Dark Humour
I was just reading this web page, an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. His books are full of dark humour. But interestingly, he does actually say in this interview that there are some subjects that he thinks it is inappropriate to joke about, such as the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Vonnegut did think that Voltaire demonstrated that the Lisbon earthquake could be made funny. The interviewer suggested that the difference was in the amount of time after the event. If it were only one year after the Lisbon earthquake it would not be funny. And if it were three hundred years after the Holocaust it might be funny. The difference, in other words, is whether the events affect any actually existing persons.
And yet, look at the "Friday Night Sports Machine" from the late 1980s. They poked fun at all sorts of sporting accidents, always less than a week old. I suppose you could argue that that was in bad taste, but there was clearly an audience for it. I suppose the difference here is a matter of degree. If someone had suffered a grievous enough injury or, God forbid, was killed, then it would not be at all funny. But if someone simply suffers a minor injury but will live, so that the only real anguish caused is minor annoyance, it can be uproariously funny. If that person does not exist - say, is imaginary - it can go all the way to the death of that person. That is why the scenes where Kenny dies in "South Park" are so hilarious. And yet, if we were driven by the storytelling to empathise with him too much, it would stop being funny. So really, it is all about how much we empathise with the suffering of the person in question. The Holocaust was probably hilarious at the time to various Nazis, for example. But for the rest of the human race it continues to be an emotional scar.
And yet, look at the "Friday Night Sports Machine" from the late 1980s. They poked fun at all sorts of sporting accidents, always less than a week old. I suppose you could argue that that was in bad taste, but there was clearly an audience for it. I suppose the difference here is a matter of degree. If someone had suffered a grievous enough injury or, God forbid, was killed, then it would not be at all funny. But if someone simply suffers a minor injury but will live, so that the only real anguish caused is minor annoyance, it can be uproariously funny. If that person does not exist - say, is imaginary - it can go all the way to the death of that person. That is why the scenes where Kenny dies in "South Park" are so hilarious. And yet, if we were driven by the storytelling to empathise with him too much, it would stop being funny. So really, it is all about how much we empathise with the suffering of the person in question. The Holocaust was probably hilarious at the time to various Nazis, for example. But for the rest of the human race it continues to be an emotional scar.
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