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Terror Jokes: Are they ethical?

Wed Feb 27, 2008 3:23 PM EST
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By comedicinformer
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"Although I did not loose a loved one in Columbine or 9/11 or the VA Tech shooting…they scared me, if comedy soothes my trauma…why can't I laugh?"

If we could lay out a code of ethics for performance, what would be outside the boundaries? What is not alright to perform? It seems that the most debatable of topics that come to mind is death. The dead cannot speak for themselves and therefore we speak for them, through performance. Whether that performance is through protest, political action, drama, or… comedy. Death, in some ways, breaks the boundaries of race, class, and gender as it is one of the few things we must all experience. Manner and circumstances of death, however, are not so egalitarian. If we all must experience death, can anyone ethically be limited in how they perform death and dying?

Comedic performances of death and dying are growing exponentially in popularity. From the D.C. sniper, to Columbine, to 9/11, to the war in Iraq, nothing seems to be off limits. Comedians and comedic audiences alike have nestled into a certain level of comfort in joking about these events. Is this ethical? Is the pain of the victim's loved ones unimportant? If they see such a comedic performance, could it not add to their trauma? It seems that these comedic performances are geared toward the pleasure of those not directly affected by traumatic events; that the laughter of the living at the expense of the dead is acceptable.

Although I did not loose a loved one in Columbine or 9/11 or the VA Tech shooting…they scared me. If comedy soothes my trauma…why can't I laugh? I take pleasure in jokes about terrorism (terror jokes) and as I laugh I wonder why I'm laughing. I pride myself on the ability to criticize myself before others have to and when I laugh nervously I wonder why. While watching Katt Williams' new movie "American Hustle", I laughed at a joke about a terrorist kidnapping/murder (beheading) and then I looked around to see who else laughed. Everyone did. But why did I second-guess myself? It felt wrong to laugh at death no matter how funny the situation. I then thought about how terrorism has affected my life.

I am a native of the DC/MD/VA area and I thought immediately of July 4th 2002. My friends and I concocted a plan to see the fireworks at the National Mall. As we rode the packed metro trains (nearly suffocated by tourists and natives alike clad in red white and blue) we felt content. As we exited the train we were not met with the serene normalcy of the National Mall. We exited the train to stone-faced police officers armed with large guns telling us which way to go. Suddenly I thought of the local news that morning: reports of how easy it would be for a terrorist to make a home-made bomb and launch an attack and how perfect July 4th would be for such an attack (she even went step by step through the materials this terrorist could buy from the grocery store to make such a bomb). I was scared, overwhelmed, and my own bubble of privileged existence was traumatized.

Laughing at jokes about terror somehow comforts me. The jokes help me to take such things less seriously. As Bambi Haggins coined, I was 'laughing sad'. Laughing to keep from crying. In the end I'm not sure whether it's ethical to laugh at jokes about terrorism or for the comedians to perform such jokes. I know that the trauma of the victims and their families is more important and exponentially greater than my own, but is mine strictly unimportant? In interrogating the ethicality of terror jokes, is there a grey zone or are they strictly unethical?

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Chet Domitz

Oscar Wilde's last remark on his deathbed is said to have been the following: "Either those curtains go or I do."

Questioning the relationship between comedy and death is a good way to broach the topic of ethics and performance. It simplifies matters and reframes the issue to make it more accessible. It makes me think of how students will joke about failing an exam or how falling can be funny. There may be real humor in such situations. At the same time, potentially ruining your chances at getting into grad school is not funny. And slipping on a patch of ice and falling can seriously hurt a person. Yet it's that element of tragedy that can make a situation funny. We might say that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin. Or we might use the more erudite example of a Möbius strip, a strip with only one side, such that what appears to be one side morphs into the other.

I think the Möbius strip example is more accurate. What is thought to be the other is actually one in the same. One of the fears about performing I think is the possibility of the performance having unintended meaning. For example, if something genuinely tragic befalls someone and they mourn publicly in a manner that's too maudlin, their tragedy may become (tragically) comedy. It might become something more than just a display of the sadness of loss. And then what does it mean about you as a person if you see that tragedy as comedy? Or worse yet you see it as comedy and then laugh?

Could we say that there's something supra-performative in questions of ethics and performance? Or maybe that's too obvious, too simplistic? Maybe what I'm trying to get at is something about reflexivity. What's so chilling about the Abu Graib images in my opinion is that, as Wendy Hesford notes, they assume a "we" as an audience. At the same time, not only does one see the enemy in the images but in the image-making process, as part of the events that made the images materialize. In the end, the enemy is ourself. That this question of comedy and death (or comedy and tragedy) leads to a pronoun problem isn't surprising. I suppose it has to do with the surplus of affect. There's stuff that just doesn't fit. And maybe that's where the joke comes in.

Here's some Chaplin to finish. Just watch the first minute, more if you need to.

  • 1 vote
Reply#2 - Thu Feb 28, 2008 1:53 AM EST
comedicinformer

Hi Chet,
Thanks for the clip :-). Is the correlation you refer to between this clip and the 'comedy and tragedy' aesthetic in Chaplin's impending doom? As if the audience wants him to fall off the edge?

  • 1 vote
#2.1 - Thu Feb 28, 2008 11:05 AM EST
Reply
Chet Domitz

Hi Kara,

Sorry for the delay in answering. The answer is yes. I included that clip because of how it links comedy with tragedy. Chaplin's all about making the audience laugh. And in that scene he gets laughs for playing a character who almost gets seriously hurt.

To return to our class discussion from two weeks ago: An observation I almost made out loud was that some of the examples we were talking about, particularly Sarah Silverman and Katt Williams, made me realize how minority comedians are given more latitude than straight, white men. Sarah Silverman is given more room to be offensive because she's a woman and Jewish. Somehow that permits her to make very offensive jokes about abortion and gays and get away with it, even though her fan base seems to be mostly men, not gays and women. She says things to straight white guys that they can't say. And I think that's the case in general with comedians. With comedy, I think the speaker's location—whether he or she is speaking from the center or the margins—becomes more important than who the audience is. Does this sound right?

    Reply#3 - Wed Mar 12, 2008 3:48 AM EDT
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