Dark humor won't encourage violence

My introduction to “black humor” was a book called “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller.

I fell in love with it and enjoy this guilt-inducing brand of humor even now, a half-century later.

In “Catch-22,” set in World War II, the humor came from lines of reasoning like this: You could get out of combat if you were crazy, but you would be crazy not to want to avoid combat. So, if you tried to get out of combat by claiming you were crazy, you were sane, and back into battle you would go.

Well, it was that and other dark, ironic wartime insanity that was funny, but only from a distance.

Black humor comes from the same source as the Irish blessing, “May you be safe in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead.”

One of the earliest known examples of dark humor is Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal,” in which he preposterously proposes infanticide as a solution to overpopulation. No one took him seriously. He was poking fun at the economic thinkers of his day.

The best dark humor is a form of satire, making fun of serious issues through exaggeration..

That brings me to the video — that video in which the head of President Donald Trump is pasted onto the head of an “action hero” conducting a mass slaying in the “Church of Fake News.”

The adapted video is from a black-humor English movie called “Kingsman: The Secret Service.”

Of this film, English reviewer Bilge Ebiri said, “No, Kingsman is not a film for gentlemen. It’s for us, the great unwashed, bloodthirsty audience.”

“Yes,” I respond sheepishly. “How true.”

While Trump’s head replaces the hero’s in the video, the heads of victims become CNN, PBS, NBC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi and other critics of the president.

Among those, including me, who are warped enough to find this funny, there are two camps.

The camp I belong to finds humor in the video’s satirizing of Trump’s self-image, which defies exaggeration.

The other camp sees humor in what they feel is an only slightly exaggerated portrayal of how effective Trump has been in dispatching his perceived enemies.

The video preaches to both choirs.

Since humor has been all but eliminated from our political life, however, I have to wonder why this video, which has now achieved international infamy, was shown to wealthy Republicans at a fund-raiser.

I have to assume that someone who can laugh only at their own victims thought it would entertain GOP donors and feed their vision of triumph over liberals and the media.

It backfired. Even Trump had to disavow it.

The media was outraged. The video encourages violence against them, they say.

I disagree with my colleagues. Trump’s anti-media rhetoric might inspire violence, but not a clever, satirical video that can be taken two ways.

I would think the only pain it would cause is sideaches from the misguided laughter of people like me, both left and right.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a semi-retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

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