University Press of Colorado
Utah State University Press
Chapter Title: JOKES THAT FOLLOW MASS-MEDIATED DISASTERS IN A GLOBAL
ELECTRONIC AGE
Chapter Author(s): Christie Davies
Book Title: Of Corpse
Book Subtitle: Death and Humor in Folkore and Popular Culture
Book Editor(s): PETER NARVÁEZ
Published by: University Press of Colorado; Utah State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46nsgh.5
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PART ONE
Disaster Jokes
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1
JOKES THAT FOLLOW MASSMEDIATED
DISASTERS IN A
GLOBAL ELECTRONIC AGE
Christie Davies
During the last forty years or so, “disasters”—such as a famine, an earthquake,
the crashing of a plane, train, or spaceship, a multiple murder,
or the sudden death of a celebrity—have tended to receive extensive,
vivid, tear-jerking television coverage, often rapidly followed by a cycle
of gruesome jokes. The jokes begin within hours or even minutes of the
disaster’s melodramatic presentation on television, rapidly increase in
number, peak a couple of months later, and then new jokes cease to be
created, bringing the cycle not to an end but to a plateau. The jokes no
longer circulate as something new and exciting, but remain present in
people’s memories, notebooks, and computers. Here are some British
and American favorites of the 1980s; they are examples of one of the
most modern and most democratic forms of folklore, a truly people’s
joke, a joke of, by, and for the people that bypasses all official modes of
transmission:
Regarding the death of Jessica Savitch, an American television
personality:
Why did Jessica Savitch drown?
She was an anchorwoman.
(Bronner 1985, 75)
Regarding the ferry disaster in 1987, when the The Herald of Free
Enterprise sank outside Zeebrugge, with the loss of 193 lives:
Why is The Herald of Free Enterprise like French contraception?
Roll on, roll off, and the place is full of dead seamen.
(In oral circulation in Britain in the late 1980s)
Regarding an explosion and fire on the oil-rig Piper Alpha in 1988, in
which 166 workers were burnt to death:
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Where do Piper Alpha workers go on holiday?
Burnham-on-Sea.
What’s got four legs and goes woof?
Piper Alpha.
(In oral circulation in Britain in the late1980s)
It is, perhaps, significant that fifteen years later it is necessary to explain
these jokes to the reader, even though they were major television stories at
the time. They were tragedies for the individuals who died and for their
families, but for others they were events that will not figure in a general
history of the twentieth century. They will likely figure only in television
documentaries, partly because television is self-referential and selfobsessed,
and partly because pictures are a higher priority for the producers
than the scholarship of their historical advisers. The Treaty
of Versailles is thus reduced in television documentaries to an old
(and therefore speeded up) black-and-white film of Lloyd George,
Clémenceau, and Wilson trotting out of a building, raising their top hats
to the crowd, and replacing them with unnatural celerity. It is a trivial and,
incidentally, comic picture that no producer of “good,” i.e., fatuous, television
can resist. Likewise, the only convenient way for the author to check
the details of the disasters that produced successive joke cycles in Britain
in the late 1980s was to consult the Internet.1 Most individuals do not
remember the dates or scale of these disasters, or even what they were.
THE ABSENCE OF DISASTER JOKES IN THE PAST
It is important to note that jokes of this kind certainly did not exist in
substantial numbers, and indeed probably did not exist at all, before the
rise of television. “Sick” humor existed, but it did not crystallize in this
particular form, as may be seen from a brief look at the history of such
humor. There was no shortage of sick humor in the past (Davies 1990;
Dundes 1987, 3–7; Gruner 1997, 41–53; Wilde 1979), including humor
about death and destruction, but there are no set piece jokes about particular
disastrous events or the deaths of celebrities. Before television,
the human potential for telling such jokes was clearly already there, but
the appropriate stimulus was absent.
Many sick and cynical humorous items, notably songs (Murdoch 1990;
Palmer 1990; Oh What a Lovely War 1967) emerged from the worst disaster
experienced by English-speaking peoples in the twentieth century, the
First World War, but not set piece disaster jokes. It might well be
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wondered why men confronted with death, on a scale and with a directness
unknown to their comfortable descendants watching televised disasters,
should have enjoyed such humor, but that is not the question asked
here. Rather, what is striking is that there are no sick riddle jokes left over
from the First World War to circulate among soldiers and civilians alike;
no jokes to grow old as the joke tellers who grow old might yet remember
them. Jokes could have been told but they were not, nor did those who
learned of distant disasters from the press or radio invent such jokes in
either wartime or peacetime in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
There are no contemporary jokes about the Tay Bridge Disaster, the
assassination of President Lincoln, the blowing up of the U.S. battleship
Maine in Havana, the strangling of the exotic dancer Isadora Duncan
when her trailing scarf got caught in the wheels of her car, or the mass
murders by John Reginald Halliday Christie. Not even the eating of the
Reverend Harold Davidson, the rector of Stiffkey in Norfolk, England, by
a lion in a Skegness, England, amusement park in 1937 (Paris 1999, 65)
produced a cycle of jokes. The idea of a Christian being eaten by a lion
clearly amused the British public of the 1930s, as may be seen from the
popularity of the comic monologue The Lion and Albert (Edgar 1932). Yet
no jokes were invented about the scandalous rector who, after being
defrocked for gross sexual irregularities, ended his life in a lion’s den.
