A friend called from New York to ask if I had heard the latest Christa McAuliffe jokes.
McAuliffe was, of course, the teacher who died in the recent explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. My friend`s call did not shock me, because I already had heard the jokes. Some jokes involved just McAuliffe, others involved the death of all seven astronauts.
What surprised me as I called friends in others parts of the country to check, however, was that they all had heard at least a few of these jokes, which were the same, almost word for word.
But how had they traveled so quickly across the country? No newspaper had printed these jokes. They were not broadcast on television or radio. Yet people had heard them. And who thought them up? One person? Or had different people in different parts of the country dreamed up the same jokes at virtually the same time?
Let me disappoint you right now if you expect me to reprint these jokes. I am not going to do it. If you have never heard these jokes, count yourself as being lucky. But I don`t think you will have to ask around too much before you find someone who has.
A colleague here at the paper has a whole list of the jokes. They had upset him greatly, and newsmen are very hard to upset. Bleak, sardonic humor is common to newsrooms. These jokes, however, went beyond that.
”How could people joke about a thing like this?” he asked.
But people will joke about anything. Maybe that is the point. Maybe it is some people`s way of saying that nothing is sacred.
When Leon Klinghoffer was killed by terrorists aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship and then thrown overboard in his wheelchair, there were jokes about that, too. I heard a couple of them at the time and just recently, when Klinghoffer`s widow died of cancer, I heard another one.
I don`t want to give the impression that the people I know are drooling beasts with twisted minds. Most people listen to these jokes the same way I do –with a grimace and a shake of the head. And then we go around asking other people if they have heard them yet.
I know of only two people who, when they were approached about the space shuttle jokes, said: ”I don`t want to hear them.”
But if you think that only sick or demented people would listen to or repeat such jokes, let me tell you about two paperback joke books I once wrote about.
They were published by a very big, very respectable publishing house. The jokes in the books insulted Jews, Poles, blacks, Mexicans and just about every other ethnic, racial or religious group there is. They contained a number of jokes about Helen Keller, a number of jokes about female sex organs and one joke about Helen Keller and female sex organs. These books were as disgusting and insulting and cruel as any books I have ever read.
The first book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks. The second was on for 15 weeks. In other words, millions of people, millions of ordinary people, bought them. Why? You tell me.
True, almost all jokes are based on someone else`s misfortune. That is the basis of humor. Asked once to define the difference between comedy and tragedy, Mel Brooks said: ”Tragedy is if I get a hangnail. Comedy is if you slip on a banana peel and die.”
Take any joke you can think of. Take one from my favorite comic, Henny Youngman: ”Doctor gave a guy six months to live. Guy couldn`t pay the bill;
doctor gave him another six months!”
Why is that joke funny? Why is it not cruel? Because the object of the jokes is not real. We can joke about a guy having six months to live, because there is no such guy. It is harmless, anonymous joking.
The Klinghoffer jokes, the McAuliffe jokes are different, however. In them, the targets and the tragedy are only too real.
Psychologists tell me that is the point. They say we joke about the truly horrible as a way of distancing ourselves from it, as a way of isolating ourselves from tragedy. By joking about it, we make it unreal.
Well, maybe. But maybe we joke about such things for a different reason. Maybe we do it to satisfy some deep, dark urge within us to speak the unspeakable, to challenge the bounds of taste, to push against the limits of decency.
As I said, I am not sure who makes up these jokes. I am not sure why they do it. I am not sure how they get the jokes spread around the country so fast. I`m only really sure of one thing: They are not doing it to be funny.
