Think the above cartoon is funny or does it make you wretch? To me, it's screamingly funny. This is dark, sick, black, sardonic humor. It's an acquired taste. In order to “get it,” you had to have experienced the absolute absurdity life can throw at you. Not just brushes with absurdity, I mean living it and being steeped well in it, like a cup of tea with it's bag still sitting in it, for thirty minutes.
My brother was an expert at it. I once posted a piece on his re-captioning of Dennis the Menace cartoons and some of the panels he re-did. I posted only the more gentler ones. I knew that some of them would have made nuns, cancer victims, the Womens Movement, LBGT and a host of other groups and other of life's martyrs raging mad. The greatest attack he managed was on the Bible, he rewrote part of that and I still have it. He was an Equal Opportunity ball buster and he attacked everyone no matter the affliction. Everything was up for grabs in his mind. Since everything always contained a certain amount of pure bullshit, he railed against it by turning it on it's head. Everything? Sure, look at middle class values and you can blow a month writing comedy on that alone. While in the hospital, he once joked to me that in his obituary, it should read: “He fought a coward's battle with Cystic Fibrosis.” It was his reaction to the happy-horseshit, reality-denying, positivism you find anywhere you go. We both laughed at that idea for an obit but there's no way the ProJo would publish it, nor would half his friends “get it.”
My brother was an idealist if you can understand that, given his dark humor. He used these jokes and gags to point out the stench of lies that people ascribe too or the silly things they uphold as HOLY and TRUE (When in actuality, the public display of these morals mask a disgusting selfishness). He never gave up the idea this world could be better, hence the way his humor attacked all that was bogus underneath it's “real” surface. It's also a way of enduring life's silliness, and also when it becomes not so silly, but I'll explain that later.
A few years ago, I brought a copy of that redone Dennis the Menace to my local bar and tossed it in front of an acquaintance. I took a stool a bit aways and watch his expression to see if he “got it” as he read. Nope, not in the least. He looked up at me and asked “Who's the sick fuck who would do this...is this you?”
I thought, “Nope, this one isn't a member of the Brotherhood. He can't get past the surface. He's never met absurdity.” I just removed it and quickly moved on. This kind of humor, in the wrong hands, is completely misunderstood by those not initiated.
When faced with the irrationality of life, when common sense solutions are ignored, tossed away in favor for the other person/institution/state/you name it's neurosis, you have to cope somehow when no other method works. That way of coping is to laugh at it. You can't fake this either, you will genuinely launch into a deep belly laugh if you have experienced it. It's truly funny. But like I said, you have to be cornered by the ridiculousness of it all in order transcend it and make it a comedy.
I'm a lover of this kind of humor because I understand it.
Click the pic to see where dark humor is BEST used.
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