Secretly Ironic

I was told once, by a friend taking an anthropology class, that the ubiquitous dead-baby jokes (‘what’s grosser than gross?’ and its ilk) began during the Vietnam war as a coping mechanism to make the My Lai massacre seem less horrific. They went on to say that the Challenger disaster jokes were the way that Americans dealt with that tragedy, that gallows humor was the folklore mechanism humans used to deal with the gallows.

It makes sense, sort of. I mean, there’s the classic joke about the old man in the shtetl who reads the anti-semitic rag because it contains nothing but good news about how Jews are running the world. The Jewish cultural wealth of humor could have been developed to fend off the Jewish cultural burden of tragedy.

So, how come we don’t we have any good jokes about 9/11?

I mean, we’ve got jokes about terrorists. There’s that sitcom script running around about the terror squad who starts a bowling league… there’s your standard jokes about terrorists trying to make bombs (“don’t worry, we’ve got another one in the trunk” goes back at least to the IRA days, and is basically a joke about how the Irish/Arabs/whoever are stupid). And of course you’ve got your jokes about TSA security and toenail clippers. (No, Encyclopedia Dramatica doesn’t count. Lulz are not laughter.)

I have heard only one, and that just last week:

Knock knock
Who’s there?
World Trade Center
World Trade Center Who?
YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER FORGET!

But I wouldn’t say that really constitutes “jokes” in the plural. Nor would I argue that it’s any sort of evidence that the US as a nation is coping with 9/11 in any sort of constructive way.

But as a friend pointed out, you don’t hear any Pearl Harbor jokes either. So maybe we only create jokes for some tragedies, and not others? Maybe humor isn’t the way we cope with tragedy at all? Maybe I’m just missing out on a trove of hilarious WTC-related humor (probably not.) Got any good ideas?

At last, the US catches up with the Japanese hygiene revolution: the washlet smart-john is now available in America.

I’m likely to be offline til Monday. In my absence, ponder the nature of human absence:

Exchange admins often wonder why their Outlook users don’t bother emptying their inboxes. How hard can it be to archive your mail?

Hint: Outlook Web Access has no “select all” feature. Archiving a hundred messages means clicking on every single message. Laaaame.

NY Mag reminds me where I heard that song before– it’s the theme from “Brazil” and it’s everywhere right now. Notably, in this ad for Visa:

This series of advertisements strikes me as a cry for help from someone deep in the bowels of the advertising agency. They’re brilliant statements about how commerce is dehumanizing us all, but instead of being rejected out of hand and turned into low-budget short films shown in avant-garde cafes, they’re getting labeled as advertisements for credit cards. It’s as though the creatives are trying desperately to get fired and instead succeed because their bosses and clients are too stupid, or too cynical, or too distracted, to really understand what’s going on.

I read Apathy And Other Small Victories this weekend. It’s all about that kind of feeling. Hilarious but also deeply upsetting.

I told you lending was out of control, I told you housing was overpriced, and I told you Afghanistan was going to produce a bumper crop of scag.

Maybe I’ll get a job as a doomsayer. That’s a job, right?

Given the news that Owen Wilson tried to kill himself, would you say:

• Well, if I’d been in “You, Me, And Dupree,” I’d do the same thing.
• I’d feel bad, but it’s like seeing a clown on fire: probably just part of the act.
• Maybe he’s doing research for a new movie in which he plays a troubled young man who overcomes depression through interpretive dance and homosexual panic jokes.
• All three!

Ultimately, we went with the first one. It’s short and to the point. The second one would be better for one of the more attention-seeking celebutards, but Wilson hasn’t really done anything dumb off-screen. The third is too long and confusing. And of course you can’t cram in all three (which was my original instinct).

Click through for the other Iraq vet photos.