During the last forty years or so, “disasters”—such as a famine, an earthquake, the crashing of a plane, train, or spaceship, a multiple murder, or the sudden death of a celebrity—have tended to receive extensive, vivid, tear-jerking television coverage, often rapidly followed by a cycle of gruesome jokes. The jokes begin within hours or even minutes of the disaster’s melodramatic presentation on television, rapidly increase in number, peak a couple of months later, and then new jokes cease to be created, bringing the cycle not to an end but to a plateau. The jokes no longer circulate as...

On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, a fundamentalist Islamic political movement, hijacked four American jetliners. Two were crashed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, causing them to collapse with catastrophic loss of life. A third was crashed into the Pentagon, costing an additional 189 lives, while passengers on a fourth evidently attacked the hijackers, causing the plane to crash in a rural area in western Pennsylvania with the loss of all 44 persons aboard. Much of the drama was played out live on national television, including the crash...

The playing of practical jokes¹ involving the animation of corpses at wakes seems, at first encounter, to be a singularly bizarre practice, incongruous with its social context. Such amusements, however, were congruent with the behavioral norms of wakes as they were held in Ireland through the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, these seeming revivals of the dead quite possibly were part of a tradition of parodying “the revival of the seemingly dead” and “resurrection”—familiar themes in Irish folklore and popular culture. This essay documents that tradition through a presentation of narratives and dramas in which people who...

Death used to be an integral part of life that united home and community, but today we deny it. Dying persons are routinely sequestered from the living in specialized hospital wards. Professionally trained morticians prepare cadavers to be “lifelike” for public display in funeral homes. Domestic funerary customs and rituals, community mechanisms of consolation and collective support for the bereaving, no longer appear to be with us. In Newfoundland, however, this loss is relatively new. Through the first half of this century, and on rare occasions even into recent decades (Buckley and Cartwright 1983), the traditional house wake in Newfoundland...

My first impulse was to entitle this essay “Dead People Can Be Really Funny Sometimes.” After my friends suggested counseling, I abandoned the original plan in favor of the present title—though not without some regret, because there really was an important point buried within this seemingly insensitive frivolity. Death may not be funny, but people often are, and it is in the human response to this rite of passage—sometimes collectively, but most often individually—that we find the basis for much of what we would call death-based humor. And nowhere, I would contend, is this phenomenon more visible...

The “striking florescence of celebration” in the modern world (Manning 1983, 4) is rapidly transforming both the physical topography of America and the annual holiday cycle of its citizens. Throughout the Midwest, for example, local communities seem almost frenetic in their creation of ethnic theme parks and “historic” pageants and, where appropriate, their rebuilding of habitations and public buildings with Swiss, German, Norwegian, and a variety of other ethnic motifs. Larger cities throughout the country have created “festival” markets and historic districts, while “artists’” neighborhoods have become the hallmark of a thriving city. Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis all have their...

Children eat sugar skulls with their names printed on the candied foreheads, public figures endure attacks with predictions of their impending demise, and papier-mâché skeletons appear, inviting the dead to live amongst us. These calaveras (literally “skulls,” but also used in reference to whole skeletons) walk the dog, play musical instruments, and perform other day-to-day activities. Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival, also celebrated in many parts of the United States (Beardsley 1987, 64), is a time to honor death while mocking it with great abandon.

It would be difficult to point to another culture that celebrates with so much...

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler states that humor “must contain one ingredient whose presence is indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension” (1964, 52). This assertion, controversial in its time, provides a condensed reformulation of insights presented earlier by Freud (1973), Wolfenstein (1954), and other psychoanalytic thinkers. Subsequent analyses of humor (e.g., Dundes 1971; Legman 1968, 1975) have confirmed the veracity of Koestler’s formulation. There can be no doubt that humor derives at least some of its impact from its aggressive character. Teasing, for example, provides an outlet for personal criticism. As a genre, teasing is...

Let this essay on death and laughter begin as a tale of two cities: Los Angeles, California, where I live a few blocks from Hollywood Boulevard; and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I conduct research on Vodou.¹ Though they exist at opposite ends of an economic spectrum, both these extreme cities sustain singular lifestyles, and singular preoccupations with postlife arrangements. I have been an eager participant-observer in both their life and death styles, and offer this essay as a memento mori to lessons they have taught me.

In Los Angeles, death has been subject to a treatment whose first premise is disguise....

Time is like a handful of sand. The tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers. But if you caress it, it will leave in its wake memories of its gentle flow, rather than the roughness of its stones. (anonymous Deadhead)²

It was early the morning of August third, commonly known to Deadheads as “the day the music died.” Grabbing my bags, about to dash off to work, I heard one fragment of the morning radio news, something about Jerry Garcia—and heart failure. Immediately, my phone began to ring as panic-stricken Deadheads called their Deadhead “families”...

The taboo against contamination from a dead body is one of the most profound of all socio-cultural inhibitions. I often find myself quite uncomfortable at funerals, knowing that contained within that box at the front of the chapel or synagogue lies what once was a living, breathing, or possibly even joking human being. Beyond the element of grief, of having lost a loved one, there is something psychologically disturbing about the presence of a corpse: it is a reminder that we ourselves are mortal, and that we, too, one day, shall be lying in a similar box (see Freud 1950,...