Chapter 5: The Last Laugh
On February 12, 1916, British officers in the ruins of Ypres found a printing press in the rubble of a bombed building.
Ypres — which soldiers had taken to calling "Wipers," an Anglicization of the name that was also, by this point, a kind of joke — was not a city in any ordinary sense of the word. It had been fought over, shelled, and fought over again. The Ypres Salient was one of the most dangerous positions on the Western Front: a curved bulge in the Allied line, surrounded by German guns on three sides, absorbing artillery fire from multiple directions simultaneously. The men stationed there knew what that meant. They had watched the city come apart.
Into this rubble stepped Captain Fred Roberts and Lieutenant Jack Pearson, 12th Battalion Sherwood Foresters, who found a printing press. They did not treat this as salvage. They treated it as an opportunity.
They enlisted a sergeant who had been a printer in civilian life. The first issue of The Wipers Times appeared within days of the discovery — printed, actually, in a bombed city, under shellfire, in an initial run of approximately a hundred copies. Roberts's founding editorial explained the venture: "Having managed to pick up a printing outfit (slightly soiled) at a reasonable price, we have decided to produce a paper."
"Slightly soiled."
The printing press had survived a bombardment in one of the most intensively shelled cities in Europe. The men who found it had been living in those ruins. The editorial's entire acknowledgment of that fact — of the systematic destruction around them, of the bombardment that had soiled the press, of the war that had brought them all to this specific rubble on this specific morning — was "slightly soiled." As if the press had sat out in light rain. As if it were a secondhand settee with a stain on the armrest. The response to systematic destruction was to treat it as a minor purchasing complication.
Subsequent issues ran fake advertisements for "second-hand furniture, slightly damaged." There was a recurring mock-commentator named Belary Helloc — a parody of Hilaire Belloc, the journalist who had a gift for finding reasons for optimism about the war — who calculated through elaborately absurdist mathematics that only sixteen German soldiers remained on the Western Front. There was a serial called "Herlock Shomes" featuring a detective addicted not to morphine but to a vermorel sprayer, the device used to dispel chlorine gas attacks. In one episode, Shomes fires at his own assistant. The assistant's response: "You nearly got me that time."
Then there was a soldier named J.H.M. "Max" Staniforth, Oxford undergraduate turned officer in the 7th Battalion, Leinster Regiment, who in September 1916 wrote to his parents with what he described as his personal philosophy for eliminating worry. He had just come through the fighting at Guillemont and Ginchy during the Somme offensive. He laid out a logical argument: if you are in danger, either you are hit or you are not; if you are not hit, there is no need to worry; if you are hit, either you recover or you die; if you recover, no need to worry; if you die, you cannot worry.
Conclusion: "Why worry?"
The form here is important. Staniforth was not repressing fear. He was reframing it with the tools of logical argument — turning existential terror into a puzzle, constructing an answer, arriving at a conclusion. The conclusion is absurd. It does not address the terror. It does not make the fear go away. But the act of building the argument — of making himself think rather than simply dread — was doing something real. It was a way of maintaining a self in conditions designed to eliminate one. Not the same thing as pretending. Closer to the opposite.
These men were in the Ypres Salient. They knew what that meant. The Wipers Times's humor was not a way of not knowing. It was a way of knowing, and going back anyway.
Here is the first thing to say about this: not everyone in the Ypres Salient found the newspaper funny.
The Wipers Times was produced by officers. It circulated among officers. Its humor operated in officer-class irony — deadpan, literary, working through understatement and elaborate parody. That register did not automatically travel to every man in the Salient. The paper bonded those inside a particular social world. It did not extend, automatically, to the experience of those outside it.
This is not a criticism of Roberts and Pearson. They were doing something remarkable, and they should be celebrated for it. But the first complication the chapter needs to name is this: the Wipers Times was inside humor, and "inside" is doing real work in that phrase. Not inside the catastrophe — everyone in the Salient was inside the catastrophe. Inside a particular community, a particular register, a particular way of knowing and talking.
The permission to make a particular joke belongs to the room. And the room is not defined only by proximity to danger. It is also defined by whether you recognize the language being spoken.
On September 29, 2001, Gilbert Gottfried walked onstage at the Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner. It was eighteen days after September 11.
The Friars Club roast is not a normal comedy venue. It is a room whose entire institutional purpose is to refuse the concept of "too soon." The audience is professional comedians who have collectively agreed that nothing is off-limits, that transgression is the point, that the job is to go as far as possible and take the room with you. If there is any audience on earth that can absorb a September 11 joke in the third week of October 2001, this should be that audience.
Gottfried told a 9/11 joke. The room booed.
