True story: a man was trapped in a lift for hours on end. He thought his life was at risk and naturally was very relieved when he was rescued. The man was a devout Catholic and so as soon as he got out, he went straight to a church to thank The Lord for saving his life. Unfortunately for him, as he was praying a stone altar weighing almost 400kg fell on him, killing him instantly. [Source]
When I heard this story, I laughed. When I told this to my family over a dinner, they all laughed. I think this story would cause a great deal of people to laugh — whatever their religious beliefs. And the whole point is that nobody is laughing because they don’t sympathise with him as a victim, or because they think it’s hilarious for the man’s family. But the irony’s just too great so the taboo of laughing at death is overcome.
It’s also true that sometimes we need to laugh at death, because the only other alternative would be crying. I will now up the ante with another true story of an irony much more cruel.
In the early days of the Soviet Union, many from the left in the west supported the USSR wholeheartedly and believed that they were building a new society. (As an aside, many western intellectuals were won over by the crude tactic of an invitation to visit, complete with being wined & dined, treated as a guest of honour and told that their creative work was of paramount importance to the people of the USSR.) In any case, some people from the west immigrated to the USSR to join in this communist experiment. I know someone Russian whose great-grandparents were members of the French left and came to the Soviet Union. The end result is predictable: they were killed during Stalin’s purges.
This second story reminds me very much of the first. And I’ll admit that I find it funny in the same way. But it doesn’t dehumanise the people involved, on the contrary I think by recognising the hilariousness of the cruelty of life we are often more able to empathise with the victims.
Such black forms of humour are often present in self-therapy. I’m a fan, for instance, of those Holocaust jokes told as part of Jewish cultural lore. Of course simply being a joke about a “taboo” subject is no guarantee that it’s funny or good for anything. Obviously much of the humour on taboo topics is just unsubtle hate. But often, it isn’t.
I didn’t think Life Is Beautiful trivialised the Holocaust (as some people I know did). Quite the opposite. And then there’s Catch 22, which should be required reading (especially chapter 39, where laughing at the scene of a rape and murder is the reader’s only meaningful rebellion against the shittyness of WWII Rome). If there’s no skydaddy to get us out of the mess we’re in, to laugh at the ridiculousness of our condition is one of the biggest strengths we have, and is the start of empathy, understanding and action.
13 comments ↓
<pedant>No-one immigrated to the USSR, but many people emmigrated to the USSR.</pedant>
what happened to my tags?
pedant tags!
And why can’t I delete my non-tagged comments?
You wrote <pedant></pedant>? Wordpress must consider it HTML — maybe it’s a new tag!
I’m not sure WP lets you delete comments you’ve made — I can edit it.
Also based on what I just looked up now, didn’t these people emigrate from France and immigrate to the USSR?
Apparently you have to hard code it by writing (no spaces): & l t ; tagname & g t ;
I liked this posting a lot.
Well, let me offer an explanation: This man must have been a sinner. And thus he was punished. Right?
As for jokes, the best Jewish jokes I am aware of I know from Jewish people directly. We have to have the ability to laugh at ourselves as well as make jokes about taboo subjects.
It’s not just in the early days of the Soviet Union that many from the left in the west supported the USSR. It happened in the 60s too. And sometimes it happened because people believed in a Utopia. A wonderful dream. A society were you are not struggling to compete with your neighbour for more money but where you promote freedom, justice, progress, etc., through your work, your art, your science. If you lived under a western-style dictatorship chances are that you might have been lured by the Soviet Utopia. Yes, many people (and many smart people, not village idiots) wholeheartedly believed that they could help build a new society. Many intellectuals were lured by communist awards, visits, honours, … when in their country they could not find recognition. This is human nature. We have to smile at it. But we also have to learn some lessons for the future. And this is why we should look at what happened and never substitute rational though by any propaganda, no matter how sweet it may be.
In December 1989 I found myself at the Berlin wall, on the east side, having been invited by the head of the Probability Division of the Mathematics Department at Humbolt University. Just before I went there, the guy committed suicide (most likely explanation is that his father was a Stalin victim while he himself grew up to believe in Utopia and support it–otherwise he could never have been a head of a department in East Germany–and, all of a sudden, overnight, he saw his dream collapse).
On my way back to the West, I went through the wall along with thousands of Germans. Chaos. I even managed to miss my plane back to France. And I was depressed of the whole situation, deeply touched by what I saw and the fact that my host had taken his life with his own hands because Utopia went away.
But, yes, we have to smile…
I don’t know why, but I am able to laugh at the irony present in the story of the Catholic man, but my response to the story of immigration to the USSR is one of sadness and empathy.
Well, I do admit to a predisposition to laughing at such ironic tragedies of religion. But, really, there’s nothing different in either story, other than one being religious, the other political.
Stephen Moore: I feel the same at first: laugh at the religious story, and be sad about the USSR. Human psychology. That’s why we need reason; to control and question our feelings and instant reactions.
Forget the 60s, there are still people who believe in the Soviet utopia today, including millions in Russia. And there are quotes from Stalin in the Moscow metro, and a very large Stalinist revival movement…
On the laughing vs empathy I don’t think it’s an either/or. But I’m unable to really laugh at the man in the church too much since that death was a true accident but from a certain perspective the other death was no accident.
Supporting the same regime that kills your family is a specialty of dictatorships: my own great-grandmother was largely a supporter of everything despite her husband dying in the Gulag during one of Stalin’s purges. But for a generation who knew no different, it would have been much easier to mentally draw a difference between the “bad” communists like Stalin and the “good” communists rather than question the whole thing.
Here’s a thought on the laugh/cry issue about the altar case:
If you feel empathy with the man’s initial reaction (going to church to thank God at being rescued from the lift) you feel bad for him dying, you think “that could have happenned to me.”
If you think that going immediately to church to thank God that people rescued you from a lift is a bit silly then you are more likely to laugh at what happens to him in Church.
In other words, the more religious you are the less funny you will find the story. I think that works with other situations too.
Some time ago I stumbled upon a report which claimed that the more religious someone was the more fear of death he/she has and the more likely to seek unorthodox treatment in terminal cases.
This is not to say that non-religious are not afraid of death. But the behaviour of religious ones, especially of those who expect a better life after death, pose a conundrum: why are they afraid so much *more*?
I think this has “something” to do with fear of being subject to eternal, infinite torture
Especially for the most awful flavours of such religions where nobody is safe and the believer never knows if they’re saved or not so they’re kept in a state of constant terror.
Although I think members of religions without a hell probably have a fear of death too, so go figure..
I was actually alluding (badly) to the empathy issue. If you are more likely to do what the person in the story did then you are less likely to laugh. If you think what the person did was silly then you’ll laugh.
e.g. A person following their favourite sports team around the world, avoiding natural disasters and terrorist attacks then getting killed by the team coach outside their home ground is less funny if you follow your team all over the world.
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