Locating the "sweet spot" when jokes about tragedy are seen as funny

Damage wreaked by Hurricane Sandy at Bay Head, New Jersey. Image: Skrum / Getty Images. As a tragedy unfolds, only the callous or gauche would joke about it. Yet with time, topics previously off limits come to be seen as fair game for humour. In fact, joke-making about loss and tragedy can be seen as a way to cope, or at least a reflection of coping. For a new study, Peter McGraw and his colleagues have charted people's responses over time to jokes about a real tragedy - Hurricane Sandy, which struck the USA in 2012. The researchers were able to plot the way that the jokes were seen as funny prior to landfall, then offensive and unfunny as disaster struck, then funny as the horror faded, then unfunny again, presumably as the event lost its impact and topicality. "We find that temporal distance creates a comedic sweet spot," they said.Over a thousand participants were recruited online at different times. They were asked to rate three potentially humorous tweets ostensibly written by Hurricane Sandy. For instance, one said "Oh Shit just destroyed a Starbucks. Now I'm a pumpkin spice hurricane."The participants were recruited at ten different time periods, beginning the day before landfall (Oct 29, 2012), and then in the ensuing days and weeks, so that the final sample to be contacted rated the tweets on February 6, 2013. People's responses fell into two distinct time frames. Over the course of the week during which the hurricane struck, the funniness of the tweets pea...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs