That's NOT Funny! How Dare You!

Cloudy Skies, chasing the, sun away

Come and meet, where the poison's sweet

Can you tell me how to get to

How to get to

Suicide Street

Come and play, Everyone's D.O.A.

Deathly Angels there

That's where we meet

Can you tell me how to get to

How to get to

Suicide Street

(sung to the Sesame Street theme opening)

The above “song” was rewritten by my brother years and years ago. If you cannot find it somehow funny, you totally miss the idea of gallows humor.

Gallows humor, black comedy or just plain sick jokes. That is what my brother's idea of a good laugh was. I probably adopted his style just for the simple fact I was with him for so long and actually loved his jokes, drawings and written stories. There was laughter to the point of tears sometimes.

What is black humor? Here's another example from a long, long time ago, taken from a Wikipedia excerpt on gallows humor.

At his public execution, the murderer William Palmer is said to have looked at the trapdoor on the gallows and asked the hangman, "Are you sure it's safe?”

I think that's funny. My brother would somehow turn that into a song or story.

My brother and I were aware that some of our jokes would bring condenming stares from the neighbors or friends who would wonder about our supposed mental state. So, we learned to keep the real sick humor between ourselves. In fact, most of the humor we found hilarious could only be understood by we two, and perhaps others who could find the world a bizarre place to live in.

I'll explain...

...to a certain point.

Perhaps as a matter of coping with life's sometimes inane cicumstances, my brother and I managed to find humor in it. Or, we managed to inject humor into grave situations. Instead of feeling miserable at what life can sometimes throw at you, why not laugh at it, even if for a few seconds? It's also why we both found irony so funny. Why not, irony is everywhere, you trip on the world's silliness daily, so make a joke out of it.

Our father had died young, at 47, of the same thing that took Jim Henson out, walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia sounds just like that, you can walk around with it as a minor annoyance. He apparently had been sick for two weeks when on his last day, the pneumonia escalated remarkably quick and choked him in about 12 hours. Also, my Dad being a Depression Era kid, you stayed the hell away from hospitals as that's where you got nonocomial pneumonia. Well, he was right about hospitals, until his last sickness.

So, for a good week, at the wake and funeral, everyone was wailing about how he was taken too soon, being cut down in his prime and this and that. Ok, it's true, he was too young to leave yet. But the display of grief seemed over the top to me.

My brother was starting to agree. The relatives wouldn't give up this near wailing. We're supposed to be Irish, not Italian; and we don't hire professional mourners to stand around the coffin to cry and sniffle. We're supposed to sing, be drunk and not miserable.

So after the graveside service and at the reception afterwards, we watched the adults suck down beer and whiskey (this IS the Irish thing to do...), my brother quietly comments into my ear...

“Can you imagine if the pall bearers dropped the casket?”

To that, I bust out laughing, to the wonder of my uncles and aunts whose heads shot around to hear me laughing. I quickly snuffed it.

Still, something like that was needed when everything around you seems twisted beyond measure.

I'll back up the validity of this humor with American literary icon Mark Twain, who once joked, “I haven't heard anything like that (than funny), since the orphange burned down.”

Also, Walt Disney had a go at dark humor as well...