Death and laughter
October 12th 2006 07:45
Well, the first reaction, on hearing the news, is always shock. It overturns everything, and you have to readjust. The people I passed the news onto often replied with something like, "But I just saw him a month ago", "But I just saw him two weeks ago". And surprise was my first reaction also; a friend in Cambridge sent me an e-mail (so the news had to travel to Cambridge and back before it reached me), and I had to read the message a few times over before it sunk in.
But in the act of telling people about his death, this was when I first met laughter. It was partly because I delivered the news in a blunt way. You ask them if they know this person, and they smile, or indicate they do, preparing themselves for an interesting or amusing story, and then you say that this person is dead. Instantly their expression and attitude change, and their conception of the deceased undergoes an immediate transformation. There's a lot of aspects of the situation that are often associated with laughter: suddenness, incongruity, malice, power exercised over a person, taboo subject matter.
(Perhaps one should always prepare them for it with, "This is going to be bad news" (although it mightn't be -- they mightn't have known the deceased). Though to some extent, of course, you can't be prepared -- the news is always going to be startling and impossibly final, bleak. And the actual dying almost always has a degree of unexpectedness about it, even if the person was terminally ill.)
I don't think it's so perverse and unnatural to laugh when someone dies. Laughter is always to do with releasing some sort of tension. There's at least two sorts of tension that I felt. There was the tension that comes from feelings to do with death. It's not unusual for people, mad with grief, to laugh. And, when passing the news to someone, there were the immediate tensions of the situation. People laugh out of awkwardness all the time; and, as I found, though I never cry in public, laughter helps you to control tears, to keep back any that are threatening to emerge.
There's a lot of absurdities in the situation. For instance, it's absurd that they're dead at all; it usually doesn't at first seem real. Or, if you accept it as real, it's ironic, a joke played by fate. And there's a lot of absurdities and fakeness and cliches in funerals, in the behaviour of undertakers, in attitudes and emotions that people put on.
I think it requires a sort of self-blinding to avoid seeing any absurdities.
And one of the greatest absurdities is the actual body. A lot of humour in general seems related to seeing things in dual perspectives: when someone falls over, you see them both as a person, and as an object subject to the laws of physics. And there mightn't be any dual perspective more striking than seeing the deceased, or thinking of them, both as a person, and as an inanimate thing.
Note 1: A close friend's grandmother died earlier this year. And he went to her cremation; and as he left the building, and looked at the smoke curling from the chimneys, he couldn't help but think -- "Is that Gran?". It's the norms of this society that one closes one's eyes to the absurdities, and perhaps there's good reason to, but it's not as if the absurdities aren't there.
Note 2: I don't know but I've been told: in some cultures, people openly laugh out of the shock of seeing an accident.
Note 3: Dragging Bernie's corpse around for the weekend is potentially amusing. I mean, I always thought it was a pretty crappy movie, and I didn't get many laughs out of it, but you've got humour of the taboo and irreverent, and you've got a lot of moments of humour of dual perspective (e.g. Bernie's corpse is waving at some girl in a swimsuit, then drops over face down in the sand).
Note 4: The day of the requiem, I came to work in a black suit, and received comments, light-hearted from males and curious from females, as to why I was dressed so well. And, again, it was amusing how quickly tone, attitude, and facial expressions changed when I told them I was just at a funeral. -- Part of the reason people act oddly, of course, is that they're cautious, and they don't know what you're going through, because there's many ways to react to death, so they don't know how to treat you, behave around you, and respond.
Note 5: How do people respond, and cope with, Steve Irwin's death?
But in the act of telling people about his death, this was when I first met laughter. It was partly because I delivered the news in a blunt way. You ask them if they know this person, and they smile, or indicate they do, preparing themselves for an interesting or amusing story, and then you say that this person is dead. Instantly their expression and attitude change, and their conception of the deceased undergoes an immediate transformation. There's a lot of aspects of the situation that are often associated with laughter: suddenness, incongruity, malice, power exercised over a person, taboo subject matter.
(Perhaps one should always prepare them for it with, "This is going to be bad news" (although it mightn't be -- they mightn't have known the deceased). Though to some extent, of course, you can't be prepared -- the news is always going to be startling and impossibly final, bleak. And the actual dying almost always has a degree of unexpectedness about it, even if the person was terminally ill.)
I don't think it's so perverse and unnatural to laugh when someone dies. Laughter is always to do with releasing some sort of tension. There's at least two sorts of tension that I felt. There was the tension that comes from feelings to do with death. It's not unusual for people, mad with grief, to laugh. And, when passing the news to someone, there were the immediate tensions of the situation. People laugh out of awkwardness all the time; and, as I found, though I never cry in public, laughter helps you to control tears, to keep back any that are threatening to emerge.
There's a lot of absurdities in the situation. For instance, it's absurd that they're dead at all; it usually doesn't at first seem real. Or, if you accept it as real, it's ironic, a joke played by fate. And there's a lot of absurdities and fakeness and cliches in funerals, in the behaviour of undertakers, in attitudes and emotions that people put on.
I think it requires a sort of self-blinding to avoid seeing any absurdities.
And one of the greatest absurdities is the actual body. A lot of humour in general seems related to seeing things in dual perspectives: when someone falls over, you see them both as a person, and as an object subject to the laws of physics. And there mightn't be any dual perspective more striking than seeing the deceased, or thinking of them, both as a person, and as an inanimate thing.
Note 1: A close friend's grandmother died earlier this year. And he went to her cremation; and as he left the building, and looked at the smoke curling from the chimneys, he couldn't help but think -- "Is that Gran?". It's the norms of this society that one closes one's eyes to the absurdities, and perhaps there's good reason to, but it's not as if the absurdities aren't there.
Note 2: I don't know but I've been told: in some cultures, people openly laugh out of the shock of seeing an accident.
Note 3: Dragging Bernie's corpse around for the weekend is potentially amusing. I mean, I always thought it was a pretty crappy movie, and I didn't get many laughs out of it, but you've got humour of the taboo and irreverent, and you've got a lot of moments of humour of dual perspective (e.g. Bernie's corpse is waving at some girl in a swimsuit, then drops over face down in the sand).
Note 4: The day of the requiem, I came to work in a black suit, and received comments, light-hearted from males and curious from females, as to why I was dressed so well. And, again, it was amusing how quickly tone, attitude, and facial expressions changed when I told them I was just at a funeral. -- Part of the reason people act oddly, of course, is that they're cautious, and they don't know what you're going through, because there's many ways to react to death, so they don't know how to treat you, behave around you, and respond.
Note 5: How do people respond, and cope with, Steve Irwin's death?
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Comment by Damo
There is a lot of bizzare behaviour around some funerals and cultural expectations.
Sometimes it makes me laugh how much people pay to bury their family members. Huge monuments, open coffins where the deceased is clearly wearing makeup. One person I knew got buried 3 times over six months. Once at the cremation, then at the burial of the ahes, then the remaining portion of the ashes were taken over seas to sprinkled from a bridge.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
I've therefore quite enjoyed them so far. They're anthropologically interesting. I'm all about the bizarre behaviour, about seeing people when they're psychologically naked, or in extreme conditions.
In grief, there is truth.