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 exist within. So I began to explore what space does humor hold in such circumstances for a society? Which brought me to Gallows Humor. During these dark times, people do look to humor, 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 that leaves them numb with no answer or direct solution.
Humor functioning in such a circumstance can be seen in Lisa Kron’s work 2.5 Minute Ride.(See More on her work "2.5 Minute Ride") Kron does not make jokes about the event of the Holocaust itself but finds the humor in her response and her family’s response in how to possibly deal with such immense tragedy that they at Auschwitz. She looks at the question underneath of 'How do we move forward and heal?'. Kron faces the evil of the holocaust and the reality that her family experienced this horror; humor becomes a way to somehow accept the unacceptable, make sense out of something that makes no sense. As human beings, we have a desire to understand everything, and it drives us crazy when we can’t—humor becomes a bridge to begin to deconstruct and breakdown what we can’t understand, and essentially, may never.
“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 she utilizes humor as a way to deconstruct the situation she is in, and find some level of comprehension in this moment of realization. Through the narrative, and at one point in praticular, she turns to the face the pain and horror of Auschwitz without humor. The audience can take this immensely complex ride with her because from this initial vehicle of humor, Lisa’s words become almost a double edged sword of reality,
“[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).
The notion of joking about dark topics, follows “Gallows Humor”, (Galgenhumor). The term is usually connected to a type of response in the face of a hopeless situation, often where the circumstance of death seems to be unavoidable. Were you missing Freud? Because he’s back and of course has something to say about Gallows humor in his 1927 essay, “Humour”.Freud says that this 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 (Source 15, 2). “Gallows humor has the social effect of strengthening the morale of the oppressed and undermines the morale of the oppressors” (Gallows Humor Journal- Antonin p.713).
As Antonin initially notes in his work when introducing Gallows humor that this 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 agency with 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.
When a person faces such an awful tragedy, and there’s no way to undo the awfulness that has been done-- the emotional state of a person, is left to somehow heal. How is a person supposed to move forward? My project stems from the aspect of humor being a way to fight back such evil, to show that no evil can truly conquer the humor spirit.
"To be able to laugh at evil and error means we have surmounted them.”
-Wylie Sypher
It doesn’t change the awfulness of a given a way but helps in the deconstruct of being able to process what has taken place. There must be a sensitivity of a time and place for humor to exist when dealing with such sensitive topics, and that often surrounds how much a society has healed from that event or if that is even possible. When the joke is offensive, and hits the way “too soon” category as Gilbert Gottfried achieved when joking about 9/11, 10 days later… this speaks to the moral of a culture. Gottfried's attempted joke that failed, speaks to where the culture itself is situated in relation to the event: not ready for humor to be in this space. (See 'Humor Missing the Mark')
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