He pivoted. He launched into The Aristocrats — a joke that is, by most objective measures, significantly more transgressive than any 9/11 material. The Aristocrats is a comedians' in-joke, a kind of improv exercise in escalating obscenity, a thing that exists specifically to test how far you can go. The room went with him. According to accounts, the set lasted roughly twelve minutes, the last six of which were people crying with laughter.
Same man. Same stage. Same night. Same audience that had agreed — contractually, culturally, professionally — that nothing was off-limits. One joke failed. One landed. And the only difference was this: the 9/11 joke reached into a catastrophe that was still inside the room. The wound was still the room's wound. Everyone in that audience had been in New York eighteen days ago, many of them knew people who had died, all of them were still living in the aftermath. The joke gestured at something they were still carrying.
The Aristocrats didn't. The Aristocrats gestures at nothing that any of those specific people had recently lost. It was maximally dark, maximally transgressive, and completely safe — because safety and darkness are not opposites. The joke worked because the violation was, in every relevant sense, benign.
This evening is the chapter's argument in miniature. The mechanism — transgressive dark comedy — was identical in both cases. The only variable was proximity.
Peter McGraw is a humor researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, which is a job description that makes him, at dinner parties, either the most popular person in the room or the least, depending on whether anyone asks him to explain what he does for a living. In the mid-2000s, he and his collaborator Caleb Warren were trying to solve a specific puzzle: why does the same subject matter make people laugh in one context and recoil in another?
Their answer, which they published in Psychological Science in 2010 and called "benign violation theory," goes like this: something is funny when it is simultaneously a violation — of norms, expectations, physical safety, moral order — AND benign. Safe. Distant. Hypothetical. Belonging to someone else.
Dark humor is maximally violating by definition. Death, catastrophe, extreme suffering — these are the most serious violations available. The only thing that makes them funny rather than horrifying is the achievement of benignity through distance. And distance, it turns out, has four dimensions: temporal (how long ago), spatial (how far away), social (how close you were to the people who suffered), and hypothetical (whether it's framed as real or imaginary). All four operate simultaneously. A joke about a disaster in another country from fifty years ago that happened to strangers is as far from you as anything can be. A joke about what happened to you yesterday is not funny. It is a violation with no available distance at all.
McGraw and his colleagues tracked this empirically after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, monitoring humor about the storm on social media over the months following. What they found was not a straight line. Dark humor about Sandy did not simply increase as time passed. It rose steeply in the days after the storm, peaked, then fell again as time continued to pass. "Too soon" is real. So is "too late." There is a genuine sweet spot — a zone after the event has receded enough to feel survivable, but before it has become so distant that it loses its charge entirely. The catastrophe needs to be close enough that the tension is still present, but far enough that the distance makes it workable.
There is actually something almost elegiac about "too late." The comedic charge dissipates not because the tragedy was resolved or healed — it may never be either — but because it has been absorbed into the background, become part of the furniture of the past. At some point, the Blitz stops being a fresh wound and starts being history. The jokes that crackled in the rubble don't work the same way in a museum exhibit. The distance that once made them possible has stretched so far that the tension is gone. The violation is still there, but the benignity is now total, and total benignity turns out to make for bad comedy. There has to be something left to cut against.
This sweet spot is different for insiders and outsiders. Outsiders reach it faster, because the catastrophe wasn't theirs. Insiders may never reach it at all. And this asymmetry — this difference in the location of the window — is one of the structural sources of disaster: when an outsider arrives at the sweet spot and makes a joke, an insider may still be standing in the raw wound. The distance that made the joke possible for one person is the very distance that makes it intolerable to another.
There is also a cognitive component that tends to get left out of these discussions. Ulrike Willinger and colleagues, in a 2017 study, found that comprehension of dark humor correlates with higher verbal and nonverbal IQ and greater emotional regulation capacity. People with high mood disturbance were significantly less likely to enjoy it. Dark humor requires holding two things simultaneously — the violation and the distance — and keeping them in productive tension rather than collapsing into one or the other. That is a cognitive and emotional task. It requires bandwidth. This adds another layer to the insider/outsider problem: sometimes a joke fails not because someone is outside the community of sufferers, but because they are so inside their own suffering, so overwhelmed, that they cannot hold the necessary distance for even a moment. The same person, at different moments in their grief, can find the same joke healing or devastating. Context-dependence operates not just across communities but within a single person over time.
Freud got at something related in 1927, in an essay called simply "Humour" — distinct from his better-known 1905 book on jokes, and in some ways more important. The 1905 book treats humor as a hydraulic valve, a release of psychic pressure. The 1927 essay is more interesting. Freud's 1927 claim is that gallows humor is not the same as resignation or repression. It is the ego's refusal to be dominated by its circumstances. His example: a criminal being led to execution on a Monday morning who remarks, "Well, this is a good beginning to the week." The joke has no audience. It is purely for himself — a private refusal to be reduced to a condemned man. His gloss: "Humour is not resigned; it is rebellious."