Today, a televised news report on the ex-rector’s career would produce
scores of jokes from inventive viewers, but in 1937 there was no television,
and there were no jokes.
The few jokes in circulation today that do dwell on long past disasters,
such as the sinking of the Titanic, were, so far as we can tell, invented
long after the events to which they refer. In the case of the Titanic, the
jokes emerged mainly after the visually spectacular film of the late 1990s.
THE EARLIEST SICK JOKES
The first appearance of sick jokes with a short, quick, modern format
occurred in the 1940s with variants of the little moron jokes, and in the
cruel jokes of the 1950s (Gruner 1997, 54; Sutton-Smith 1960). Among
these jokes are some that refer to past well-published disasters:
Happy Father’s Day, Mr. Lindbergh.
(Sutton-Smith 1960, 21)
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
(Sutton-Smith 1960, 21)
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Brian Sutton-Smith (1960, 12; see also Gruner 1997, 54) was able to
collect 155 “cruel jokes” in the autumn of 1958 alone, which he divided
into subsets with names such as cruel jokes, gruesomes, grimsels, sick
jokes, and the comedy of horror:
But Warden, I like Joe.
Shut up and pull the switch.
(Sutton-Smith 1960, 14)
I’m going to take you out of the parade, if you don’t stop dragging your cross.
(Sutton-Smith 1960, 20)
However, the jokes still did not refer to current events. Indeed, they
were generally non-specific. Most of them were one-liners, in contrast to
the riddle jokes with a complex and sophisticated link between question
and answer, (as distinct from unresolved nonsense riddles) of the kind
that emerged in the 1960s, grew in the 1970s and 1980s, and boomed in
the 1990s and into the new millennium. By the beginning of the 1960s,
though, all the key elements were in place, namely major cycles of sick
jokes, told mainly but not exclusively by young people, and the beginning
of the production on a large scale of question-and-answer riddle
jokes, notably those about ethnic minorities:
How do you get a Polack out of a swimming pool?
Throw in a bar of soap.
(In oral circulation in America in the early 1960s)
The emergence of such jokes in America by the early 1960s indicates
the growth of a mocking sense of humor, especially among the young,
which violated the American pieties of the late 1950s. These included the
belief in the equality, assimilation, and Americanization of immigrants,
respect for religion (crucifixion jokes are not anti-clerical, but about the
very core events, narratives, and faith of Christianity), and obsessive
cleanliness. The humor also defied the appropriate sense of gravity and
concern to be adopted towards death and disaster. These jokes of the
late 1950s and early 1960s occurred during a period of confident modernity,
and of faith in progress and science and in economic growth
through the beneficent oligopolistic competition of big business, which
were producing endless product improvements and wealth. The emergence
of such jokes at this time completely refutes the explanations for
the emergence of these jokes, put forward in terms of the much more
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recent emergence of a supposed period of post-modernity and its associated
doubts (Paton, Powell, and Wagg 1996, 7; Ellis 1996, 226). Indeed,
the much earlier emergence of such jokes further undermines the usual
understanding of post-modernity as a distinctively fin de siècle phenomenon.
The timing of the origins of the jokes demonstrates once again that
there is no such thing as post-modernity (Davies 1999), and it is ironic
that a generation ever more trapped in an iron cage of modernity should
think that they have escaped into post-modernity. That said, we live in an
unreflective, non-reflexive age (Davies and Neal 1998).
KENNEDY AND THE FIRST DEAD CELEBRITY JOKES OF AN
ELECTRONIC AGE
All that was missing in the jokes of this time was any specific references
to current events. This element only emerged and fell into place
in the 1960s, with the total triumph of television as the medium that
provided a new kind of disaster reporting, in which the audience cannot
avoid the intrusive pressure of dominating pictures combined with insistent
moralistic commentary about how they ought to feel. You are
watching Big Brother, and he is talking to you.
This was the crucial new factor that precipitated the new sick disaster
jokes based on current events. We can see it emerge through the
evolution of jokes about the death of President Kennedy. Before his
death, there were already jokes about his Roman Catholicism and the
decisive effect that it might have on his politics (a very controversial
issue at the time), and the form of the jokes was well-established. With
Kennedy’s assassination, and the first ever tear-jerking television coverage
of the death of a celebrity, came the first cycle of dead celebrity disaster
jokes. Possibly it had a precursor in the one-liner joke about the
assassination of Lincoln from the 1950s cited earlier, but Kennedy’s
assassination provided the first joke cycle about a contemporary disaster,
and coincided with the growth and dominance of television coverage
of a particular style and type. First the political jokes about
Kennedy’s religion:
Have you heard the Kennedy jokes? Well, he (JFK) was asking everyone to
save their old bowling balls—he was going to make a rosary for the statue of
liberty.
