5 Awful Stories You Shouldn't Laugh At (But Probably Will)

"Now that you mention it," responds the assailant.

Oh thank God. Thank God the victim in question survived and I don't have to live with the psychic burden of laughing at a fatality. I mean, hopefully he lived and made a full recovery and possibly learned a valuable lesson about the place of skepticism in gang warfare. But at the very least, he lived.

Here's what really gets me:

The headline on the actual news story is nothing special. It's about what you'd expect: "Man Stabbed in the Throat in East Spokane." That's not funny. That's terrible, and I'm sorry it happened to anybody. If you gain any amount of joy from that information, well, hopefully you look like Christian Bale so your psychosis is a bit easier for the audience to swallow.

But that's not the text that the local TV news went with. No, the guy in charge of those pointless info-dumps on your local TV news delved into the depressing details of a knife attack, and he came back up with poetry. You know he wrote it that way on purpose. There are a million ways to phrase the events that transpired that aren't funny in the slightest -- "The victim did not believe the threat was real and questioned his attacker's intent" -- and only one way to phrase it that is funny:

QUOTE FROM MAN STABBED: "WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO, STAB ME?"

That was some next level shit, slide writer for the local TV news. I hope that as soon as you finished typing that headline, you leveled up out of that job like a Final Fantasy character and went on to write for SNL or something.

Also, let's not overlook the real hero here: the victim. Sure, it's stupid in retrospect, but bravo to the man who saw an assailant wielding a deadly weapon and had the balls to dare him to use it. I mean, when a guy comes at you with a knife and you essentially say "You're not gonna stab me, pussy," what choice does that guy have? What exits have you left him? Maybe he wasn't going to stab you before, but he pretty much has to now.

The news story says "The attack moved inside the music room," so it's probably the latter, but is that better, or worse?

I don't know. All I know is that every time I click on this article, I expect to see the album cover from Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, and there's a part of me that's a little let down when I don't find it.

Wikipedia

Here's the text of this story:

Ervin McKinness, a 21-year-old aspiring rapper, tweeted about driving drunk at 120 mph minutes before dying in a fiery one-car crash that killed the rapper and four others.

Tweets:

Drunk af going 120 drifting corners #FuckIt YOLO

Driving tweeting sipping the cup f*** yolo I'm turning it up

I'm admitting to a lot of terrible stuff in this column. Things I really probably should never admit to another human being -- not even to a stranger in a drunken stupor at a dive bar in the bad part of town -- and here I am posting it on the Internet. I don't know why. I'm having a minor stroke, I suspect. But in the interest of continued honesty: I don't actually feel bad for laughing at this story. I keep trying to. I keep trying to analyze the events objectively. An ignorant young man makes some mistakes while under the influence and pays for it with his life. It's a tragedy. Right?

... right?

I read that headline and I see an idiot hollering "YOLO" out the window of his frat right before he jumps into a pile of garbage cans, as though the willful ignorance of consequences will serve as some sort of metaphysical barrier to keep them at bay. I see an idiot posting about his crimes on Twitter in a dire effort to impress somebody with a SpongeBob avatar. I see an idiot proudly drinking while driving (in this case, not the same guy texting, like that makes the slightest bit of difference). I see all of those idiots combined together like a Megazord of idiocy, and my sympathy just ... calls in sick.

I don't think the dude deserved it or anything. I don't wish harm on stupid people or rejoice in the harm that comes upon them, but I've searched all over for a way to feel bad for him, and I just can't find it.

Maybe it's under the couch.

The story:

A teenager was decapitated by an amusement park ride at Six Flags Over Georgia, after he hopped a pair of fences and entered a restricted area to retrieve a hat he lost while riding the Batman roller coaster.

You probably don't need to hear this disclaimer again. It's probably not going to help anybody's opinion of me at this point. I'm sure the black helicopters are already on their way. But it's worth repeating that I don't find anything funny about tragedy or loss of life in general.

But man, if you're gonna go ...

Listen: You could die at any moment. You could die in a car crash. You could die of an aneurysm, right now, reading this stupid sentence. You might have cancer growing inside of you at this very second. Or maybe you're just going to get up from your computer, trip over your cat, and bash your brains in on your shoe rack. Death can happen at any time, and most likely yours is going to be boring or pointless, and although folks will be sad, nobody will ultimately find anything particularly notable about it.

Or you could get your head punted off by fucking Batman.

If you absolutely had to choose, which way would you go?

I'm saying, when you get up to the pearly gates and they ask how you died, "shoe rack" may get some condolences, but "I got my head punted off by a Batman roller coaster" is getting you a high-five and a "nice" from Saint Peter.

Read more from Brockway at his own monument to narcissism/website, The Brock Way. Follow him on Goodreads, Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

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