Delphic Maxim 134: Do not make fun of the dead
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
134. Do not make fun of the dead
There’s a conversation that I periodically have with a friend of mine — one of those recurrent themes that we return to in furious agreement. The essence of the conversation is about the limits of humour. Where should we draw the line on comedy? What subjects are out-of-bounds for someone who is cracking jokes? We’re both in agreement that really, there is no line. If you don’t make fun of everything, then humour loses its power of critique. It loses its capability to blunt the sharpest swords (figurative and actual).
At the same time, though, I think sometimes people get carried away with this free rein that we should grant to the subjects of jokes. There’s a difference between being edgy and funny, as opposed to being simply tactless and rude. It’s not that the limit exists which bans something from being funny, but actually that in a particular time and place and context…jokes about sensitive things just aren’t funny.
This is how I read today’s maxim: it’s not to ‘not make fun of the dead’ in an absolute way, but rather to be sensitive to the appropriateness of humour in a time and a place. For instance, I don’t really think there are circumstances where making fun of someone who has died in the immediate circle of grieving friends and family is appropriate. It may never be appropriate — and I’d argue it’s never actually going to become ‘fun’ (and if you personally think it is fun, with no regard for the feelings of the people around you, then you’re probably an utter jerk, so there’s a whole new question about character there).
But what about public figures? I can recall plenty of public figures about whom jokes were cracked sometimes within minutes of their deaths. Michael Jackson, Margaret Thatcher, even Diana Spencer — some admirable (Princess Di), some not so admirable (Thatcher). There seems to be a reflexive public reaching for humour as a way to process both collective grief — perhaps to leaven the experience of loss we feel for a person we’ve never met, or a person who we know was significant, but absurdly never was an immediate part of our lives. It might be the disjuncture that technology and mass media have introduced into our daily lives: we are creatures biologically adapted to small-scale and intimate communities, but we have learnt to communicate on a planetary scale, and to care about the lives of people from whom we are radically disconnected but intimately familiar.
That whole scenario is so absurd, so outside the realm of sensibility (and I mean that in the ‘sense-making’ mode of the word), that maybe humour is a natural response. It’s also a fine response, I think, because most of us aren’t in that inner-circle of grieving where jokes wouldn’t be appropriate. It helps us process mortality in a way, to trivialise the loss of a significant figure — a person who for all intents and purposes has become ‘immortal’ — written into history’s pages, not to be forgotten (at least, they will last a little longer than most of us will).
Public grief is a real thing of course, and for some it can be as real as the private kind. The point of this maxim — or the way I choose to interpret it for our irreverent, nihilistic, un-sacred times — is that ‘fun’ is best deployed wisely, and never to hurt another person. The dead don’t care what we say about them — they’re not around anymore and they don’t give a shit. But the people who survive them are, so this maxim is a reminder that while nothing should be off limits for comedy, it still needs to be sensitive to the sadness and sorrow of others. Context is king.