(UCBFA2 Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4.
Collected by Michael Denas 1965, circulating in 1961)
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Did you hear that President Kennedy is going to reinstate Roosevelt’s “fire-side
chats” program? It’s going to be called “coast to coast with the Holy Ghost.”
(UCBFA Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4.
Collected by Marcia Rasumoff)
Then came the assassination:
Question: What did Johnson say to Mrs. Kennedy?
Answer: I guess John needed that trip to Dallas like a hole in the head!
(UCBFA Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4. Collected
by Jane Rudofsky. In circulation in Los Angeles in 1962 a
few days after the assassination)
What did John-John get for his fifth birthday?
A Jack-in-a-box.
(UCBFA Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4.
Collected by Denise Adelman)
The latter joke was collected by a woman who heard it “shortly after
President Kennedy’s death” and felt “rather sick and disgusted with
whomever it was that told it to me.” She adds that JFK’s son John-John’s
fifth birthday fell on the day of his father’s funeral.
What’s Jackie Kennedy’s new name now?
Jackie Idlewild.
(UCBFA Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4.
Collected by Susan Knopow, 1965)
The joke reverses the tendency to arbitrarily rename all manner of
things ‘Kennedy’ after JFK’s assassination, such as Idlewild Airport, and
suggests that Jackie to-be-Onassis was now wild and idle.
These jokes set a pattern for the later Kennedy jokes about disaster—
the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the slaughter of Mary Jo Kopechne
through the drunk driving, negligence, and cowardice of Edward
Kennedy, and the loss of John Kennedy, Jr. (the “John-John” of the jokes)
while flying his own plane. Each wave of jokes was numerically larger, and
the best of the jokes cleverer than in the preceding cycle. Disaster jokes
were now on an ascending curve, and were partly driven by the everincreasing
pervasiveness of television and partly by the rise of the “antirisk
society,” in which early death had become rare due to improved
nutrition, public health, and medical treatment. Occasional loss of young
life through violence or accident was now seen as the ultimate tragedy
(Davies and Neal 1998, 43–44).
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In the jokes about Edward Kennedy, we can also see a precursor of
the later and equally media-driven jokes about President Clinton. In the
case of America’s “Father Ted,” public shock and horror were mixed
with private laughter:
What did Edward Kennedy say to his secretary when she told him confidentially,
“I’ve got a problem?”
He said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
(UCBFA Anglo-American file. Jokes II-2, F3, P6 U9 K4.
Collected by Richard Peters, 1970)
Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and his aide, Mary Jo
Kopechne, was tragically drowned. The joke plays quite unfairly with the
notion that either she or some subsequent secretary might have been
pregnant, and that this was his way of dealing with such a problem.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF THE DISASTER JOKE
The television jokes discussed thus far have been concerned with
events occurring in and reported in the country where the jokes were
told. However, the global television reporting of distant disasters has led
to jokes that place these events within a framework of local trivia.
The following phrase was habitually used when a bar was due to close
for the night in Britain, but it acquired a double meaning at the time of
the Armenian earthquake:
What does a pub landlord say at the end of the evening in Armenia?
All right, you lot, closing time. Haven’t you got homes to go to?
(In oral circulation in Britain in the 1980s)
Regarding the Mexico City earthquake of 1985:
What did they rename the Hilton Hotel in Mexico City?
The International House of Pancakes.
(UCBFA Anglo-American file II-2 T6, D5 Topical Disasters
Miscellaneous. Collected by Andrea Collette, 1986)
Regarding the assassination of Ghandi:
Why doesn’t India have Halloween anymore?
Cause they ain’t got no Gandhi.
(UCBFA Anglo-American file, Jokes II-2, F3, P6, N6 Famous political
Non U.S. Collected by Lewis Rosman)
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Successive waves of recycled jokes about African famines also circulated
on both sides of the Atlantic—the Biafran, Ethiopian, Eritrean,
and Somali famine jokes (Christopher 1984–5; Gruner 1997, 57–8):
How do you get an Ethiopian into a phone box?
Throw a tin of baked beans in.
(In oral circulation in Britain 1980s)
What’s black, round and covered in cobwebs?
An Ethiopian’s asshole.
(Christopher 1984–85, 39)
What’s new about the McDonald’s restaurant in Ethiopia?
It features a crawl-up window.
(Christopher 1984–85, 40)
What did Poland send to Ethiopia for famine relief?
4000 pounds of after-dinner mints.
(Christopher 1984–85, 41)
What do Yoko Ono and Ethiopians have in common?
They both live off dead beetles.
(Christopher 1984–85, 41)
These were perhaps the first famines to be shown directly on television.
The horrific pictures, with a strong emphasis on starving children,
were accompanied by a rhetoric that implied that viewers should not
only feel shocked and upset, but guilty, even though there was no connection
between them and the racist and ideology-driven warring
African governments who were responsible for causing the famines.
Show business personalities now ran highly publicized fund-raising
events that cashed in on the television pictures. Significantly, no one
thought to make a major television news story out of that, or to put on a
show to raise money to ameliorate the steady high death rate of children
and adults alike from malnutrition or diarrhea caused by dirty drinking
water in very poor countries. Nor were there jokes on this subject.
Many young people were clearly responding to being lectured about
their moral responsibilities by inventing jokes that mocked their media
mentors. Such a response is very common. In Israel after teaching about
the Holocaust became compulsory in secondary schools, there was a wave
of sick jokes on this subject (Zajdman 1995), something that had never
happened in Israel before. There is no point in searching for “deeper”
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(i.e., inaccessible and untestable) reasons for these responses, or speculating
about coping mechanisms or systems of meaning. Young people
resist secular preaching, and that is all that need be said. It is for this
reason that secular moral crusades to alter their behavior tend to fail.
TELEVISION AS THE CAUSE OF DISASTER JOKES
The explosion of the Challenger space shuttle on live television in
1986 set off what was probably the first of a series of joke cycles about
accidents. A leading humor scholar, Elliott Oring, soon noticed the significance
of the incorporation into the Challenger jokes of references to
commercial products and phrases from television advertising (1987,
1992). Oring wrote:
A number of the shuttle jokes (as well as other disaster jokes) increasingly
employ the names of familiar and amiable commercial products from television
advertising: Coke, Seven-Up, Tango, Head and Shoulders, Ocean Spray,
Bud Light. “What were the last words said on the Challenger? I want a light. . . .
No, no a Bud Light.” In this joke an incongruous image is created of the
Challenger destruction being caused by someone mistaking an order for beer as
a request for an explosion. The incongruity is appropriate because incendiaries
were indeed part and parcel of Budweiser Light beer commercials in the
mid-1980s. . . . Like the Challenger newscasts themselves, they were so
omnipresent that it was almost inevitable that they would be employed in parody.
. . . But the juxtaposition of commercial products with images of disaster
seems a particularly appropriate commentary on the television medium and
images it presents to viewers at home. Television news programs regularly conjoin
images and stories about death, disease and destruction with images of
commercial products. Virtually every television report of a news disaster is preceded
and followed by a commercial message (or each and every message is
preceded and followed by the report of a disaster). Thus the concatenation of
brand name products and images of disaster achieved in the jokes is really no
more incongruous than that achieved several times each evening by national
and local news programs. (1992, 38–9)
Q. What’s the favourite drink at NASA?
A. Seven-Up with a splash.
(Oring 1992, 32)
Q. How did they know Christa McAuliffe had dandruff?
A. Her head and shoulders were washed up on the beach.
(Oring 1992, 32)
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Q. What was Christa McAuliffe’s favourite drink?
A. Ocean Spray.
(Oring 1992, 33)
Christa McAuliffe was a civilian schoolteacher travelling as a publicity
passenger on the space shuttle to show how safe it was. It exploded in full
view of those watching the launch on live television, scattering the
inmates as molecules over the shore and sea at Cape Canaveral.
To Oring’s Challenger examples we can add:
Why did Indira Gandhi change her deodorant?
Because her right guard was killing her.
(UCBFA Anglo-American Jokes II- Political Non U.S. Collected by
Christina Bartolucci in California in 1984, two days after Mrs.
Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguard)
Biafran housewives every day open a tin of beans and say, “One each.”
(In oral circulation in Britain among young people in the late 1960s.
Sung to the author by Dr. Anne Curry, distinguished singer and
military historian, over a cafeteria lunch in 1999)
The latter joke is a play on the words of the television advertising jingle:
“Millions of housewives everyday open a tin of beans and say ‘Beanz
Meanz Heinz.’” Baked beans are, as the advertisement implies, an instant
convenience food for the young and are, as it happens, a source of flatulence
and hence comedy. Heinz meanz fartz.
Elliot Oring’s insights and observations can be extended to form a general
theory of how television reporting of disasters such as the Biafran
famine, the Challenger space shuttle, the sinking of The Herald of Free
Enterprise, the Piper Alpha fire, Chernobyl, and the deaths of celebrities generates
sick disaster jokes through new forms of paradox and incongruity.
Before television, these forms of paradox and incongruity were not nearly
as strong a part of people’s “mediated” experiences, and distant shocking
events could not and did not give rise to cycles of sick disaster jokes.
The first incongruity is that television is a rubbish sandwich. The
announcement of sad and shocking disasters alternates not merely with
advertisements, but with programs that are by any standard banal and
trivial, such as low i.q. quiz shows, costume dramas from England which
are far more costume than drama, American sanitized thuggery for
cheap excitement, and saponaceous operas. Television is a world of free
circuses and advertisements for white sliced cardboard bread, in which
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trivia are used to sell trivia and appearance takes precedence over analysis.