This reframes everything. Gallows humor is not a symptom of suffering. It is a response to suffering that specifically refuses the role being assigned. The condemned man is not pretending he isn't about to die. He is insisting on being someone who has opinions about Mondays.
Staniforth, in the trenches, was doing the same thing with a syllogism. In a different letter, earlier in his service, he described being detailed to take a working party out in the rain to dig latrines. His summary of the day's contribution: "All I have done to-day to make the world a better and a nobler place is to take out a party in the rain and build a princely row of latrines." The grandiose framing — "nobler place," "princely" — deliberately dwarfs the actual activity, which is digging ditches in a field during a world war. The joke works because the self-inflation is so perfectly calibrated to the situation's deflation. This is what survival humor does at its best: not deny the situation, but refuse to be entirely defined by it. The self is still capable of irony. The self therefore persists.
Here is something that may surprise you: the impulse to do this is very old, and it is not specifically Western.
Giovanni Boccaccio was in Florence when the Black Death arrived in 1348. He watched it kill somewhere between a third and a half of the city's population. He writes about it in the introduction to The Decameron with the specificity of a man who was there: bodies in the streets, houses abandoned, the social fabric dissolving, people dying faster than they could be buried. Out of this he wrote a hundred comic stories, framed by a device — seven women and three men who retreat to a villa outside the city and tell stories for ten days.
The first story in the collection is about a thoroughly wicked man named Ciappelletto. Ciappelletto is a scoundrel of almost spectacular range: a forger, a liar, a fraud. On his deathbed, he tells a confession so elaborate and saintly that the monk hearing it is moved to tears, and Ciappelletto is subsequently venerated as a saint by the surrounding community. He cannot stop performing even when he is dying. The joke is about the machinery of religious legitimacy being completely fooled by a dying con man — about how easily sanctity can be manufactured and how willing people are to believe it.
This is not escapism from the plague. Boccaccio's brigata do not pretend the plague is not happening. The disease is the reason they are in the villa. The ceremonious structure they create — rotating "kings" and "queens" of the storytelling, music, dancing, rules — is explicitly a prescription for remaining human while the catastrophe is active. They owe it to themselves to keep laughing. To stop laughing would be to let the plague win at the level of the self, even before it reached them.
A few decades after Boccaccio, in 1424 or 1425, an unknown artist painted the walls of the charnel house of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris — a cemetery that had itself been a site of plague burials for a century. The mural depicted Death as a skeleton dancing with representatives of every social class from the Pope and the Emperor down to the laborer and the infant. Each figure is approached by a skeletal counterpart. Each is compelled to join the dance. The Pope dances whether he wishes to or not. The merchant's gold buys him nothing. The verse dialogues address each victim: the Pope is not given reverence. He gets the same leveling inevitability as everyone else.
The danse macabre. The joke is in the leveling. The skull's permission to say what the living dare not: Your position protects you from nothing.
The original mural is lost. Guyot Marchant published an illustrated version in 1486, and the image spread across northern Europe, replicated in paintings, woodcuts, church walls. The joke traveled because the subject traveled. The subject was everyone.
Across the Atlantic and five centuries later, a printmaker named José Guadalupe Posada was working in Mexico City during the Porfiriato — the era of Porfirio Díaz, whose cultural program encouraged indigenous and mestizo Mexicans to approximate European identity, to deny their own heritage, to dress, in some cases, in the fashions of Paris rather than the fashions of home. Around 1910 to 1913, Posada produced a zinc-plate broadside: a female skull in an elaborate European hat. He called it La Calavera Garbancera.
The garbancera was a recognized type — a woman who had traded her identity for aspiration, who had decided to be European rather than what she was. Posada's insight was compact and merciless: all that aspiration, and underneath it nothing but the same bones as everyone else. Death the great equalizer had found her particularly ridiculous. The image was a cheap popular print, mass-distributed, immediately legible to its audience of working-class and middle-class Mexico City residents who knew exactly who was being mocked and why.
Diego Rivera, decades later, added a body to the skull, called her La Catrina, and installed her in a famous mural. Rivera's version is the globally recognized image. But Posada's original — just the skull, just the hat — does something Rivera's fuller figure doesn't quite capture: the emptiness under the hat is total. There is no body. There is only aspiration and bone.
A reader who does not know what a garbancera was — who does not know the political valence of that French hat in Porfiriato Mexico City — sees only a skull in fancy headwear. The joke requires the room. The room in this case was a city, and the city knew.
