There are a number of problems humans have always had, and will never be able to fully escape them. Things like death, disease, infant mortality, rape, tyranny. And on top of those, people have to deal with fears that are old and primal, even if they aren’t present in the modern world, like raiders, looters, slavers, or wild predators. Perhaps you even live in a part of the first world where some of those problems are still around today, like Chicago, of Flint.
The thing about humans is that, unlike every other animal on the planet, we know that we can never be fully safe, we know that these problems will never really be gone for good, and we all know that one day, we’re going to die. And in spite of this knowledge, we have to somehow get up and face these problems every day, knowing our lives, homes, families, and everything else could be snuffed out of existing at any moment.
So how do we handle these problems? Why, with gallows humor and rape jokes, of course!
There are a lot of psychologists who believe that humor evolved as a response to scary things not going as one would expect. A caveman is being chased by a tiger, the tiger slips on a tree root and tumbles off of a cliff, leaving the caveman bewildered. How does he respond to such a turn of events? One second, death is imminent. The next, he’s safe due to a ridiculous coincidence. How does one react to such a silly circumstance, except with the laughter of relief?
Humor allows people to turn their fears into something they can handle. It doesn’t get rid of the problems, but it does help us live with them.
This is especially true with problems that everyone faces on an individual level. For example, getting mugged, assaulted, or killed in a car accident are all things that could happen to us at any time. And while a lot of people think the proper way to handle this is to pretend that it’s impossible, or cover themselves in bubblewrap so they can maintain a false sense of security, human psychology doesn’t work that way.
On some fundamental level, humans know that death is inevitable, and the fact that some people have to consciously take effort to not think about these things, or build ridiculous barriers to protect themselves from these mundane dangers that probably won’t save them anyway means that they’re still thinking about them. If you won’t go outside without a thick layer of plastic wrap around your pants to protect you from pickpockets, then you’re still thinking about being pickpocketed. The fear still takes up some space in your mind and you don’t have it under control; it controls you, hence the skirt of plastic wrap.
That’s where comedy comes in: it sands the edges off of these fears and makes them tolerable. Good black comedy should turn the worst fears into something we can handle. The key is in the handling; black comedy shouldn’t just make light of the victim, or of the fear. It should make the fear less scary. The butt of the joke should be scary thing itself.
There are two major issues I do need to point out that you’re going to run into. The first is the issue of rape. Rape is probably one of the scariest things people can experience, and that fear is so terrible that many people want to ban any and all black comedy about rape in all media everywhere. This is a bad idea, because if there’s anything so horrifying that we need comedy to help us live with it, it’s definitely rape. The key, as mentioned above, is to make sure that the act of rape itself is the target of the joke; not the victim, or the suffering, but the act itself, and occasionally the rapist.
A good example of what not to do is pretty much anything done by Family Guy, although to be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve watched that show it’s possible that they’ve started improving their writing. In particular, the fact that the character Quagmire is shown to keep hordes of Asian women in the trunk of his car or locked in the garage, and the fact that he has them tagged so he can recapture them later fails to have the desired effect. Do you get it? This is the joke: Quagmire is so good and experienced at rape that he plans it out and has contingency plans, and approaches the subject with all the intellectual brilliance as Light Yagami or David Xanatos.
However, one rape joke in Family Guy that actually worked well was a scene in which Peter is raped by a pie, and the fumes of the pie forces Quagmire to watch. It was so ridiculous, it’s impossible to watch a scene like that and not feel a twinge of good humor, purely because a) it’s utterly insane, and b) the joke was the act of rape itself.
The other major issue you run into with black comedy is going to by people who have power over you who rule through fear. Depending on where you are in the world, this could be angry cancel culture mobs, a tyrannical government, a teacher in a public school who really should be on a government list, or a boss with anger management issues who responds to every problem by threatening their employees. Tyrants rely on fear to hold power over people, and black comedy disrupts that fear; by its very nature, black comedy takes a tyrant’s power away. There’s an old saying that “the first victim of tyranny is comedy,” and this is why. Have you ever noticed that when people can laugh at themselves, other people cannot laugh at them, they can only laugh with them? Well, the exact opposite is also true, and tyrants cannot afford to laugh at themselves.
I don’t have a solution for this problem, other than moving to an area where the tyrants don’t have hold over you, and I know that’s not always an option. But if it’s not, then you’ll have to decide if it’s worth taking power away from the people who have authority over you. Comedy is the weapon of clever rebels, and it can be used without initiating the use of force. It’s incredibly powerful against people with no sense of humor.
Might not work against people who can laugh at themselves, though.
