How could I have laughed at that? I remember being shocked at myself the first time that I heard a particularly dark joke during my time as a strategic communications officer for an intelligence agency. I worked at a center that specialized in media exploitation, where torture videos, disturbing proof-of-life footage, child pornography, and other terrible media content were regularly unearthed in captured ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and other terrorist electronic devices and media. The joke in question was made by the center’s former Hardware Exploitation Laboratory (HEL) manager, and, without relaying the exact particulars, it simultaneously made fun of Islamic Extremist terrorists’ proclivity for child marriage, pornography, and modern dating apps.
It was appalling.
And it was funny.
Despite the punchline’s references to the evils of child marriage and pornography, I found it wickedly funny and—perhaps to assuage my own conscience—have been pondering the role of dark humor ever since. In a recent discussion, Lorraine Murphy, professor of English at Hillsdale College, described how all great stories, comedies and tragedies, demonstrate a “willingness to look at the darkness.” Truly memorable stories acknowledge the brokenness of our world and humanity’s immense capacity for evil. Humor, especially satire and dark humor, plays with the incongruence and deviation from how things are and how they ought to be. It highlights the absurdity of evil in ways plain English can’t. Likewise, my former coworker’s joke hit on an ugly truth, momentarily laying bare the evil that my colleagues and I dealt with every day. The crude joke mocked an evil that, except for rare moments, was compartmentalized and handled with detached professionalism. It dared to “look at the darkness” through the guise of levity.
Throughout the Western literary tradition, humor has historically been a means of acknowledging the darkness present in the human condition, often by exposing moral failures and hypocrisies. In book 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that wit, when used correctly and not in excess, is a valuable tool in conversation. Erasmus, the father of humanism and key figure in the Renaissance, was able to critique the 16th century Western church and society by cloaking his less than flattering appraisals in humor in his highly entertaining essay In Praise of Folly. Consider also Shakespeare’s Fallstsaff, the embodiment of the clever court jester, poking fun at the absurdities and shortcomings of monarchs and court officials through cleverness and the entertaining quality of his wit. Humor has always had the unique capacity to make hard truths simultaneously more bearable and more potent.
Dark humor is no different—it brings hard truths or hypocrisies to light in a way that is simultaneously more bearable (because, well, it’s funny!) and yet also unsettling (because of its grim subject matter), making whatever uncomfortable truth that the joke uncovers especially resonant. Winston Churchill exemplified such humor; throughout WWI and WWII, his sense of humor was never diminished but rather was sharpened through his gruff and courageous leadership style. For example, Churchill’s quip that “Americans will always do the right thing, after they’ve exhausted everything else” continues to spark laughter, decades after Churchill’s death, for its encapsulation of the ironic position of America as the savior of the free world.
Abraham Lincoln also exemplified the value of dark humor in trying times. At a cabinet discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln opened the meeting with a funny story from a favorite humorist of the time, Artemus Ward. Unsurprisingly, some members of his cabinet, including Lincoln’s Secretary of War, made known their disapproval, to which Lincoln responded, “Gentlemen…with the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.”
Dark humor, then, does more than merely acknowledge the darkness. As Lincoln reminded his cabinet, it acts as a medicine against despair, and, by uplifting spirits, can even be considered a form of resistance against the evil itself.
After my former colleague told his joke, we grimly chuckled and stood there a moment, brooding over the unfortunate realities that made it so powerful yet appalling. In our professional environment, rife with terror and jihad, it was easy to grow numb to such evils. But instead, it was dark humor that kept us sane. My coworker’s joke rejected indifference and called attention to an issue in a way that resonated with those listening—a sort of camaraderie that broke down the emotional barriers we had erected against acknowledging the genuine horror of our work. Throughout the Western tradition and beyond, humor and sharp wit not only give art and voice to harsh truth, humor also—as anyone who has ever been the butt of a joke can attest to— cultivates a rebellious solidarity at the subject matter’s expense. Far from being disrespectful, the dark humor that prevailed in my former career in intelligence was a small act of resistance against the overwhelming, though often unacknowledged darkness.
In fact, theologian Frederick Buechner, in his 1977 book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, goes so far as to argue that comedy is an agent of the Gospel, because the Bible and the story of man’s relationship with God can be considered both the ultimate tragedy and comedy—beautiful and absurd at the same time. He urges clergy to preach the gospel by embracing its tragic, comedic, and mythological aspects of Christianity. He closes his book with the following petition:
“Let the preacher tell the truth…Let him preach this overwhelmingly tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true, because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”
Comedy is forever intertwined in mankind’s relationship to the Divine—an unavoidable part of the human experience and one of the deepest intuitions that we possess. And so, while dark humor is certainly not appropriate for every situation, we should remember that wit and humor need not be strangers to serious discourse. We often take ourselves too seriously in politics and international affairs, thereby depriving ourselves of the special potency with which humor can deliver an ugly truth or expose a hidden ill. As we encounter the darkness of this world and the absurdities that arise in the business of warfare, let’s not forget that humor offers a weapon of its own: a deterrent to pessimism and a herald of truth that reverberates within the deepest recesses of our humanity.