Failure is instructive.
In 2005, in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the comedian Carlos Mencia made jokes about the storm. The jokes attributed the death toll to the behavior of Black victims. They praised the comparative effectiveness of Hispanic evacuation. They were made from a position of safety, about people who were drowning.
In February 2009, Mencia was announced as a celebrity participant in the Krewe of Orpheus parade in New Orleans — a Mardi Gras celebration in a city that had been rebuilding for three and a half years. Within twenty-four hours, New Orleans residents protested. He was uninvited the following day. The community's objection was specific and worth quoting precisely: the jokes had been made while bodies were still being found.
This is not the same as saying Katrina humor was impossible or wrong. Quite the opposite. Louisiana Folklife documentation confirms that community humor about the storm had been running since the disaster — mold costumes at Mardi Gras, ironic FEMA signs, jokes about the storm's aftermath that circulated among people who had lost homes and returned to gutted neighborhoods and were doing the work of rebuilding. That humor was dark. It was funny. It was doing exactly what gallows humor is supposed to do: reclaiming agency, naming the shared experience, maintaining solidarity in conditions designed to break it.
Both humor traditions were dark. The distinction was not between dark and not-dark. It was between humor made from inside the loss and humor made from outside it, aimed at the people who suffered.
Mencia was not wrong about catastrophe being usable as comedy material. He was wrong about what room he was in. He was never in any room where the loss was his to claim.
Now we come to the part of this chapter I want to handle carefully.
Chaya Ostrower is an Israeli scholar who spent years interviewing Holocaust survivors for her doctoral research, published by Yad Vashem in Hebrew in 2009 and in English as It Kept Us Alive in 2014. She interviewed fifty-five survivors — thirty-one women, twenty-four men — who had experienced ghettos, concentration camps, or death camps. She asked them about humor.
Sixty percent of the documented instances of humor in their testimony functioned as a defense mechanism.
Here is one of them.
An unnamed woman arrived at Auschwitz. As part of the intake process, her hair was cut. This was not incidental. It was designed. The systematic removal of hair was one of the mechanisms by which the camp stripped inmates of their individual identities — reduced persons to interchangeable bodies, eliminated the particular in favor of the categorical. It was dehumanization made physical and specific.
When the cut was finished, she laughed. She remarked: "A hairdo for free? I never had before."
The word "free" is doing precise work. It insists on the speaker as someone who has opinions about haircuts and their cost. It refuses the role being assigned to her. The camp was designed to eliminate the self; she responded by asserting the self's most ordinary, domestic concerns. Not denial — she knew where she was. Something closer to the opposite of denial: a forceful insistence on remaining the person who has opinions about prices, even here, even now.
A phrase circulated among Auschwitz inmates: "Entering through the gate is exiting through the chimney."
The parallel construction maps arrival against death in a single sentence. It does not soften the knowledge. It does not pretend the knowledge is other than what it is. It gives the knowledge a shape — a compressed, shareable form — in place of raw, unstructured terror. To put it in a phrase was not to make it bearable. It was to make it communicable. It was solidarity in the form of a sentence.
These were not jokes for outsiders. They were not entertainment. They were the living insisting on their own subjectivity in conditions designed to eliminate it.
Before turning to Finck, a word about categories. Ostrower's research distinguishes carefully between types of humor documented in survivor testimony: self-humor, gallows humor, humor directed at captors, humor that circulated among inmates. The "free haircut" remark is self-humor — the self as its own audience. The gate-and-chimney phrase is gallows humor — a whole situation compressed into a form that could travel between people. Alan Dundes, the folklorist who spent decades documenting disaster humor cycles, made what I think is the starkest version of the categorization: there is the condemned's gallows humor, and there is the executioner's humor. These are not the same thing. The first is the ego's refusal. The second is cruelty wearing comedy's costume.
Weiss Ferdl was a Munich cabaret performer who came onstage during the early Nazi period disheveled, looked at the audience, and said: "What's the matter — I'm just two years ahead of the rest of you." That is prophecy as punchline. A German non-Jewish performer using dark comedy as a form of warning — naming what was coming in the only register available, in a room where the explicit naming would have been more dangerous than the joke. This is a third territory: not survivor humor, not outsider entertainment, but the comedy of someone watching the catastrophe approach and finding that the joke is the most honest thing available.
Werner Finck occupied a fourth category, distinct from all of these. He was a German non-Jewish actor and cabaret performer, the master of ceremonies at Die Katakombe — The Catacombs — a literary-political cabaret in Berlin that ran from 1929 to 1935. As the Nazi regime consolidated, Finck developed a technique of deliberate incompleteness: he would pause mid-sentence at a politically charged moment, leave the words unsaid, and the audience would complete the thought silently. The joke was in the gap — what everyone in the room knew and none of them said.
