The article gives a detailed account of the emergence and relative popularity of black humor jokes that circulated in February and March 1986, shortly after the tragic loss of the NASA shuttle spacecraft Challenger, with the lives of the...
moreThe article gives a detailed account of the emergence and relative popularity of black humor jokes that circulated in February and March 1986, shortly after the tragic loss of the NASA shuttle spacecraft Challenger, with the lives of the astronauts aboard. It shows that the jokes appeared in distinct "waves," the first responding to the disaster with clever wordplay and the second playing with grim and troubling images associated with the event. Males and females offered jokes in similar proportions, though females were more likely to refrain from joking completely and males were more likely to become "superinformants," collecting and relating strings of jokes on the topic. The primary social function of disaster jokes appears to be to provide closure to an event that provoked communal grieving, by signaling that it was time to move on and pay attention to more immediate concerns. Thus disaster jokes express a desire to "speak the last word" on a painful topic by transforming the most dissonant images of the event into creative wordplay.
