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3 posts tagged memes
That’s Not Funny.
For every “lash” there is a harumph in the equal and opposite back direction. Take a controversial event with an easy to follow, uncomplicated plot, and sides will be taken. From sides, breed opinions. And what is a status update without an opinion?
Right.
Something icky happens and the whole world knows about it, jokes are inevitable. Humor lives in shared experiences. And some people don’t like that very much.
“How can people joke about this?!?!?!?!” “It makes me weep for humanity that people can find humor in something so awful!!!!!1!!!”
Yeah, well. Explore that weep a tiny bit. Perhaps we meme so we don’t cry out loud. Not to get all Daria about it, but it’s a Sick, Sad World. And yes, you can debate whether we actually have it worse now, but where humans exist, so do the darkest recesses of imagination, shock-and-awe topping what has come before until someone ships his kid off in a giant balloon. Or worse. Way, way worse.
Like it or not, these are our fellow humans. We all walk among those who would commit atrocity. And when it happens? What are you supposed to do, really. As a method of survival in a hopeless situation, a method of preserving the psyche, it’s not new. Yes, it gets Facebooked, and Twerted, and blogged with stunning reach and speed, but it’s all just plain ol’ gallows humor. And I’m pretty sure a gallows isn’t digital, let alone analog even.
We do it. We joke about stuff to survive the awful. I’m not kidding.
Freud slips in this bit about Galgenhumor:
The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.
So it would seem, when someone gets huffy in the face of what appears flippant, offended by the joke, perhaps it’s the jokester who actually feels the true gravity of the situation.
And maybe it is funny — because if we’ve learned anything from the Comedy and Tragedy masks, if you’re not laughing, there’s really only one alternative.