When Gestapo informers were present — which they increasingly were — Finck would address them directly from the stage: "Am I talking too fast? Can you follow me, or shall I follow you?"
The double meaning of "follow" — keeping pace with a performance, and being tailed by police — named the informers publicly, in front of an audience, in terms they could not object to without admitting what they were. It was a room applauding the exposure of the men who were there to report on the room.
Die Katakombe was shut by Goebbels on May 10, 1935. Finck was arrested and sent to Esterwegen concentration camp. He was released, eventually, through the intervention of an actress named Käthe Dorsch, who went to Hermann Göring on his behalf. He was released on the condition that he not perform for one year.
The regime's response is the thing to notice. They closed the cabaret. They arrested the comedian. They did not consider the jokes harmless. They were right not to.
Renée Firestone survived Auschwitz. She is interviewed in Ferne Pearlstein's 2016 documentary The Last Laugh, a film about whether Holocaust humor is acceptable. Her position is precise. She does not say the humor did not exist inside the camps. She knows it existed. She is describing something different.
"Jokes about the Holocaust are not proper. About the perpetrators, I don't care, but about our situation, nothing is really funny."
I want to sit with this for a moment.
Firestone is not disagreeing with Ostrower's research. She is not saying the woman in the intake line who laughed about her haircut was wrong to laugh, or that the phrase about the gate and the chimney was not doing real work. She is saying something more specific: that humor cannot be reproduced by outsiders as entertainment. That what was made inside, for people inside, cannot be transferred intact to a position of safety without becoming something different — something she refuses.
She is right about that. And the throughline argument of this chapter — which says that the mechanism of gallows humor is universal while the permission to use it is not — is exactly what Firestone is describing. She is drawing the permission line with her own hand, from her own experience.
But I have to name something here, because the brief that underlies this chapter was honest about it and so I should be too: by writing these paragraphs — by documenting the "free haircut" remark, the chimney phrase, the laughter at Auschwitz — I am doing something. There is a distinction between scholarly engagement and entertainment. It is a real distinction. It is not absolute. The material cannot be handled without being, in some sense, used. Whether that use is justified by the analysis around it is a question I am not going to answer with a formula. I am going to name it, and then keep going, and let you decide.
The insider/outsider distinction has a way of shrinking to its most intimate scale.
A systematic review of humor in palliative care, published in 2018, found something that should probably have been obvious but wasn't: approximately seventy percent of humor in documented healthcare interactions was patient-initiated. The person closest to death was the most likely to make a dark joke about their own condition. Family members were the least likely to initiate and the most likely to find the patient's dark humor disturbing.
One documented patient expressed frustration at the room's solemnity with a simple statement: "If I ever needed humor, it is now."
The people around them could not follow where the patient was willing to go.
This is the insider/outsider problem at the most intimate possible scale: not a community, not a century — a single family, in a single room, between the person who is dying and the people who will survive them. The person who is actually inside the experience can make the joke. The people watching from the outside find the same joke alarming. The same joke. The same sentence. The difference is not taste. It is proximity.
The same split appears in a 2024 study of ninety-three U.S. veterans by Romero-Reche and Muñoz-García, which distinguished between two types of dark humor. Affiliative dark humor — shared with others, used to bond a group — correlated with positive outcomes. Self-defeating dark humor — directed inward, mocking one's own situation in isolation — predicted lower life satisfaction with a standardized coefficient of β = −0.60. That is a large effect. The popular understanding of gallows humor treats it as uniformly healthy — a release valve, a coping mechanism, a way of processing extremity. The veterans data shows this is wrong in a specific, measurable way. Dark humor that bonds a group works. Dark humor that isolates an individual within their own suffering harms. Whether the joke is a weapon or a lifeline depends entirely on the direction it's pointed and the people it reaches.
(The Romero-Reche study is a single source, and I am flagging that. It needs corroboration. The direction of the finding is consistent with everything else in this chapter, but "consistent with" is not the same as "confirmed." I mention it here and I mention its limits.)
In March 2017, Ricky Gervais performed his Humanity tour in Belfast. During the set, he told a dead baby joke. A woman named Suzi Gourley was in the audience with her husband. Their son Eli had been stillborn the previous year.
They left the show.
SANDS NI — the Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society, Northern Ireland — issued a formal warning to subsequent audiences. Gourley's statement, documented in news reports: "This is our life — we have no choice but to live with this."