In consequence, messages about disaster arrive in an incongruous
package. It is as if an official letter telling a family that one of their members
in the armed forces had been killed in action were to arrive in a
glitzy envelope with smiley face stickers, accompanied by advertisements
for soap powder and chocolate bars. Whilst it is true that newspapers
potentially have the same problem when they run a disaster story on the
front page, a trip down naked mammary lane on page three, and sports
in the back section, these are arranged in a known and segregated spatial
pattern. There are no cartoons on the obituary page, and the reader
who is upset by a disaster reported in the news section can postpone
reading, or even consign to the bin, other potentially incongruous parts
of the paper. A television viewer, by contrast, is hit by a bizarre mixture of
messages in an almost random temporal pattern decided in advance by
other people, to which only minimal changes are made when a disaster
hits the news. Controllers might pull a comedy about trains or aircraft if
there has been a bad crash, but in a normal evening’s solid viewing or
channel switching, incongruity is unavoidable. The incongruity of things
seen is greater than that of things read or heard, and more likely to give
rise to jokes. When disaster strikes, the dead donkey does not get
dropped, but merely occurs later on the television news.
There is a second source of incongruity in television: the frequent and
deliberate blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction, or between
reality and fantasy, in television programs. There is the fakery of the
drama documentary, those mendacious films purporting to represent
real events; the fly-on-the-wall program from which anything that would
bore, offend, or frighten the average fly has been deleted; and the reconstructions
of distant history that boast of accuracy but from which fleas,
facial blemishes, and ordure-filled streets have been eliminated. These
may deceive and entrance many viewers, but they reduce others to cynical
amusement. This cynical amusement is then extended to television
news reports, whose only claim to truth is that they are showing you the
pictures. When the pictures are accompanied by insistent moralizing,
instructing the viewer on how to respond to them, it is no wonder that
disaster jokes become not only possible, but also popular.
Finally, there is the incongruity between the viewer’s situation, seated
safely and comfortably at home in a clean, well-lit place, eating a morethan-adequate
tv dinner, and the pictures of death by starvation or by
accident with which they are being confronted. Television tries to
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deceive people into thinking they are being witnesses, when they are
merely seeing pictures—selected, edited pictures at that. The broadcasters
then exhort the viewers to respond to these distant events as if the
disaster had directly impinged on them, their families, and communities,
and harmed people they know directly and are attached to as particular
individuals (Davies and Neal 2001). As Smyth shrewdly noted in
relation to the Challenger disaster:
The general public was made to feel as if they were there as witnesses and
participants. To not feel shocked by this event would be unusual, yet at what
point and for what reasons might one say “enough of this” and repeat or perhaps
just laugh at jokes about this event? . . . How well do people really know
these media figures and how long do they feel obliged to mourn for them?
For the most part there is no real familiarity with them as persons, only the
one-sided exposure to images absorbed by sitting in front of a television set.
The shuttle crew members had never been woven into the fabric of most people’s
lives. They were not persons, only media personalities. (1986, 255–56)
The same point may be made in regard to the death by disaster of
ordinary members of the public. Other than their particular loved ones,
who have suffered very real personal bereavement, who else in the
twenty-first century cares about the victims of Piper Alpha, The Herald of
Free Enterprise, or the Clapham rail crash, or knows any of their names?
The incidents were tragic in and of themselves, but television turned them
into ephemeral media disasters and thus a fit subject for jokes.
Television created the conditions for the jokes to be invented, but, of
course, the jokes were never broadcast on television (Davies 1996).
Before the Internet, the jokes could only be found in archives or in
books of jokes labeled “gross,” “tasteless,” or “offensive,” and often
edited by unknown persons with female pseudonyms (Alvin 1983a,
1983b, 1984; Knott 1982, 1983a, 1983b, 1984; Thickett 1983a, 1983b).
DISASTER JOKES AS RESISTANCE TO
A HEGEMONY OF FEELING: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
The driving force behind the popularity of disaster jokes is the emotional
hegemony enjoyed by those controlling television, who feel able
to tell viewers what to feel in the same sense that authoritarian governments,
such as those of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe,
told their subjects what to think. In consequence, the same kinds of
jokes emerge in opposition to an illegitimate monopoly—political jokes
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under socialism (Davies 1989, 1998b) and disaster jokes in the West. I
am not, of course, saying that Western viewers hate the controllers of
television, much of the content of which is market-driven and consumer-led,
so that viewers get the lowest common denominator of what
they want—a sort of K-Mart of images. But it was also the case that many
citizens under the old East European socialist regimes who were supporters,
beneficiaries, or even privileged members of these regimes
enjoyed anti-socialist political jokes (Deriabin and Gibney 1960, 173–5).
