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Gallows
Humor: Funny as Hell
By
Daniel Gaskill
This paper was
presented on
Since the theme of these talks is dirty work, and
I’m giving a talk on humor, you might think that I’m going to be talking about
dirty jokes. Like this one:
A young man walks up and sits down at the bar.
“What can I get you?” asks the bartender.
“I want six shots of whisky,” responds the young
man.
“Six shots? What’s the occasion?”
asks the barman.
“My first blowjob.”
“Well, in that case, let me give you a seventh
on the house.”
To which the young man replies, “No offence sir,
but if six shots won’t get rid of the taste, nothing will.”
This sort of humor is certainly dirty, (although
there are much dirtier jokes out there) and I suppose it does work of some
kind—no doubt it has some important social function—but I, for one, have
nothing to say about it.
Which brings us to
another thing that I won’t be talking about.
A lot of humor is dirty, or “sick” in a
different way. What I have in mind is
humor that is sexist, racist, or directed against specific religions, groups or
individuals. I think this sort of humor
would be a fascinating subject for a talk.
But that would require giving examples of jokes that were sexist,
racist, directed against particular religions, and so on. The trouble is, you
aren’t supposed to tell those jokes unless you are a member of the group that
is the butt of the joke. This is
limiting, especially since all the funny ones are about other groups.
It just isn’t feasible to tell jokes that are
sexist, racist, or anti-religious, if you have to be a member of the group that
is being joked about. I mean, the cost
of the sex-change operation alone would put me in the poor house! And, as for religious conversions…I’m barely
smart enough for my job as it is; the last thing I need is a frontal
lobotomy. (Okay, that was uncalled
for. But at least it wasn’t a slam
against any particular religion). What
about racist jokes?
Maybe I could change my race without having
surgery. After all, I’ve been told that
race is a social construct. But then
again, so is having a job. So I’m going
to give that a miss.
Actually, you can get away with telling a joke
that makes fun of other groups, as long as it satisfies certain
conditions. Take this old joke, for
example:
What is the difference between heaven and hell?
In heaven, the English are the policemen, the French are the chefs, the Germans
the mechanics, the Italians are the lovers, and the Swiss organize everything.
In hell, the Germans are the policemen, the English are the chefs, the French
the mechanics, the Swiss are the lovers, and the Italians organize everything.
That joke is supposed to be okay because it’s an
equal-opportunity disparager, and also because it simultaneously praises the
groups it pokes fun at. But that’s a
load of bull. It’s actually a cleverly
disguised anti-Swiss joke.
Think about it:
they’re lousy lovers, but they’re good organizers. So, the moral is: It’s okay to make fun of Swiss people.
But,
despite its anti-Swiss-ness, the joke is a good illustration of how humor
can—to use an old cliché—help us to laugh at ourselves. Humor can do this by getting us to take a
step back from our lives, thereby giving us the freedom to laugh at the
absurdity and pathos of the human condition.
To put it another way, some humor has the
ability to shift our perspective from our usual subjective point of view from
which our personal concerns are all-consuming, to a more objective point of
view from which humanity is seen from the outside, and from which vantage point
the concerns and struggles of humanity seem comical.
Let’s call this phenomenon distancing, for lack
of a better term.
Now, distancing is a rather lofty explanation as
to why it is funny to list a bunch of stereotypes and call it a joke. But there is a type of humor for which
distancing provides a very plausible explanation as to why we laugh, and that
would be “gallows humor”. Gallows humor
is humor that makes light of terrible things, and we’ll be looking a number of
examples shortly.
Oversimplifying a bit, my thesis is that
distancing makes gallows humor funny.
There are some caveats and potential
misunderstandings regarding my thesis, which I will mention now.
First, I do not claim that distancing is the
only thing that makes gallows humor funny.
Gallows humor, like any other kind of humor, often makes use of
ambiguity and other clever devices which are amusing in their own right.
Second, the phenomenon of distancing is not part
of any joke. Rather, it is part of our
reaction to certain jokes. It is not a
necessary reaction, either, except in the sense that it might be necessary in
order to fully appreciate the joke. It
wouldn’t surprise me if many people hear gallows jokes and don’t like them
precisely because distancing does not occur for them when they hear the
jokes.
Third, while I have described gallows humor as “humor
that makes light of terrible things”, I realize that there are exceptions. For example, jokes that make fun of Adolf Hitler do make light of something terrible, but that
doesn’t make them gallows humor. That’s
okay, because we don’t need a precise definition of gallows humor.