Gervais, in his documented response, made an intellectually coherent argument. He invoked the distinction between subject and target — the principle that comedy can use a subject without targeting the people who suffered it. Dead baby jokes are a documented tradition in transgressive comedy. The subject of infant death is not the same thing as targeting bereaved parents. You can tell a joke about a kind of death without aiming it at any specific person who experienced it.
He is not wrong about that. The distinction is real and it matters. It is used correctly in many contexts. A joke about mortality is not an attack on the bereaved. A joke about plane crashes is not an attack on plane crash survivors. The subject/target distinction is doing genuine work in comedy, and collapsing it entirely would make a lot of legitimate dark humor impossible.
And yet.
Gourley walked into that room carrying something specific. Her son Eli. The previous year. The particular, irreducible, non-generalizable weight of a loss that is hers and hers alone, and that she carries every day whether or not a comedian is talking about it onstage. The dead baby joke was not aimed at her. And the dead baby joke was about the exact thing that had destroyed her year.
When you walk into a room and tell a joke about the specific thing that broke someone's life, the distinction between "using it as a subject" and "aiming at the person who suffered" collapses. Not theoretically. In practice. For the person sitting in the dark.
Gervais was not wrong about free speech. He was wrong about what room he was in.
Gourley's statement — "This is our life — we have no choice but to live with this" — is not an argument against dark comedy. It is a description of what it means to be permanently inside an experience while everyone else moves past it. The person whose catastrophe is current will always be in a different temporal relationship to dark jokes about it than anyone else. That gap cannot be closed by good intentions or correct theory. It is a structural feature of loss.
Here is what I keep coming back to when I think about all of this: not the failure cases, not the clever theoretical framework, but a moment in Kandahar, on a NATO base, during an actual attack.
Nick Watkins was a U.S. service member at the base when a vehicle-borne IED breached the perimeter. Suicide bombers entered. The cafeteria took a mortar hit. In the aftermath, what the service members found themselves laughing about was this: their Polish allies, NATO partners in the middle of a live attack, had sprinted into the smoke-filled cafeteria and started looting it for Pop-Tarts and cookies.
Joelle Rabow Maletis is a therapist who heard Watkins's account. Her documented response: "Wait! What?! Your base was attacked while you were sleeping, you could have died and you were laughing about Pop-Tarts?! What's wrong with you?!"
Nothing was wrong with them.
The laughter was completely intelligible inside the community of people who had just survived the attack. Completely incomprehensible outside it. Maletis — a therapist, a professional whose entire job is to help people process extremity — heard the account and her first response was bafflement. Because she was not in the room. She was not in the cafeteria. She had not been there when the mortar hit and the smoke was still clearing and the Polish soldiers were stuffing their pockets with pastries. She was outside, and from outside, the joke made no sense.
This is what Boccaccio's brigata were doing in their villa outside Florence: a group of people who had survived proximity to catastrophe, creating order and humor among themselves, for themselves, in deliberate contrast to the dissolution they couldn't stop. This is what Roberts and Pearson were doing in the ruins of Ypres: the printing press, the founding editorial, the sixteen German soldiers who remained on the Western Front according to Belary Helloc's mathematics. This is what the inmates at Auschwitz were doing with the phrase about the gate and the chimney: putting the shared knowledge into a shape that could be passed between people who already knew, as a way of saying I know that you know, and we are still here.
The mechanism travels across everything. Across Florence in 1348 and Ypres in 1916 and a Polish coalition base in Afghanistan. Across illness wards and bereaved families and the ruins of New Orleans. Across a Friday night roast at the Friars Club. The reach for the joke, when the losses pile up high enough and the dread becomes the baseline — this is one of the things that human beings do. It is not the best thing human beings do, but it may be among the most human: the insistence on being someone who has opinions, even here, even in this.
The mechanism travels. The permission doesn't. That asymmetry is not a crack in the theory. It is the theory.
The permission is the interesting part. Because permission is not a bureaucratic category — you do not get a certificate that says "you were there, you may now make jokes." Permission is structural. It is determined by whether the catastrophe was yours to carry. Whether you were in the cafeteria when the mortar hit. Whether you came back to a gutted house. Whether you watched your hair fall on the floor at Auschwitz and reached for the only thing that was still yours: an opinion about prices.
What the failure cases — Gottfried, Mencia, Gervais — have in common is not bad intentions. Gottfried was performing exactly where he was supposed to be performing. Mencia was doing what comedians do with catastrophe. Gervais was making an intellectually defensible argument about free speech and artistic scope. What they have in common is this: they walked into a room and invoked the mechanism without the proximity that gives the mechanism its permission. They told the condemned man's joke without having walked up the steps.
