Sick humour, RL and sensitivity....discusss!

[Blu]

I am genuinely interested in this because it poses personal dilemmas for me.

(This is not a thread to intended to carry on opinions about individual MN-ers).

I remember watching the Zebrugge disaster on tv and crying. But the next day, someone told me two very sick jokes - at which I did laugh. Without feeling any less horrified at what had happened. Had a relative of the drowned been close to me my sympathy and sensitivity would have been, I hope, total.

On the other hand I have been hugely upset on MN by some of the relentless jokes about HMMc's leg, because I felt that people could well make jokes about my own DS's leg, and also that her leg was becoming a focus for all sorts of other things about the way HMMc is seen.

Is it about whether we think these thjoughts at all? Whether we write them down, and consider them 'legit' and ok to share widely if we write them down?

Do we encompass all our emotions in the face of verything we eencounter, and humour is in there somewhere?

And where does the sensitivity we would show if we were in the front room with someone bereaved stop, and free speech become an issue? I have seen things discussed as free speech issues on Mn when personally i would have seen them as 'someone's fromnt room sensitivity' issues....

fio agree with you there they should try the shoes for size.
fed up with the excuse "it was a joke"
some things are just not funny

no-one is suggesting it doesn't hurt. but lots of things are potentially hurtful.
for example, one might flippantly suggest that someone should "get some therapy". perfectly normal turn of phrase.
which is a perfectly flippant and innocuous thing to say.
but if the person in question had previous and current mental health issues, that would hurt, wouldn't it?
no-one really knows everyone else's history. to say "you don't know how it feels" is an over simplification. Lots of people have sensitivities about which we may know nothing.

im sorry but i cant stop sniggering at "murdered to death".

We had an incident at work the other day, where a patient had died, and the porter, being unaware of this, knocked on the door of the patients room and and said "Sorry to disturb you" before laying the paper down on the table and turning to leave. At which point the porter saw the Housekeeping Supervisor was gesticulating wildly at him with a 'slash throat' sort of motion. He didnt suss what was meant until he got to the corridor. Clearly its not funny to laugh at the fact that a someone has died. But, there is something darkly humorous about saying "sorry to disturb you" to a dead person.

"It doesn't seriously affect them one way or the other. And to pretend that it does is a pose"

I find that rather trite and dismissive

well is a bit strong. Is there a mildly disapproving emoticon?

I know

And i'm afraid i found it amusing when some undertakers got lost the other day whilst firstly trying to find the patient they were collecting (ended up a locked fire escape stairwell, frightening the life out of the nurse who was close by, by hammering on the door!), and then with the patient.....I was tracking them on CCTV and these two nincompoops wandering around with a body in a black bag on a stretcher was simply surreal! It was like watching a sketch from Last of the Summer wine.....

Interesting innit that this fairly calm discussion covering the same topic as the other thread has only 30 something posts compared to around 300+ on the other. Nowt like a bit a barney to get a thread going.

And to avoid a barney on this thread (I don't wish to provoke NOELallie as I absolutely loathe arguments these days) I shall explain why I got mildly irritated (as if anyone cares, lol)

It is not "a pose" to be upset by a joke about the Twin Towers etc even if you weren't there/ didn't have a relative there etc.

When my Finance Director shared that particular Twin Towers joke with me, I was still feeling shaken and upset about the whole thing. No I didn't know anyone directly involved but I had been haunted by images of people freefalling to their deaths from the upper floors rather than be burnt alive, and had been particularly upset that one of the people who did this was a heavily pregnant woman.

It isn't a pose to be upset about the plight of other human beings - even if they don't share your DNA or drink down your local. Those feelings of empathy can be 100% genuine.

Yes, sure is....

Never a dinner break goes by with out an anecdote about poo or objects up bums either......

I'm not a complete kill joy, I can see the comedy in the situation that VVVQV describes.

But that sort of black humour is a whole different ball game to finding humour in a human tragedy (mass murder / war atrocities etc)

Agree with that though hmc....i still reel when I see pictures of the WTC collapsing and am to admit that I dont find jokes about dianas death particularly humourous - even 9 or so years on.

