When Is It Too Soon To Make Fun of a Tragedy?
Last week, on the day Amy Winehouse died, I sat down and wrote a eulogy that several people, including my wife and online employer, found unnecessarily ghoulish. And while it's true I thought it was amusing to quip that London officials had banned Amy's cremation for fear of a nation-wide contact high, I was pretty sure I wasn't the worst person in the world. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered what it was about this tragedy that made me so completely fine with cracking jokes. I mean, it didn't occur to me to write a bunch of zingers about all those murdered Norwegian children from the week before. Why did I have no compunction about making fun of this? And why did I get annoyed when I saw people leaving Facebook statuses about the Winehouse tragedy and summoning up the "27 club." Why did it ring false?A little more than a week later, I'm still not sure, but I think it has something to do with the distinction between fiction and real life, and the difference between tragedy and the tragic. In literature class, they teach you that tragedy is defined by inevitability. Tragedy requires a fatal flaw that can only lead to one unhappy conclusion. King Lear's arrogance sows the seeds of his destruction. Macbeth's lust for power seals his fate. Or take The Godfather as a more modern example. Despite Vito Corleone and then Michael Corleone's desire to ultimately run a legitimate business and to set rules for how they conduct their affairs, the enterprise was still based in crime, intimidation and murder. That flaw can only lead to more bloodshed. Corleone brothers, sons and daughters will be murdered. And like Macbeth, the taint of spilt blood will leave its mark. That's tragedy. Inevitable. Logical. All good tragedies follow this rule because if they don't, the events are merely tragic. And no one cries about that. Sonny and Fredo Corleone can't slip in the shower. Lady Macbeth can't develop breast cancer. That's melodrama. A soap opera. We want a death we understand. One that feels fated. One that is carefully constructed and inevitable. Anything less than that and we resent the writers. We accuse them of playing God, sprinkling death arbitrarily down puppeteer strings solely for the purpose of messing with us. And we refuse to cry.
"Look how they massacred my boy. ... They should have put nonslip pads in that shower."
Is one of these the secret to everlasting non-life?
"Just let me get a few more feet, and then I'll be sure to buy some life insurance for junior."
Gladstone is Cracked.com's Senior Resident Warlock. Visit his Hate By Numbers site (seriously under reconstruction) and find out more about supporting new episodes. Also Twitter. And then there's the Internet Apocalypse fan page.
Check out more from Gladstone, in The Trials of Gladstone (as told by Franz Kafka) and An Open Letter To American Express.