The condemned man tells the joke about Mondays because he is about to be hanged. That is the whole thing. Take him off the scaffold, put him in a coffee shop, have him tell the same joke about Mondays: it is a different joke. It might still be funny — timing, delivery, context. But it is not the same act. The scaffold is doing work.
What Freud saw in 1927 — humour is not resigned; it is rebellious — holds because the rebellion requires something to rebel against. You cannot rebel against an abstraction. You rebel against the specific weight of the specific thing that is bearing down on you, at the moment it is bearing down on you. That is the source of both the humor's power and its limits. It draws on a reality that cannot be faked.
So: the joke about the Pop-Tarts. The "slightly soiled" printing press. The "hairdo for free." The gate and the chimney.
None of these are the same joke. None of them are funny in the same way or for the same reason or to the same people. A laugh in a Polish-looted cafeteria after a mortar attack is not a laugh in the Ypres Salient under shellfire, which is not whatever passed for a laugh at Auschwitz in 1943. The distances are not comparable. The losses are not equivalent. The humor is not interchangeable.
But the impulse — to reach for the joke when everything else has been taken, to insist on the self that has opinions when the catastrophe wants to eliminate the self entirely, to create something shareable out of the unshareable — this shows up. In the thirteenth century and the twentieth. In Florence and in Ypres and in Kandahar. In a medical ward where the patient is the only one in the room who can laugh about what's happening to them. In a family that outlives one of its own.
I want to be precise about what I mean when I say the impulse is universal, because "universal" is a word that has gotten a lot of people into trouble in this territory. I do not mean that all cultures respond to death the same way. And here the chapter needs to slow down, because the counterexample matters and it is not a soft one.
Unni Wikan spent years doing comparative fieldwork across two Muslim communities — one in Bali, one in Egypt — and published her findings in 1988. What she found, in the bluntest possible terms: the same loss, the same religion, and completely opposite prescribed responses to it.
In the Balinese community Wikan studied, grief at a funeral was not merely discouraged. It was understood as actively harmful to the deceased. The requirement after a death was cheerfulness — not a brave face, not a stiff upper lip, but something more like a genuine performance of brightness. You smile. You joke, in the sense of being light and social. You make the gathering feel like a gathering of the living rather than a vigil of the stricken. The logic behind this is specific: excessive grief, in this framework, burdens the spirit of the dead person. It holds them. They cannot move forward if the people who loved them are drowning. Cheerfulness is the mourner's gift to the person who has died. It is what you owe them. The alternative — weeping, collapse, the full expression of how terrible this is — would be a kind of selfishness, an insistence on your own grief that comes at the expense of the person you're grieving.
Picture what this looks like from the outside, if you didn't know: people at a funeral, talking, animated, faces open. What you're watching is not denial. It is love expressed in the form most useful to the dead.
In the Egyptian community Wikan studied, the opposite is equally prescribed. Here, the requirement is demonstrative weeping — public, expressive, audible grief. Not performative in the dismissive sense, but communal: the right way to honor a death is to make your grief visible and unmistakable. Women in particular carry the weight of this in the communities Wikan documented. To be composed at a funeral, to be dry-eyed, would be read as a failure — a suggestion that you did not love the person, or that you do not understand what has been lost. The expression of grief is itself the tribute. To withhold it is to withhold something owed.
These are not remotely similar behaviors. Someone watching a Balinese funeral and an Egyptian funeral back to back would have no obvious reason to conclude they were watching the same thing — the same human beings performing the same relationship to loss. The cheerful gathered Balinese community and the openly weeping Egyptian one look, from the outside, like different species of occasion.
And yet.
Both communities are doing something that the gallows-humor tradition is also doing: placing an unbearable thing within a structure that makes it possible to be near. The Balinese mourner who smiles is not pretending the death didn't happen. They are placing the death inside a frame — a metaphysical one, a story about what the dead person needs — that transforms grief into an act that can be performed rather than an abyss to fall into. The Egyptian mourner who weeps loudly and openly is not simply overwhelmed. They are performing grief according to a form — communal, shared, given shape by tradition — that makes it expressible and therefore bearable. The weeping has a structure. The structure holds.
Both of these are distance management. Not the dark comedian's distance, not the gallows joke's compression of terror into a sentence — but the same underlying motion: something unbearable, encountered through a cultural form that makes it survivable. The form is opposite. The motion is the same.
"Universal dark humor" is not what Balinese mourning culture is doing. It is doing something more interesting: the universal mechanism, in a form that dark humor's defenders would not have predicted and cannot claim.
What travels — the mechanism, not the form — is something like this: human beings, under sufficient pressure, reach for structures that hold the experience at a small distance from the raw. Sometimes that structure is a syllogism. Sometimes it is a parallel sentence about a gate and a chimney. Sometimes it is cheerfulness. Sometimes it is elaborate weeping. The culture determines the form. The need is shared.
