Experts Defend Them : ‘Sick’ Jokes: Coping With the Horror

One day after news broke of the nuclear power plant disaster in the Ukraine, Prof. Alan Dundes’ anthropology students at UC Berkeley were jotting down the radiation jokes already making the rounds.

What has feathers and glows in the dark? (Chicken Kiev.)

What do you serve with chicken Kiev? (A black Russian.)

What’s the weather report from Kiev? (Overcast and 10,000 degrees.)

“You know it’s sick and disgusting when you tell these,” said Dundes, a folk humor specialist. “But the fact that these are all over the country suggests it’s not any one group telling them.”

Next-day joking about the nuclear disaster was hardly a speed record in the United States. Within 90 minutes after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Joseph Boskin, a Boston University history professor specializing in contemporary humor, had received calls from friends in New York who told him five dead-astronaut jokes.

‘Absolutely Amazing’

“Some people from the West Coast called at the end of the same day, and they told me the same jokes. It’s absolutely amazing,” Boskin said.

Amazing, he said, not because of the apparent callousness of the jokes but because of the lightning speed with which they appear and spread.

They are neither published nor broadcast by mass media, yet they are transmitted throughout the nation within hours of a disaster--apparently passed along by middle-class office workers and commercial travelers whose long-distance telephoning is a routine part of the business day.

“It’s the middle class that largely determines what humor is in America,” Boskin said. Once planted in a community, the joking spreads. One week after the nuclear disaster, the joke being told by pupils at Chandler Elementary School in Van Nuys was, “What do you call a man exiled to Siberia two weeks ago?” (Answer: Mr. Lucky.)

Death, Deformity, Suffering

Almost all such jokes and wisecracks are “sick” humor, Dundes said--that is, they are part of the longstanding “sick” genre that deals with death, deformity and suffering.

But few of these jokes are sick in the psychological sense, said Dr. William F. Fry, a psychiatrist at the Stanford University Medical School who specializes in the implications of humor.

A crack made as horrible news is pouring from the TV screen is merely the way that person is “trying to cope with the horror. He’s saying it for himself, not necessarily for the others around him,” Fry said.

“Maybe the person is more horrified than you are,” Fry said. “We shouldn’t be alarmed by these jokes; they’re perfectly natural in our human functioning.”

Yet even psychologists concede that these jokes can be social dynamite, depending on the circumstances in which they are told.

Alleen Pace Nilsen, assistant dean of Arizona State University’s graduate college and co-editor of English Journal magazine, attended the Fifth International Conference on Humour in Ireland last year and said that “more psychologists than anyone” were in attendance.

“It just amused me that they were telling these jokes over cocktails but that nobody got up and formally talked about it,” she said.

They refrained, perhaps, with good reason.

‘Legitimate Function’

“I’ve given lectures on sick humor,” said Harvey Q. Mindess, director of the graduate psychology department at Antioch University West in Venice, Calif. “When I say it has a legitimate function in helping people cope with anxieties, some are so offended that they will get up and be very angry.”

When Dundes wrote a scholarly article recounting and analyzing the “Auschwitz jokes” recently being told in West Germany, he provoked an avalanche of criticism and demands for his dismissal. “They blame me for the jokes,” Dundes said.

“I don’t think you should print them,” he warned. “What you can say, you can’t write. You have to know who you’re telling them to.”

There is nearly unanimous agreement, even among the people who tell them, that the disaster jokes are “not nice” and should be told only among friends, Boskin said.

Misunderstood Humor

“But why, really? The humor is funny. Otherwise, people wouldn’t laugh. It’s when you think about it-- ‘Should I laugh?’--that you gasp. And that’s taste, which is entirely different.

“The problem here, I think, is we don’t understand humor in America, and we don’t want to. Of all the European-based cultures that I know, we treat humor as if it makes no sense.”

A Southern California advertising executive, returning after a year’s stay in Mexico, said that after the Mexico City earthquake, Baja Californians were joking openly about it on buses. “Something like: ‘How do you make a Mexican sandwich? With one Mexican and two slices of concrete,’ ” she said.

Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, said the same strain of seemingly callous humor has been practiced in Europe for generations. “The more you’re scared, the more you have to create jokes,” he said.

Eastern European Pun

“Eastern Europe survived with jokes. Really. Whenever you arrive in the Soviet Union or, more so, a country of Eastern Europe, jokes are mentioned to you. It’s a way of confronting a reality that you can’t modify.”

He said one current pun, which does not translate well into English, is: “We thought the Communists had promised us a radiant future, but they meant an irradiated one.”

In some cases, however, the catastrophe is not a single disaster but a prolonged misery, such as political repression, Moisi said.

