By Joseph Longley
Whether you laughed or sent complaint letters, the last ‘Dog’ comic in The River definitely got a reaction; isn’t this how most comedians get started?
In the age of Sickipedia, Adult Swim and Family Guy, comedy has to push the boundaries as tastes change; no one wants to be Michael McIntyre.
“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
This is the oldest recorded joke, which comes from the Sumerians in 1900BC; it isn’t exactly Jimmy Carr is it? Maybe I am wrong though, maybe some of our married readers will still be clenching their fists in fury at this.
Let’s look at one of the worst event in recent history World War I in which 16.5 million people died, obviously no one poked fun at this tragedy.
Wrong: There were two main satirical papers published throughout the war, Punch and The Wipers Times which did what any comedian worth his salt would do, use current events to make their jokes topical. Most pages were jokes about the war and pictures depicting comical scenes of tragedy.
One thing that seems to get humans through a tragedy faster than a box of Kleenex is a joke about it.
Looking forward to more recent times, how many Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and Madeleine McCann jokes have we all heard in the last few years?
Whether we laugh, cringe or shake our heads we all take them for what they are, jokes, or am I wrong? Do we ring up the bereaving families and tell them “Joe Blogs said an awful thing about your Amy today”.
According to South Park it takes 22.3 years for something tragic to become funny, character Randy says: “It’s been 22.3 years, so… AIDS is finally funny.” The problem with this is who will care about a fox in 2034.
Sure what happened to that poor fox was a terrible thing and I hope the students involved are punished accordingly, but I am still going to laugh at any joke about it that I find funny.
Jokes in bad taste are after all exactly that, jokes.