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As a humorist I’m often asked by people: What are the limits of humour? When does humour become bad taste? In reply, I quote an old ‘sick’ joke: "Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" The reference, of course, is to Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated while watching a stage performance. Lincoln was shot in 1865, in the politically surcharged atmosphere following the end of the American Civil War. I heard that joke some 40 years ago, though its provenance is probably much older; the colloquialism ‘his name is mud’ is believed to be derived from a contemporary reference to a Dr Mudd, a Confederate sympathiser who treated Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who was injured while escaping.
‘Black’ or ‘sick’ jokes seem to spawn spontaneously at times of trauma. Though P G Wodehouse was pilloried for his humorous broadcasts during World War II when he was held captive by the Germans, his ‘sin’ was seen to be not his inappropriate recourse to jocularity but his apparent collaboration with the enemy. In fact, blitz-ravaged Britain kept its morale up with laughter in the dark: A bombed-out, roofless establishment would bear the sign, "More open for business than usual".
The wars in West Asia, African famines, the death of Princess Diana all fomented a sub-cultural bacillus of gallows humour. Within a few hours of the royal massacre in Kathmandu palace, a ‘sick’ story was doing the rounds: Prince Charles tells his mother, "OK, so you won’t let me marry Camilla; why don’t you and the rest of the family come round to my place for dinner Friday night".
Sickening as it undoubtedly is, ‘sick’ humour is like a toxic titration prescribed to cure or alleviate a deeper malaise; it is a psychic alka seltzer taken for a mass emotional hangover. It’s based on the homeopathic principle that a judiciously administered dose of the poison that made you ill can make you better.
Like ethnic jokes, ‘sick’ humour is deplored as being ‘politically incorrect’. This is to understate the case. ‘Sick’ jokes are meant to illustrate the incorrectness of the politics that have brought you to the grief from which you now seek deliverance.
The more incorrect the politics, the blacker the corrective humour. War is the ultimate in incorrect politics — ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent’ — as Isaac Asimov says — and the most effective anti-war antidote is not pious bromides but black humour. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is a classic example. The protagonist, Yosarian, takes off all his clothes and goes around naked on the army base. He hopes that he will convince his superior officers that he is insane so that, by virtue of his insanity, he is discharged from service. However, the army psychiatrist turns down this plea on the grounds that since only madmen would want to fight a war, madness is not a valid argument for dismissal from combat service. That’s the Catch-22 underlying the war conducted by other means that we call the human condition.
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