He cited a joke that made the rounds in Poland in recent years. In it, a fairy godmother descends to grant a Pole three wishes. He uses all three to wish that the Chinese would invade Poland--because they’d have to march through the Soviet Union to get there.

“It’s interesting,” Moisi said. “American history, by comparison, has not been tragic. With Vietnam, you entered into the path of historical normalcy.

Events Prompt Jokes

“We in Europe know that history can be sad, bad, collectivized by humiliation. You didn’t know that. That may be a reason why you’re surprised by the arrival of these jokes. For you, the shuttle was the new frontier that knew no defeat, no tragedy.”

Dundes disputes that point of view. He insists that virtually every American event that “hit the national nerve”--from the death of a President to a Hollywood scandal--has prompted such jokes.

“They are unique only in one sense: that TV and perhaps newspapers make everyone a witness,” Dundes said.

“In the old days, by the time the news spread it was already old news. Now you are essentially an unwilling eyewitness.

“How many times did you see that damned shuttle explode? Some people actually saw it happen. They show the damned thing again and again. A press conference, and they show it blowing up. Recovering the bodies, and they show it again. You’re an eyewitness whether you like it or not.

“We all saw those smiling people getting aboard--including one of us, a civilian, a non-professional. That’s what makes it different now. We all share, and we share immediately. It has sped up the normal process. It has increased the number of people involved.”

Confronted With Disaster

The joking emerges because people are confronted with a disaster that “makes things appear to be out of control,” said Walter E. O’Connell, a psychologist for the Veterans Administration in Houston who has published articles and taught courses on the relationship of humor and death.

“We want to think we have absolute control, but when we find out we don’t, we’re shocked. . . . Joking is a healthy reaction for people who are overwhelmed. It’s a far better way than to get all the psycho-physiological problems and breakdowns that can happen.”

By macabre coincidence, O’Connell’s class on the implications of death and dying convened in Clear Lake City, Tex., only a few hours after the space shuttle exploded.

The Johnson Space Center is in Clear Lake City, and nearly all of O’Connell’s students were either employees of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or relatives of employees. One woman was the wife of an early astronaut. Some knew the astronauts who had just died.

‘A Lot of Crying’

“I had them do psychodramas in which they talked to the (dead) astronauts. Some of them played the astronauts. They did a lot of crying and a lot of feeling better. They could see something more than the immediate tragedy,” O’Connell said.

“They had to go through the grief first. That class worked it out. Even afterward, I never heard any of the students getting into those jokes.

“That was for two reasons: First, the people in the classes worked out their anxiety, so there was no need for the jokes. And second, the community as a whole had too much anxiety, so the jokes weren’t funny. It’s really a small-town atmosphere. Most of the astronauts lived there at one time or another.

“This is probably the big fact we’ve discovered in humor research,” O’Connell said. “Too much tension--or no tension--and there’s no laughter.” But if there is no other way to work off the anxiety, physical breakdowns can result, O’Connell said. He cited the classic case of Plainfield, Wis., whose story was recounted in the “Bulletin of Menninger Clinic.”

Ghoulish Details

In November, 1957, police in the small farming community discovered that Edward Gein, the 51-year-old “town fool,” had for several years been stealing female bodies from fresh graves and had killed at least two local women.

He had strung their bodies up by their heels in his barn and had mutilated and dismembered them. The ghoulish details horrified the townsfolk.

According to the article, jokes known as “Gein-ers” sprung up statewide and were “gleefully recited by young and old alike. . . . The joking was so common that it could be considered a mass repetition compulsion.”

But not in Plainfield, where the horror was too great to permit joking. Instead, the tension persisted, and local physicians reported an outbreak of gastrointestinal complaints. Even the patients connected the ailments to the grisly discoveries.

The Sickest Reaction

“Humor is the ability to override the really negative things, to let go of hostility and guilt and to be able to play with them,” O’Connell said. “They (the jokes) are really not the sickest reaction. The sickest is to have the breakdown.”

Dundes said such jokes run in cycles, “but they’re always with us, because you never know when the next catastrophe will be. I have my students alerted: Write them down and write down what day you hear them.”

He said he tries to teach his students that humor always works the same: “The more horrible things are, the more you need these things.

“All humor is based on tragedy. Every joke always has to be at someone’s expense. It’s no fun for the guy slipping on the banana peel. In most humor, somebody’s in trouble, making a fool of himself.

“Once you realize that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, it begins to make sense.”

‘All humor is based on tragedy. Every joke always has to be at someone’s expense. It’s no fun for the guy slipping on the banana peel.’

--Alan Dundes,folk humor specialist