Fourth, while I’m going to be focusing my
attention on jokes, that doesn’t mean that distancing isn’t important to the
appreciation of other forms of humor. It
is convenient to use jokes as examples because they tend to be short and
self-contained. But some of the best
examples of gallows humor can be found elsewhere. The song “Always Look on the Bright Side of
Life,” from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, is a prime example. Stanley Kubrick’s
brilliant film Dr. Strangelove is one big instance of gallows humor.
Finally, I want to acknowledge that I don’t
offer much of an argument for my thesis.
If I were to formulate an argument, it would go something like this:
1. Gallows humor is funny, at least in part, due
to its tragic content. This is supported
by the fact that when such content is removed and replaced by non-tragic but
otherwise equivalent content, the result is not as funny.
2. Distancing provides a plausible explanation
of why the tragic content of gallows humor would make it funny to us.
3. I haven’t thought of a better explanation,
and it’s little late to start now.
With this in mind, it’s time to look at some
examples of gallows humor, and gradually work our way towards a discussion of
distancing. Last year, British
psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted an online experiment called “LaughLab”, in which people from around the world could vote
on over 10,000 different jokes to determine which is the funniest. The following joke came out on top:
A couple of
He gasps to the
operator: “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator, in a calm soothing
voice says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.”
There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s
voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK, now what?”
This joke, unlike many of the others, had
universal appeal, and got high ratings across many different countries, from
both men and women, young and old alike.
Here is what Dr. Wiseman had to say about it:
“We find jokes funny for lots of different
reasons – they sometimes make us feel superior to others, reduce the emotional
impact of anxiety-provoking events, or surprise us because of some kind of
incongruity. The hunters joke contains all three elements – we feel superior to
the stupid hunter, realize the incongruity of him
misunderstanding the operator and the joke helps us to laugh about our concerns
about our own mortality.”
Of course, it’s that last element, that it helps
us to laugh at death, that makes the hunter joke an example of gallows humor.
Now, compare the hunter joke to this one:
A
Both jokes involve misunderstandings, and
victims that never had a chance. They
also involve death. Notice that the joke
would be a lot less funny if the soldier had arrested the Iraqi instead of
shooting him. Clearly, the tragic
content of the joke plays a crucial role in the humor.
Our next example is this Jewish joke about the
Holocaust, which literally involves gallows:
As World War II ended,
the advancing Russians came upon a town recently vacated by the retreating
Germans. They went to the Jewish ghetto and found that every single Jew, man
woman and child, had been hung from hastily erected gallows. As they stared in
silence, one Russian soldier said to another, “Look what a horrible thing those
barbaric Germans have done; they have hung every single Jew in town.” “Yes,”
said the other, “it is terrible. They didn’t leave a single one for us to hang.”
Why is this funny? Let’s start by ignoring the obvious. Obviously, the joke depends on a revelation
about the Russians’ attitude toward the slaughtered Jews which forces us to
reinterpret the Russian reaction to the atrocity. This surprise factor is clearly essential to
the humor, but instead I want to focus on the tragic content of the joke, which
is also essential.
One doesn’t fully appreciate the joke unless one
laughs at the Jewish situation as portrayed in the joke. It is the situation of being totally screwed;
the victim of forces beyond your control in a world that doesn’t care about
you. If one is in the right frame of
mind, this tragic situation becomes comical.
The joke, when successful, gets us into that frame of mind.
Another example:
Did you hear about the
emergency ward nurse who died and went straight to hell?
It took her two weeks to
realize that she wasn’t at work anymore.
Again,
there is a surprising revelation that plays a crucial role in the humor. But the surprise factor, by itself, does not
suffice to make the joke funny. To drive
this point home, consider the following joke that uses the exactly the same
device:
Did you hear about the
park ranger at
It took him two weeks to
realize that he wasn’t at work anymore.
The park ranger joke is not funny. Yet the difference between the park ranger
joke and the nurse joke is just the difference between heaven and hell. Why is hell funny? There is nothing intrinsically funny about
hell, or about the Holocaust. It might
be claimed that people laugh at these jokes only because they are not in the
position of the emergency ward nurse or the persecuted Jew, and that if we were
in such a position, it wouldn’t be funny.
