“Empathy is…the capacity to understand…that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.” Barbara Kingsolver
I’m plugged into my laptop, watching one of those comedy specials that Netflix seems to throw out weekly. The stand-up takes aim at the expense of some tragic historical incident; the audience groans and the performer retorts sarcastically “too soon?”.
The performer marches on into some other routine, about fat people I think, but my thoughts have drifted elsewhere.
I’m now wondering if you could draw a graph with Tragedy Intensity as the vertical axis and Time Elapsed as the horizontal axis and then plot the point that sits right between “ooh, too soon” and “that’s fair game, go for it, son”.
I conclude that you can’t because that would assume empathy has a shelf-life and we can calculate when that expires.
Despite having a desert-dry sense of humour (so opined my teacher in a junior school report, so that’s proof), I’ve never laughed at jokes about real-life tragedy, individual or collective, recent or ancient. This isn’t because I’m secretly hoping the world will fawn over my stunning high moral fibre and appoint me as First Lord of the Order of Empathy. No. I don’t laugh because I don’t find it funny: the source of the joke suffocates it.
I’m not talking about well-meaning satire or a serious point being made through a darkly comic filter. My issue is a joke where the point is the joke, not the subtext. Gags that start proliferating through social media soon after a tragedy: a public figure dies in a car crash, a plane goes down and there are no survivors. Cue: word play, puns and lashings of bad taste.
When Malaysian flight MH370 went missing, with many South-East Asians on board, a joke immediately started doing the rounds that investigators searching for the wreckage in the sea had found the wings….but they were still searching for the Wongs. I remember greeting that particular sublime word-play comedy nugget with mild puzzlement: the beginnings of a benign strained smile and a slightly furrowed brow. The look that says: “Really? That’s what you’re going with? Okay then…”
For me human tragedy is just that, and never becomes compost for surface-level comedy. And it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to me if you’re mocking an incident from last week or last millennia. If it happened, then that’s the clincher: when it happened is a detail to me when it comes to rationalizing it’s mockery. Putting a sell-by date on a tragedy (or, an empathy-end date, if you will) just reflects that person’s worldview. There are no objective graph co-ordinates to consult.
Ok, I’m getting preachy here, but I’m on a roll, so hang tight. How often do you see someone mock a real-life tragedy that ensnared his/her loved ones? Rarely. Exceptions like Pete Davidson joking about his father’s death on 9/11 seem to be a uniquely weird attempt at personal catharsis. But tragedies involving strangers? Infinitely more popular as superficial joke fodder.
Some may suggest that playground-level jokes about a tragedy affecting others is a defence mechanism to help cope with the acknowledged horrors of that event by creating distance from its reality. I suggest this is giving too much credit.
Most of us are programmed to only dip our toes into the pool of someone else’s tragedy and avoid belly-flopping in, and that’s the normal defence mechanism. At the news of another set of nameless victims of a far-off civil war, we momentarily question our meaning and worth: what is my contribution to making the world more fragrant? What will be the footprint I leave behind? We sit and gently self-interrogate.
And then we realize that there’s no food in the house and we need to decide what take-away to get tonight. And then we start Googling the weather on the weekend to see if the car boot sale is likely to be rained off. And so we get distracted from Big Questions by Everyday Banality in a matter of seconds.
This cycle of engagement then detachment, empathy then insularity, is understandable. It’s how we cope with what we learn. Active mockery of it, on the other hand, I just don’t get. Count me out.