I’m asking myself, mostly. How can I explain this? Look here:
This is funny and I laughed at it, and I was delighted to laugh at it because child abduction is something we should be making lots and lots of jokes about. Lots. Of the number of children who are abducted or kidnapped (the Dept of Justice has different shades of meaning for these terms [PDF]) in a given year, 99 percent are returned alive and .08 percent are either killed or never returned. In fact, it’s better to look at the hard numbers and not the statistics, in that on the average 50.7 kids each year are killed by kidnappers or never returned. There are 73.6 million kids under the age of 18 living in this country as of the latest census data, which means, each year, .00006 percent of US kids are killed by kidnappers or get abducted and never returned.
It happens, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. And yet people are. I imagine I might understand it better if I were a parent, but I don’t understand it. It’s an irrational fear that leads to important news getting shut out of the airwaves when a child is abducted and to increased paranoia about one’s neighbors.
The problem is that it can be easy to equate “laughing at child abduction” with “laughing at a parent who has lost a child from kidnapping”. It’s not the same. Nor is “laughing at child abduction” the same as “dismissing child abduction as not tragic”. It is tragic. It is rare and tragic, like sarcomatoid renal cancer, which kills its victims, on the average, within 9 months of diagnosis, but accounts for .02 percent of all cancer deaths. That’s less than one person a year.
Straight people beating or killing gay people because they are gay or perceived as gay isn’t rare. In fact, Psychology Today reported last year that it’s on the rise. I live in a city of gays, but I also live in a city of people and violent crime. There’s a poster in my building’s stairwell that says if you can walk down the street holding your partner’s hand without fear of exposure or reprimand you are suffering from heterosexual privilege. Here, I pretty much suffer from heterosexual privilege. And yet, I make sure I look around before grabbing Neal’s hand. Last time I did it, actually, was during Pride.
So there’s this joke:
I’m kind of a magician. I can turn fruits into vegetables. Or, as the police call it, “gay-bashing”.
It’s not great, but it’s not bad. It does its jokework fine. Rendered within the voice and character of a relatively innocuous standup comedian I can easily imagine laughing at this joke within a set. And again, I’m happy to laugh. Because what I’m laughing at is not my fellow gay men having been victims of violence, nor is it even the idiot bragging about what he can do to gays. It’s this: laughing at dark stuff takes its power away. I’m less anxious when I’m laughing, and it becomes really hard to be afraid of something you can laugh at. Hence J.K. Rowling’s riddikulus charm. Laughter is such great defense.
I know myself and trust myself to know what’s right and to act and move my life toward goodness whenever I can. I can also laugh at jokes about gay men being beaten into comas. One more problem: some jokes are op-eds. But it’s good to remember that most jokes are balms.