But these are jokes that are told, mainly, by emergency ward nurses and
Holocaust survivors. Apparently,
proximity to the relevant position makes the joke funnier.
A woman comedian said, If
I’m ever stuck on a respirator or a life support system I definitely want to be
unplugged—but not until I’m down to a size eight.
If you hear the respirator joke, and it fails to
get you into the right frame of mind, then it might strike you as being sad or
even offensive without being funny. You
might think, “It is sad that this woman has an irrational desire to be a size
eight, even when it would do her no good at all.” And, you might think, “It is offensive that
she is wrongly promoting being a size eight as something of great importance.”
But the fact that she is telling it as a joke
indicates that she is aware of the irony, and aware that she really shouldn’t
put so much importance on being a size eight.
She is aware of this, yet she is still in the grip of the desire.
How, then, are we to appreciate the joke? What is the right frame of mind? As I understand it, the comedian takes a step
back from herself and regards her situation objectively. She observes herself from afar, as one might
observe a person from a different culture.
As the observer, she is keenly aware of her situation while
simultaneously being at a safe distance from it. Here, I claim, is where the chief value of
gallows humor is to be found: it
releases us, albeit only briefly, from the concerns of life. Release, of course, is a happy occasion,
often accompanied by laughter.
I have just a few more examples which I will
present without comment. Here’s one of
mine (I think):
A heavy smoker and
drinker has not seen a doctor in ten years. He goes in for some tests, and it’s time for
the doctor to tell him the results.
Doctor: “I’ve got some good news and some bad
news. First, the bad news:
Liver failure will kill
you within a year if you don’t get a transplant.”
Shocked patient: “That’s terrible! So what’s the good news?”
Doctor: You won’t need a transplant because the lung
cancer will kill you in three months.
Last example for a while:
Jake was on his
deathbed. His wife, Susan, was maintaining a vigil by his side. He looked up
and his pale lips began to move slightly.
“My darling Susan,” he
whispered.
“Hush, my love,” she
said. “Rest. Don’t talk.”
He was insistent. “Susan,”
he said in his tired voice. “I have something I must confess to you.”
“There’s nothing to
confess,” replied the weeping Susan. “Everything’s all right, go to sleep.”
“No, no. I must die in
peace, Susan. I slept with your sister, your best friend, and your mother.”
“I know,” she replied. “That’s
why I poisoned you.”
And now for an abrupt transition into a
philosophical discussion of distancing and objectivity:
The idea that appreciating gallows humor
involves distancing was inspired by Thomas Nagel, in his paper, “The Absurd.” In that paper, Nagel argues that the feeling
that life is absurd or meaningless is a result of the juxtaposition of our
usual, personal point of view with an objective, impersonal point of view. The inspiration for the present comes from
Nagel’s description of the objective point of view. He writes:
“Humans
have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves…with that detached
amazement which comes from watching an ant struggle up a heap of sand.
“Without
developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their highly specific
and idiosyncratic position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis—and
the view is at once sobering and comical.”
I’m going to take issue with this statement in a
very limited way. I’m going to say that
viewing our own situation as comical does involve developing the illusion that
we are able to escape from it. It’s an
imperfect illusion, and a fragile, fleeting one at that, but it is this
illusion that provides us with comic relief.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. “Sub specie
aeternitatis” is a phrase that was used by Spinoza;
it is Latin for “under the aspect of eternity”.
As far as Nagel is concerned, to view something sub specie aeternitatis is to view it objectively. But what does this really amount to?
The idea that we take a step back from ourselves
is just a metaphor; we cannot literally step outside of ourselves. The objective point of view is sometimes said
to be “the point of view of the universe”, but this too is just a metaphor,
since the universe, as a whole, does not literally have a point of view. Perhaps the objective view is “the God’s eye
point of view”? One problem with this
suggestion is that it seems to conflate objectivity with omniscience.
Less metaphorically, the objective point of view
can be described as “an impersonal standpoint”, or “the view from nowhere”. But these descriptions suggest that the
objective point of view is something paradoxical: the point of view of not having a point of
view.
We can avoid the appearance of paradox if we
begin by saying what it is that makes a point of view subjective. Let’s start with our own visual field. It tells us important information about the
outside world. But it also contains
information about the experiencing subject.
The contents of the visual field are experiences of a subject, and the
character of those experiences contains information about the subject: for example, under normal circumstances, the
location of the subject is revealed by its relation to the objects being
viewed. Likewise, any experience that
contains information about an outside world carries information about the
subject of the experience. In this
sense, experience is an intrinsically subjective medium.
