“Jokes That Follow Mass-mediated Disasters In A Global Electronic Age” by Christie Davies and “The Death-Humor Paradox” by Peter Narvaéz provide a detailed explanation of the ways dark humor has manifested itself in modern society and touches on many of my own conflicting views on dark humor and how I have interacted with the genre throughout my life. Beginning as early as second or third grade, jokes about celebrity deaths were already circulating. I distinctly remember a day in the second grade in which my friend Matthew said a joke about him killing John F. Kennedy because he stole his lollipop. Weird kid. Nevertheless, those kinds of jokes were relatively tame. Davies explains that “sick humor” was scarce if not nonexistent before the influence of widespread media, and in my life, this could not be truer. By the time I was in middle school, the social media phenomenon known as Vine was in full swing, and with it came some of the first instances of dark humor going viral. One of the most notable ones was a video of a baby spinning a jack-in-the-box, however, when the “jack” finally emerged, it cut to a plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I have yet to comprehend what made the clip funny, yet at the time, I laughed. Maybe it was because I was immature and “edgy”, or maybe it was the shock factor of seeing such a horrendous thing happen. Regardless, I struggle to understand how finding humor in national tragedy occurs. Even in middle school when I asked, “why is this so funny?” I usually responded, “I don’t know. It just is.” Narváez ultimately decides that despite the apparent nonsensicality of finding humor in death, “it appears to be a human universal, a technique for communicating and dealing with the enigma of our precarious mortality” (Narváez 11). While I would love for this to be the answer to my question, I struggle to find internal conflict pertaining to my mortality manifesting itself within me. Perhaps I have yet to contemplate how fragile my mortality truly is.
