This week: Death Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience.
—Mark Twain
I am prepared to meet my maker. Whether my maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
—Winston Churchill
The trouble with quotes about death is that 99.9% of them are made by people who are still alive.
—Joshua Burns |
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Death isn't funny.
For some reason—I can't quite put my finger on it—the concept of death popped into my head whilst creating this newsletter over this past weekend.
It's fairly well-known that noted American humorist Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." A humorist, by the way, is a comedian who's dead but is still funny.* So Mark Twain and George Carlin are humorists, while Dave Barry is a comedian. For now.
But as another comedian once said, "We laugh because we know we're going to die." (Me. That was me.)
I once tried to rescue an injured cat. As I picked the poor thing up, broken on the side of the road, I noticed it was purring. Purring is what we normally associate with a healthy, contented feline, but here was a very hurt kitty, purring like a chainsaw. Well, it turns out that they also purr when they're distressed; I don't really know why—there's a lot about a cat's purr that we just don't understand—but it appears to be a comforting thing, a way of trying to make things right in a world where so much isn't.
And that's the same reason we laugh. A laugh is a human's purr. We laugh when we're relaxing among friends, and we also laugh to make the pain go away. Sometimes, we do both at the same time.
Most jokes just edge around the concept, if they address it at all, but some—generally called dark, graveyard, or gallows humor—get at the condition directly. Here's an example:
John is dying. However, he can smell his favorite chocolate nut
brownies cooking downstairs. John summons all the strength that he has
left, he flops out of bed and crawls downstairs. He sees the brownies
cooling on the counter and staggers over to them. As John reaches for one,
his wife's wrinkled old hand reaches out, smacks his and she yells:
'No John, you can't have those! They're for the funeral!'**
Then there are the jokes etched upon gravestones. These can be done at the request of the deceased's family, or sometimes, if you're the kind of person who absolutely has to get the last laugh, you can specify your epitaph in your will. For example, "I told you I was sick!"
Or this one, allegedly etched upon a stone in Pennsylvania:
In loving memory of Ellen Shannon, aged 25,
Who was accidentally burned March 21, 1870,
By the explosion of a lamp filled with R.E. Danforth's
Non-explosive burning fluid.**
For the record, I've spent my life playing video games, so I want mine to read, "Game Over."
If you're still not convinced of the connection between humor and death, how many times have you seen the Grim Reaper in a comics panel?
Humor, in general, is often about finding common ground with other people—and can there be more common ground than a cemetery?
But, like I said above, death isn't funny.
Except when it is.
*That's not really the difference, but Waltz's First Rule of Comedy applies: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one."
**The above quotes are sourced from this site. |
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Comedy: September 14, 2022 Issue [#11555]
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