Language, too, is often subjective, in that it
conveys information about the asserter.
The statement, “I have the flu” entails that the asserter has the
flu. On the other hand, “Dan Gaskill has
the flu” does not entail this, since it could be asserted by anyone. In fact, it entails nothing about an asserter
at all. Its truth does not even require
that there be an asserter: the sentence
could still be true if it were formed by Scrabble letters randomly spilling
onto the floor. The first sentence—which
contains the first-person pronoun ‘I’—we will call subjective. The second—which is a purely third person
affair—we will call objective.
Objective sentences tell us nothing about their
authors. “Hydrogen is the most common
element”; “2 + 3 = 5”; “Many people were concerned about global warming”; “Pope
Benedict does not use condoms”, and even “George Bush said, ‘I believe that
Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction’”, are examples of sentences that
have no subjective entailments. These
are statements of objective fact.
Now we can give a more helpful characterization
of what objectivity is: it is a mode of
thought that excludes subjective claims and includes non-subjective
claims. Roughly, objectivity is the
state one would be in if one took all of one’s subjective beliefs, such as “I
have the flu” and replaced them with corresponding third person claims, such as
“Dan Gaskill has the flu.” When we take
the objective point of view, we think as though third person facts are the only
kind of fact there are.
This would mean, in my case, that there is no
fact that I am Dan Gaskill. Thus, if I
am in the objective mode, I cannot infer that I have the flu from the fact that
Dan Gaskill has the flu. Notice
that, in the objective mode, there are still facts about people and their
personal lives. But, there is no fact
about which person happens to be me.
From the objective point of view, it is not even
a fact that there is a person that is me.
There are just no facts involving “me” at all. So, from the objective point of view, it is
not a fact that I care about other people, or that I should care about them, or
that I value anything at all. For that
matter, it is not a fact that I exist, or that I want to keep existing.
We have all heard the saying that “justice is
blind”. What this means is that justice
is impartial, and it achieves this by being blind to subjective facts. Objectivity, as we experience it, is a kind
of blindness, in which subjective claims are blotted out and replaced by
objective counterparts.
The ideal of perfect objectivity is something
that we can never reach, because the blindness of objectivity is something that
we impose from within our own subjective point of view. It is probably
fortunate for our sanity that we are never entirely objective, nor are we very
objective for very long at a stretch.
But, insofar as we are able to achieve
objectivity, it can provide a release from our cares. If there is no me,
then nothing matters to me, not even the most horrific atrocity. To be sure, it may matter to
many people, but none of them are me.
Now, it would seem that being objective could be
a good way of dealing with terrible things only in the manner that euthanasia
can be good: it eliminates the bad, but
it does so without bringing about anything that is positive in its own
right. It is easy to see how objectivity
might bring temporary relief from anxiety or unhappiness, but hard to see how
it could bring about happiness.
This raises a problem for my thesis. How could distancing,
which is the transition from the subjective mode to a more objective mode, make
us laugh?
The answer lies in the fact that we never become
entirely objective. Distancing works
like a pain killer that relieves our suffering without knocking us
unconscious. There remains a subjective
self underneath the objective view we have constructed, and that self feels
safe and untouchable, free to laugh at its erstwhile tormentors.
I’m going
to conclude with a brief discussion of some gallows jokes that offend
people. Big catastrophes, such as the
September 11th attacks and the recent tsunami, are fertile ground for gallows
humor. Such humor is often regarded as
callous or even hateful. Perhaps it is,
in some cases, but for the most part this is a mistaken reaction. By and large, the gallows humor that follows
a calamity is a way for normal, caring people to cope with something very
upsetting.
Even at
this physical distance from the devastating tsunami, many of us are impacted by
it: the thought of human bodies washing
up on shore like so much flotsam, or being eaten by sharks is shocking,
disturbing and an affront to human dignity.
It is understandable that some of us would respond by objectifying the
situation. On the internet, you can find
jokes like these:
Why don’t tourists in
A bar owner in Phuket
was asked how his business was doing over the last week. “It’s been very quiet, but some of the
regulars are starting to drift back.”
Some people are outraged by such jokes. But, on close examination, no
mean-spiritedness is indicated in the jokes themselves. There is no criticism, say, of the tsunami
victims.