Dark jokes are one form of this. They are a particularly compressed and communicable form — they can be passed between people, they accumulate into a shared vocabulary, they do the work of solidarity in addition to the work of distance. That is why they show up across so many contexts and centuries. Not because all humans tell the same jokes about death, but because all humans eventually need to say something about it, and the joke is one of the few structures that can hold both the saying and the unsaid simultaneously.
The impulse is a constant. The form and the permission are local.
Which is to say: the humor is universal and you cannot steal it.
And also: the fact that you cannot steal it is the most human thing about it.
Because the thing that makes gallows humor work — the thing that makes the condemned man's Monday joke land, that makes "slightly soiled" carry the weight of a bombardment, that makes the gate-and-chimney phrase into solidarity — is the specificity of the loss behind it. The joke is powerful because it is from somewhere. It is made out of real material by people who know that material from the inside. Reproduce it without the material, tell the same joke from a position of safety about other people's suffering, and you have the mechanism without the engine. You have the joke's shape and none of its charge.
This is why Renée Firestone's rule is not a counterexample to anything. It is the theory. The humor of the camps existed. It did real work. And it cannot be reproduced by outsiders as entertainment, because what made it work was precisely its insideness, its specificity, its being made by the people in the situation for the people in the situation. Extract it, and you do not have the same thing. You have a ghost.
Maletis — the therapist hearing about the Pop-Tart looting — was baffled because she was outside. The service members laughing were inside. That gap is not a failure of communication. It is the correct and honest relationship between the person in the cafeteria when the mortar hit and the person who heard about it later. The gap is supposed to be there.
What I find worth sitting with, at the end of this, is not the elegance of the theory or the way the failure cases confirm it. It is the image of Roberts and Pearson in the ruins of Ypres, looking at a printing press that had survived a bombardment, and deciding to make a newspaper. Something in them said: the press works, we have paper, we have a sergeant who knows the trade — let's go. As if the bombed city were merely an inconvenient publication venue. As if the war were a supply-chain problem.
Slightly soiled at a reasonable price.
That phrase does not make the Ypres Salient less terrible. It does not address the fear. It does not save anyone. It is, in Freud's sense, completely rebellious — a small piece of language that insists the person who made it still has some territory the bombardment cannot reach. Still has opinions. Still notices, with some precision, what an absurd thing it is to be finding a printing press in the rubble and deciding what to do next.
That territory — the territory where the self still has opinions, where the joke is still possible, where you can look at the worst thing and put it in a sentence and hand the sentence to someone else — is not safety. But it is something. It is the thing that dark humor protects, across every century and catastrophe in this chapter, when it is working right.
The question of what it means when it isn't working right — when the joke is made from the wrong position, aimed at the wrong room, landing on someone who is still carrying what the joker has already moved past — is the question this chapter has been circling since Gottfried. It does not resolve. It keeps generating new cases. It will keep generating new cases. People will keep making jokes too soon, from too great a distance, at audiences who are still inside the wound.
And inside those audiences, separately, the survivors will keep making their own jokes. About haircuts. About the chimney. About the Polish soldiers and the Pop-Tarts.
The mechanism is universal. The permission belongs to the room. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out.
What comes next — because laughter in extremity is not the only thing humor does at the edge of the map — is the question of absurdity: what happens when the catastrophe is not just suffering but cosmic nonsense, when the thing demanding your response is not grief but bewilderment, when the universe presents something so structurally preposterous that the only honest reaction is a joke that doesn't quite know what it's laughing at.
Sources for this chapter: McGraw, A.P. & Warren, C. (2010), Psychological Science; McGraw et al. (2014), Social Psychological and Personality Science; Ostrower, C. (2014), It Kept Us Alive, Yad Vashem; Freud, S. (1927), "Humour," International Journal of Psychoanalysis; Romero-Reche, A. & Muñoz-García, A. (2024), Behavioral Sciences [single source, flagged]; Hirsch et al. (2018), PMC6020769; Wikan, U. (1988), Social Science & Medicine; National Army Museum, "The Wipers Times"; The Conversation, "Gallows humour from the trenches of World War I"; Newberry Library, "Satirical Calaveras and the Day of the Dead"; Joelle Rabow Maletis (2021), joellerabowmaletis.com; Global News (March 30, 2017); RTÉ (March 30, 2017); The Comics Comic (February 7, 2009); Louisiana Folklife, "Conversing with the Land of Dreams"; PBS Independent Lens, The Last Laugh (dir. Ferne Pearlstein, 2016).