Likewise, in National Socialist Germany, political jokes of an ostensibly
anti-Nazi kind sometimes revealed insider knowledge of what was going
on within the Nazi hierarchy (Gamm 1963, 23). Political jokes are sometimes
not so much an index of political opposition as a way of playing
with the forbidden, of taking time off from the official line. Individuals
in authoritarian societies may well tell these jokes regardless of their
political views, just as in democratic societies they may tell disaster jokes
regardless of their emotional responses to disaster. Many true believers
and true mourners may exclude themselves, but this leaves a wide spectrum
of responders. There can be an evasion of and resistance to hegemony
even from those who do not seek to undermine or even challenge
its legitimacy. It is unfortunately probable that most Germans and
Austrians supported the Third Reich, even if they sought an escape
through jokes from being perpetually told that they must.
Likewise, disaster jokes are an evasion of compulsory rhetoric, rather
than mere callousness. Viewers are often responsive to and genuinely
upset by television disaster coverage, and indeed engage in and collaborate
with it. Smyth commented in his analysis of the Challenger jokes:
‘’When something disastrous happens to a media figure, however, people
spread the news and begin to grieve as if they had lost someone with
whom they intimately shared their lives’‘ (1986, 256). The public may
even help to drive the media pressure (O’Hear 1998), as when they created
a mountain of flowers, messages, and sad redundant teddy bears
outside the Princess of Wales’ home in Kensington, England. Such
spontaneity even occurred among the faithful in Soviet Russia, some of
whom could speak quite genuinely of having been moved by a vivid
vision of the long dead Lenin who spoke to them, comforted them, and
advised them: the opiate of the apparatchiks.
The crucial point, however, is that the old regimes of Eastern Europe,
like the Western mass media, made such feelings and thoughts compulsory,
and the jokes emerged in resistance to this, regardless of where the
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joke-tellers’ own sympathies lay. This phenomenon underpins many
types of jokes. Joking consists of playing with the forbidden, whether the
‘forbidden’ is political, racial, sexual, or gruesome: it is the social fact
that is common to them all. In the case of disaster jokes it is unlikely that
the joke-tellers relish the reality of the disasters, and equally unlikely
that the jokes were their way of coping with grief. We have no reliable
way of finding out what their deeper feelings were, and even if we did,
these would be of no use in explaining the other types of joke cited
above. “Resistance to hegemony” and “playing with the forbidden,” by
contrast, are general concepts that can be employed to construct
hypotheses about many types of jokes.
EAST EUROPEAN POLITICIZED DISASTER JOKES UNDER
SOCIALISM
Indeed, jokes exist that display these characteristics in more than one
direction at a time, as with the East European jokes that followed the
Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The nuclear catastrophe in the Ukraine
provided disaster jokes in many countries in the West (Kürti 1988f.;
Milspaw 1981), but in Eastern Europe the jokes also became part of a
much larger genre of political jokes (Kürti 1988).
What’s the new shopping craze?
To save money, people are buying Kiev bread instead of fluorescent light bulbs.
(331)
What did the workers celebrate at the May Day Parade in Budapest?
The radiant friendship between Hungary and the Soviet Union.
(331)
How was the May Day Parade in Kiev organized?
In rows. In the first row were the party activists, in the second were all the
youth communist activists, in the third all the union activists, and finally all
the radioactivists.
(333)
A similar fusion of disaster joke and political joke may be seen in an
East German joke of the 1980s about the killing by East German border
guards of those who tried to escape to the West over the Berlin Wall.
When does a good border guard fire the warning shot?
At the end of the second clip of ammunition.
(Stein 1989, 93)
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In the East European case, the jokes probably did generally coincide
with resistance to political oppression (Davies 1998a, 1998b); the East
European socialist regimes did after all collapse with remarkable speed
in the wake of the jokes. However, their key characteristic was not resistance
to the regimes as such, but to a hegemonic discourse; the jokes
evaded the only form of discourse that was officially permitted. They
were funny even to those who accepted the legitimacy of that discourse.
It is the same lack of pluralism in regard to media-mediated disasters
that results in cycles of disaster jokes. The disaster jokes are not striking
against the victims, nor even against the reporting of disasters as such,
but against monopoly; if the disaster jokes are a form of aggression, it is
a strange and diffuse kind of aggression, and to conflate it with other
forms of aggression is misleading.
THE INTERNET AND THE PROLIFERATION OF DISASTER JOKES
The greatest growth in the numbers of disaster jokes came towards the
end of the twentieth century, with the availability of cheaper, easier, and
more accessible and universal forms of electronic dissemination.
Cheaper long distance and international phone calls, and an expanding
volume of such calls (for instance, between commodity and financial
dealers), allowed a more rapid exchange of jokes between individuals.
The phone was soon supplemented by e-mail, which enabled large numbers
of geographically scattered individuals to convey jokes to a large
network of associates in a single dispatch, particularly through the use
of mailing lists. Each recipient may, in turn, become the apex of a further
pyramid of distribution. Finally, in the 1990s, numerous web pages
were created such that anyone who wanted to consult a set of files of disaster
jokes indexed by subject could do so, and they could also add to
the collection by e-mail. In consequence, disaster jokes proliferated.
