any better.


I honestly don’t remember anyone telling 9/11 jokes, but a quick Internet search shows that they’re out there. One 9/11 joke website even says, “After five years, you can laugh! It’s official!” What exactly are we supposed to be laughing at?


Should any subjects be “off limits” to jokes? Why or why not?


“Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable.” -- Goethe

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus and the Inconvenience of His Word to American Christians

I'm not a preacher, but if you follow the teachings of Jesus, it was he who said: Do to others as you would have them do to you. That's from Luke 6:31 , and reading all of Luke 6 isn't a bad way to spend five minutes of your time.  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%206&version=NIV I guess a lot of Christians understand the Golden Rule and practice it in their daily lives. Others, however, especially political Christians (and specifically those promoting Christian Nationalism) seem to ignore the Golden Rule. They don't care about humanitarian issues. They claim they either don't exist, aren't the problem of the United States, or are the fault of the victims. They counter with distractions like, "Why do you care so much about THEM when you should be caring about the REAL people who matter?" Sorry, but I don't recall Jesus ever dividing people into those who matter more and those who matter less. Of course, Jesus also said not to j...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microblogging? The Future of Writing with ADHD

Bill Bennett is a very common name. Right now, I'm reading a book by the Australian film maker Bill Bennett. He hiked the Camino in 2013 and then wrote a book (and made an Australian movie, not available in the U.S.) about it.  Seems he kept a blog about that hike, too. I went to look for his Camino blog, and found he started one years after the hike, but he didn't post regularly... His last post from 2022 announced his had Parkinson's and had kept the diagnosis secret for 4 years.  Now that almost three years have passed from that post, I wonder what's happened to him.  Blogs are weird. They just sit there. Anyone can stumble upon them, and read them. So I decided to keep looking for his Camino blog.  https://billbennett.blog/home/ *** And I found another Bill Bennett, this one from New Zealand, who keeps a microblog. It's current and updated. "What's a microblog?" My wife asked. Well, I said, it's a small blog. Just a sentence or two for a post. ...
Post a Comment
Read more