Gallows Humor
IF YOU DON’T LEARN HOW TO LAUGH AT LIFE, IT WILL SURELY KILL YOU, THAT I KNOW -Brom
There is a line when it comes to humor. And everyone has experienced the crossing of that “line” when good old cousin Bobby comes to Thanksgiving. There are certain circumstances and issues where comedy and humor feel impossible to joke about or even exist within. So I began to explore what space does humor hold within these difficult circumstances for a society. During these dark times, people look to humor and comedy, to somehow get them through and achieve some type of tension release, that a human being so desperately needs in the face of a tragedy with often no direct solution.
Humor functioning in such a circumstance can be seen in Lisa Kron’s work 2.5 Minute Ride (Read More on"2.5 Minute Ride"). Kron does not make jokes about the events of the Holocaust itself but finds the humor through her response and her family’s response in how to possibly deal or make sense of Auschwitz. She looks at the question underneath of 'How do we ever move forward? How do we heal?'. Humor becomes a way to somehow make sense out of the senseless. Life is something that we can't control or understand. And as human beings, that drives us crazy. Especially in the face of tragedies, we want to be able to break life down, make it so it's digestible. Humor is a bridge to begin to deconstruct and breakdown what we can’t understand, while simultaneously, allowing us to move forward.
“They give us a map and we go exploring. The day alternates between a feeling of horror and a feeling we’re at Disney. We look at the map and say, “Well, where should we go next? To the pits where they buried bodies in mass graves or the fields where they piled them up and burned them.” We have to laugh. We especially laugh at the bookstores which we refer to as the Auschwitz gift shop. They sell postcards there. ‘Greeting from Auschwitz, wish you were here.’ We make gruesome jokes about what gifts they might sell… lampshades and soap. I actually go into one of the shops to buy a book but its full of pictures of the pope and I turn around and walk out”(Kron 25).
Throughout the narrative, Kron uses humor as a way to deconstruct her current situation and find some level of comprehension in the horror of what is Auschwitz. At one point in particular during the play, she turns to face the pain and horror of Auschwitz without humor. The audience can take this immensely complex ride with Kron because from this initial vehicle of humor, the move into the deep emotional state is possible, making Lisa’s words a double-edged sword:
“[There is a long, very long, still pause—and almost unbearable silence—as she realizes the thing she’s about to say.]
I’d been so afraid I wouldn’t feel anything here.
[The silence hangs as she realizes:] I think that was my biggest fear.
[Then she gets drawn into the explanation of her memory] But when I enter the crematorium for the first time in my life I feel horror. Physical repulsion. I can feel my face contort, my lips pull back. In the gas chambers my father stops to take his two o’clock pill. This breaks my heart. I stand to the side and cry. Hard. I can feel… I can feel the bottom. It’s clear to me now that everything in my life before this has been a shadow. This is the only reality: what happened to my father and his parents fifty years ago..” (Kron 27).
GALLOWS HUMOR
The notion of joking about dark topics follows “Gallows Humor”, or Galgenhumor. The term is usually connected to a type of response in the face of a hopeless situation, often where the circumstance of death seem to be unavoidable. Were you missing Freud? Because he’s back, and of course has something to say about Gallows humor in his essay, “Humour”. Freud says that Gallows humor is a way in which an individual’s ego refuses to be accepted by the traumas of the world—so much so, that trauma is actually just a way for the ego to gain more pleasure (Freud 1927), “Gallows humor has the social effect of strengthening the morale of the oppressed and undermines the morale of the oppressors”(Obrdlik 1942).
As Antonin Obrdlik notes when introducing Gallows humor in his work, he discusses how gallows humor historically can be seen as an index of strength or morale on the part of the oppressed peoples of Czechoslovakia following the rise of Hitler. But he also points out that while humor is both a social product and an agent with a social function; when the Czechoslovakia nation was absolutely destroyed, there was no place for gallows humor or humor of any kind for that matter. Humor did come back to the surface for a specific period of time and in a different way.
Time and place are essential in the dimensions of humor being able to function in dealing with sensitive topics. What contributes to the time/place sensitivity surrounds how much a society has healed from a specific event. When the joke is offensive, and hits the way “too soon” category as Gilbert Gottfried achieved when joking about 9/11, ten days later. When a joke goes into the category of offensive, the joke itself speaks to the morals of a culture and where the culture itself was situated in relation to the event.
(See 'Humor Missing the Mark')
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- Uproar: The Power of Humor Mary Lopez