I think the main reason that people are offended
by disaster humor is the belief that the jokers are laughing at the victim’s
expense. The idea of laughing at someone’s
expense is an interesting notion in its own right that deserves analysis which
we don’t have time for. It isn’t obvious
to me that it’s wrong to laugh at the expense of others, but even granting that
it is wrong, I see no reason to suspect that this is what is usually going on
when people tell disaster jokes.
Shortly after September 11th, jokes about the
attacks started to crop up in the dark corners of the internet. The initial response from those who
encountered these jokes was outrage, sometimes accompanied by threats. In addition, there was—and still is, for the
most part—a self-imposed ban by all major media on making light of the events
in any way. Nevertheless, jokes such as
these continue to circulate:
Q: Why are police and firemen
A: Because now you can run them through a sieve.
This joke is certainly in poor taste, but it’s
no criticism of the brave men and women who died on the scene. We, too, could be run through a sieve, if we
were pulverized by a collapsing skyscraper.
Is there reason to suppose that the teller of this joke was cackling
with glee at the idea that rescue workers were pulverized? If so, then one might rightly be offended by
it. But as it stands, we have no reason
to suppose this, and in fact it is more likely to be a clever pun intended to
help objectify the situation for the purpose of comic relief.
Another example:
What’s the difference between the attack on
Why would someone find this objectionable? Does anyone seriously suppose that Timothy
McVeigh was not outdone by Osama Bin Laden?
Perhaps people are offended by the phrase ‘do
it better’ because they take this to mean that terrorism against the
I understand the hijackers went to flight
training school in the States. Nothing fancy, mind
you, just a crash course. To be offended by this, one would have to think that
any joke that makes light of 9-11 is objectionable. In fact, there seem to be many Americans who
take this unhealthy view.
Is there
ever good reason to object to gallows jokes?
Certainly; depending on the joke, and the context, it might be quite
inappropriate, even outrageous. But it
is beyond the scope of this paper to characterize the conditions under which
telling gallows jokes is appropriate. I’ll
just make two quick points in this connection.
One: Placing a high value on free
expression, as our society does--and rightly so--is not compatible with the
idea that one is obligated to refrain from making a statement or telling a joke
simply because one can predict that others will be angered, shocked or otherwise
offended by it. Were this not the case,
then we should all be prohibited from making any controversial statements at
all, such as those that promote the theory of evolution.
Two:
there are contexts in which potential listeners have a justified set of
expectations that a statement or jokes would violate. For example, it would be inappropriate for
the President of the
One concern about gallows humor is that it might
de-sensitize people to evil, thereby making them callous. The obvious response is that the evil itself
would do this long before making jokes about it ever would. When you consider the forces at work that can
conspire to create a bad character, it should be evident that humor ranks
pretty low on the list of influences.
Then again, maybe this isn’t evident.
But until there’s some hard evidence that joking makes people callous, I’ll
be skeptical.
Before
closing, I want to briefly touch on one more topic. The Problem of Evil is the problem of
explaining why a benevolent God would permit evil. The existence of gallows humor suggests an
answer: because it’s funny.
More accurately, the evil itself isn’t funny,
but it gives rise to a great deal of humor that is. As a solution to the problem of evil, this is
totally inadequate. Still, it’s at least
as good as the other solutions that have been proposed. For example, it is often said that free will
is a really great thing that God gave to humans, but that the existence of free
will guarantees that there will be evil, since people are free to make bad
choices as well as good ones. Free will
on the one hand, humor on the other…which is the better explanation? I would say that humor has a definite
advantage here, because it actually exists.
Moreover, free will doesn’t explain the existence of natural evil, such
as tsunamis and AIDS, whereas the humor hypothesis does, providing that there
are good jokes about natural evils, which there are. Sometimes the free will response is
supplemented with the claim that evil adds value to the world because it is
necessary in order to build moral character.
But considering the vast amount of evil in the world, this is a bit like
saying that we should train runners by setting packs of wild dogs on them. Besides, if God wants us to have moral
character that badly, then why can’t he just give us the moral character and
keep the evil to himself? Honestly, if
you believe in God, and you’ve noticed all the evil in the world, then the idea
that God…appreciates gallows humor is very plausible. But this suggests that the ability to
appreciate gallows humor is a divine characteristic. And maybe it is.
Copyright © 2005, 2006
by Daniel J. Gaskill
Dan
Gaskill is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at U.C. Davis, CA.