The Challenger space shuttle disaster generated fewer than fifty recorded
jokes at the time of its explosion in 1986, even though it produced more
jokes in America, and even in Britain, than any previous disaster, and
inspired the leading academic studies of disaster jokes (Oring 1992,
1987; Simons 1986; Smyth 1986). The Internet was not at that time
important as a means of joke dissemination. Disaster jokes were overwhelmingly
still transmitted orally, either in face-to-face situations or by
phone. By contrast, when Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a motor accident
in 1998, more than three hundred jokes were invented and collected—six
times as many as in the case of the Challenger explosion, the
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previously most successful joke-generating disaster. Diana jokes were
banned from the mass media, and no joke book publisher has yet dared
to bring out a collection of them.3
The key to this growth in the numbers, and also in the international
popularity, of disaster jokes has been the Internet. Already, in 1998
itself, there were at least five web sites in English devoted exclusively to
Diana jokes, including sites in the Netherlands and Australia. Diana
jokes were even found on the web site Blagues Lourdes in French.4 It may
be that the Internet simply makes the jokes appear more numerous by
enabling these otherwise scattered and forbidden items to be assembled
in one place, but it seems more likely that the use of e-mail and web sites
has a snowball effect, since the existence of an accessible core of jokes
stimulates further jokes through imitation, modification, inspiration,
emulation, and legitimation.
The jokes about the death of Diana demonstrate very clearly the
antithesis between television and the Internet. Television is a form of centralized
and homogenized mass production, from which anything that
offends the management, the sponsors, or any significant section of the
audience to whom they choose to defer, is excluded. The Internet is
decentralized, international, and diverse. Setting up a web site is inexpensive,
and censorship is ineffective, though growing. Individuals or small
groups with relatively modest resources can send, collect, display,
exchange, and read jokes or any other material they choose, including
items banned by other media. You can search out what you want when
you want it. The square-deal surfers are not dominated by a sequence or
pattern of contents controlled by a small group of powerful, narrowminded
broadcasters combining huge resources with politically correct
values. The official pieties of the broadcasters can be evaded and defied
via the Internet. Television is hegemonic, the Internet libertarian. Jokes
as anonymous creations fit into the anonymous Internet very well indeed.
THE INTERNET AND THE FURTHER GLOBALIZATION OF
DISASTER JOKES
The Internet is not a cause of disaster jokes in the way that television
is; it is merely a facilitator of their dissemination and storage that supplements
their oral circulation. It has, however, helped to make the jokes
even more global. It is particularly striking how the Internet has facilitated
and globalized the circulation of disaster jokes referring to local
incidents, jokes that otherwise would not have been as widely publicized,
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and, indeed, would have had little meaning outside their country of origin.
The Deathsucks.com web site in the United States has a “Dead
Celebrity Jokes Graveyard” which is activated by clicking on the appropriate
tombstone. It even has a collection of jokes concerning the late
British crimefighter Jill Dando, prefaced with the comment,
Looks like another Brit has Bit the Dust! First Rod Hull now Jill Dando. I
guess there is something to the saying that the English are all ‘a bit of a
homebody’. For those of you ignorant Americans (like me), Jill Dando was a
popular correspondent who hosted a show called “Crimewatch UK” (kind of
like “America’s Most Wanted”). Jill was shot at her doorstep as she was leaving
for work, most likely because of her crime-fighting reputation.
(www.deathsucks.com/jokes/jilldando/html)
Forty-five jokes then follow. Some are clearly recycled from previous disasters,
but most are local to Britain, some of them obviously so:
What does [sic] Jill Dando and George Best have in common?
They both ended their careers at Fulham.
(www.Deathsucks.com/jokes/jilldando/html)
George Best was a famous international soccer player from Ulster who,
in middle age, played for the Fulham team in London; the late Jill
Dando lived in Fulham.
What does [sic] Jill and the milkman have in common?
They both leave four pints on the doorstep.
(www.Deathsucks.com/jokes/jilldando/html)
The jokes were presumably in oral circulation in Britain and sent to
America in response to the Celebrity Caretaker’s request to “Contribute
your jokes to this page, e-mail the caretaker@deathsucks.com with your
tasteless Jill Dando jokes or vent your politically correct outrage against
our blasphemy.” Anyone in the world with access to the Internet can now
read these jokes, but outside Britain Jill Dando jokes are largely a pure art
form. They are jokes felt to be funny because they are playing with someone
else’s forbidden notions, albeit ones that are generically similar to those that
are the basis of more familiar local disaster jokes. The very idea that North
Americans at home, who do not and cannot watch this kind of British television,
are in any sense involved with the jokes is absurd. If the jokes have a
victim, it is not Jill Dando but those provoked into “outrage against our
blasphemy,” whether the blasphemy is one of content or merely one of
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form. Anyone’s televised disaster now seems to be good for a joke; the
jokes have gone global and are now two electronic stages removed from
reality. By contrast, in the past Americans and Canadians would have had
little access to and would have made no contribution to the British disaster
joke cycles of the late 1980s cited earlier in this essay, which were purely
local in their origins and appeal. The overall pattern of change due to
both television and the Internet is summed up in the table below.
