Bad Taste Humour

 

Some people find something more sinister going on here because they find this cruel. This is not a case of some jokester choosing to say something offensive, this is a case of taking something which another person did in earnest and then holding it up and going "This is stupid and deserves derision." This is nothing new but it seems to have become a lot more common since the internets. Also, it seems to have lost its satirical edge where now it is simply "for the lols" rather than making any sort of point like the founding father's of satire would have done. And the problem with this is that the laughter becomes an attack. To laugh at the people involved is to say "You suck". "Homo Kid" had no point at all but went some way towards wrecking a young man's life.

 

The whole "so bad it's good" ethos, perhaps most popularly expressed in the evergreen "Worst Album Artwork Ever" craze, also comes under this umbrella. (Laughter at physical accidents such as Afro Ninja and America's Funniest Home Videos doesn't really count because they are accidents- you're not attacking the character of the person involved by laughing because accidents can happen to anyone.)

 

You might also like to read up about the infamous "An Hero" meme where a young man's suicide became a big joke on the internet.

 

 

Unlike our non-existent boy with leukemia in the OP, we now have an actual seventh grader with a name who shot himself in the head. And people still laughed.

I suspected it was Jackson mainly because of the hard close-ups on the eyes. Just like the killer character in The Lovely Bones. 

I share your thoughts.

I feel bad about it sometimes, but I definitely don't have very nice thoughts on 9/11.

We wrote a piece that was beyond offensive from the perspective of an office worker's final thoughts as the plane struck the building and he eventually jumped to his death, sh*tting his pants on the way down. The tone couldn't have been more vicious and unflattering and disrespectful. I don't think it had anything to do with 9/11 at all, I think we were just using that as a platform to show how badass we were. People were roaring with laughter when it was read out at an editorial meeting but nevertheless they declined to print, probably wisely. And this is the same magazine that caused a national stir by printing a guide on how to rob banks using the campus bank as a case study.

 

We came up with Deathcamp Dash where you were an officer in Auschwitz and you had to quickly consign all the inmates to their fates, some in the showers, some in the oven and so on while also finding time to sort through the corpses for gold teeth and beat people so they continued digging their own graves and so on.

 

We're terrible people.

 

'Senseless'?  seems pretty funny to me.  Which is what is important about a joke.  Unlike the Pakistan flooding 'joke' which is just nasty and not a joke because a joke has to be funny on some level or other. 

 

Nearly all jokes can be offensive to someone as they nearlly all have a 'victim'.  What is important to me is what lies behind the joke what is the intention of the joke teller -  I would give an example but i can never remember jokes.

 

Now I'm angry cos I can't think of a single joke of any variety