My brother comes home with some really funny stories sometimes about his day. He is a PC. Undoubtedly whatever it was that was funny to him probably wasnt funny at all to the member of public it concerned but when its your day to day job its a bit different i think.

I suppose that I am a real kill joy but I have never thought it appropriate to laugh at someone elses misfortune. I will say that from time to time I have had the odd thing like this tickle my funny bone, but I don't think it should be done, Even if it is people you don't know in the towers or the little boy with a handicap down the street.

I would have been laughing at the things VVVQ describes, and if, when my time comes, I am the lost body being transported by oafs round the hospital - I will be happy for other people to laugh too. Probably not if the body is of my loved ones, though.

I think there is a huge difference between finding anachronistic aspects of tragic events funny, even whilst we find the event tragic, and making a laughing stock out of features that people a) can't change and have no control over, b)leave people vulnerable to discrimination, prejudice and loss of opportunity in RL. Yes, hopefully that person can have the strength to shrug it off - but as someone said below, that doesn't excuse the person making it necessary for someone to have to cultivate a thick skin, a sense of humour as a defence mechanism, or an olympic-standard shrugging motion.

I quite often think really irreverent and 'off' thoughts - but I probably wouldn't post them on MN because for me there's something about putting something in writing, which legitimises things, or plants them deeper than the moment should allow, iyswim.

How is it you get the turn of phrase so spot on so often, Blu - I love "plants them deeper than the moment should allow".

Yes the litvinenko jokes have started:
?Jokes about polonium 201 will be half as funny 138 days fom now?

'could equally have been an aardvark' was pretty damn good, too...and you nabbed it!

I have a very black sense of humour which I do not indulge on MN - as 3 seconds' worth of snigger is not worth 500 irate posts directed at me. I used to work in newspapers and we all seemed to share a particularly warped sense of humour - helped us cope I guess.
I now work in mental health in a very touchy/feely/sensitive and polictically correct environment. There are times when I literally want to put my head out of the window and scream with the effort of biting my tongue - because once an 'inappropriate' funny thought has popped into your head, it's fiendishly hard to get rid of it.
Could we not have a confessional box on MN for such occasions?

handlemecarefully - I didn't say you shouldn't get upset. I very deliberately did say that might be disgusted but unless you have some direct involvement you have no right to say that no-one must make a comment or joke. Decent human concern dictates (as far as I'm concerned) that you try hard not to deliberately offend anyone who is in distress...and as it happens I think that making jokes about recent disasters is in pretty poor taste. But that doesn't cover every person who might possibly be upset by every eventuality and every disaster. Have you seen the Catherine Tate sketch with the office workers - one of whom always has some current charity that she has taken under her wing, and the other who's concerns are totally dismissed by the first because they aren't as important as her own. Oversensitivity can be just a pose - "I'm so much more PC and caring than you are...look I'm offended by that!!!"

I may be deemed to have a sick sense of humour as it was a coping mechnansim whilst in the Police force , however I wouldn't share it with a forum like this or some of my friends. I would not certianity make a joke of someones misfortunte/death/murder etc unlike some people who seem to be able to get away with it on this , with pople falling over themselves making excuses for them and basiaclly sucking up to them., whilct other posters who make points about pople being too sensitve get a slating !

On the issue of real life I do think pople should face up to what does happen in real life and not stick their head in the sand and pretend its doesn't happen because of their 'sensitivity' especailly on public forums like this .

Pople have got a salting recenrly for posting about real life evenst, not about making jokes !

I nearly always laugh at sick jokes

and am honestly a lovely caring sensitive person

go figure

Dripping fanjoes... .. now there's thread fodder for you!! How's that for "sick humour"! Bleeughh... some Mners!!!

And for what it's worth HMC, I found the Twin Towers thing totally haunting. I kept thinking about the the 3 yr old girl on one of the planes knowing that she was going to die. But stopping other people joking about it wouldn't stop it being haunting.