Televised Disaster News Disaster Jokes
Television national news local jokes
(Stage 1)
Television global news local jokes
(Stage 2) (as well as local)
Early Internet global tv news global jokes
Mature Internet local tv news global jokes
(as well as global)
CONCLUSION
By the use of the comparative and historical method (Davies 1998a,
1998b, 2002) it is possible to demonstrate that disaster jokes were the
product of the rise to dominance of new forms of electronic communication
in the last decades of the twentieth century. They were and are
caused by television, and their invention and dissemination has been
greatly facilitated by the growing use of the Internet. Jokes of this kind
were unknown, or at least very rare, prior to television becoming a dominant
source of news and cheap entertainment in the 1960s. The jokes are
the spontaneous inventions of ordinary people, set off by the incongruous
way in which television conveys the news of a disaster or the death of a
celebrity to its viewers, an incongruity far less apparent in other media.
Disaster jokes are common in democratic countries dominated by television,
but political jokes are relatively rare, and only thrive in authoritarian
countries where there is a hegemonic control over political discourse,
notably under the former socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. From this
we may see that both types of jokes are a form of resistance to compulsory
political correctness. The controllers of television attempt to impose an
emotional hegemony on viewers that restricts the ways in which they can
openly speak about disasters, and the jokes defy this monopoly. Disaster
jokes, like jokes about sex or race or, in some societies, religion or politics,
are a way of playing with the forbidden for the sake of amusement.
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Jokes about televised disasters have little in common with the humor
used by those who directly experience danger and death by being
involved in a real disaster (Abe and Ritz 1996), or in their everyday lives
such as soldiers or high-ironworkers constructing tall buildings (Haas
1977). The making of jokes within small groups of men faced by danger
and death may help to maintain morale and solidarity, and to train
members in the ways of the group (Haas 1977; Obrdlik 1942). But jokes
about current events reported on television have no such social functions;
they are for amusement only. It is pointless to speculate as to
whether they are a means of coping with a shocking report of sudden
death, a means of extracting humor from a shared piece of grim knowledge,
or an expression of Hobbesian triumph that it happened to somebody
else (Gruner 1997, 41, 60). We do not know, and it would be very
difficult to find out, which, if any, of these is the case, given the wide
varieties of individuals telling or listening to such jokes, and the differences
in the context and tone in which they are told. A large genre of
jokes, such as the current-event disaster jokes discussed here, that is
made up of many joke cycles is a social fact that can only be explained in
terms of other social facts.
The rapid reporting of events on the other side of the globe is a nineteenth
century electronic phenomenon that stems from the invention
and spread of the telegraph (radio is merely wireless) and the subsequent
growth of newspapers for the newly semi-literate. There is nothing
new about globalization (Davies and Trivizas 1999). However, television,
for the first time, had the capacity to thrust vivid pictures of distant disasters
into people’s homes and meeting places, and to set them joking
about events on the other side of the world. Americans could now invent
jokes about the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, Chernobyl, and famine in
Ethiopia, and the British about the Challenger space shuttle or an earthquake
in Armenia. Disaster jokes have gone global.
As a result of the provision of the Internet and its rapidly increasing
use, there has been a further degree of encouragement for and globalization
of disaster jokes. The Internet is an electronic facilitator. It
enables jokes to be exchanged and disseminated by e-mail, and to be
accumulated on web sites in large numbers, which no doubt also stimulates
the invention of disaster jokes and of death-of-a-celebrity jokes by
providing templates for, encouraging emulation among, and granting
legitimacy to disaster joke-tellers. The Internet is also a globalizing
force, in that it enables the pooling of jokes from many countries in
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response to a globally reported, televised disaster, such as the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales, that called in jokes from three continents and
at least four European countries. This allowed a truly sharing event in
which nation joked unto nation in a spirit of international cooperation.
Television, far from creating a global village, destroyed local communities
and institutions, leaving behind a mass of atomized and alienated
individuals, but the Internet is now enabling them to recreate virtual
substitutes for the world they have lost. Now globalization has gone a
stage further, with webspinners in one country setting up sites to act as a
storage place and a mail box for local disaster jokes from other countries,
concerning disasters that would not have received much television
coverage or had much impact abroad. The Internet thus goes beyond
television, and also circumvents television; it is a free, decentralized
electronic medium in an otherwise controlled and restricted electronic
age. Whether this freedom to joke will continue is doubtful. Already
there is pressure on servers in many English-speaking and European
countries from pressure groups5 to remove collections of jokes to which
they object.
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