When Does Dark Humor Stop Being Funny?
In either ninth or tenth grade, my friend Dan and I found a book of “Truly Tasteless Jokes” on the cafeteria floor. Our teenage psyches were quickly mesmerized, and we spent the majority of lunch reading it cover to cover. I laughed at one dead baby joke in particular (which I can’t repeat here). It involved a blender.
To see if I was a psychopath for taking delight in dead babies, I asked the cartoons editor for the , Bob Mankoff, for his opinion. He’s had plenty of time to ruminate on what makes a good, given the punishment if caught. “It asks us to consider what is in the mind of a child molester,” says Mankoff. “He’s asking us to understand the things that drive them.” Watching the clip, you can almost feel the audience’s guilt as they laugh.
