I agree, it’s cruel to laugh at other’s misfortunes. I don’t see anything funny in people falling down or injuring themselves. Being injured is not funny; people fall down all the time. Why should either of these cause other people to laugh?
Although I did laugh at the OP you mentioned about the man falling into piles of cow shit. But I was not laughing at his misfortune, or his shame- I was laughing at the absurdity of the situation. I was laughing at the fact that in accomplishing a goal, he was led on a completely circuitous path and a totally unforeseen event happened. I was laughing, in essence, at the randomness of life’s situations and the bizarre outcomes of mundane intentions. I’ve been covered in poop many times in my life, and it is never fun. So I’d never laugh at something like that. I also don’t find disgusting things funny. Poop is not funny. It’s just poop.
Watching other people be humiliated is also never funny. I cringe at seeing movies in which people are humiiated and made to feel ashamed. I feel what that character is feeling, no matter how much I dislike them. For instance, I was forced to sit through the movie “Meet the Parents”. For those of you who haven’t sen it, this is two hours of watching Ben Stiller be humiliated. We are supposed to laugh as he squirms. This movie was incredibly cruel and in very poor taste. It was just so mean-spirited, I ended up being very angry at the filmmakers and at the people whom I was with, who of course saw all this as high comedy.
On the other hand, I agree with Coldfire to an extent. You shouldn’t take yourself so seriously. It is better to just laugh off minor humiliation, and being able to laugh at oneself is a great skill. Laughing at oneself is also a way to save face. You laugh at yourself before anyone else can laugh at you.
When I was in the fifth grade, a teacher was explaining why being able to read was important. She told about a mother who fed her family dog food, thinking ir was meat, because she couldn’t read the lable and just looked at the picture on the can. All the students laughed, except me. I felt so sorry for the woman, and I couldn’t understand why every one was laughing. I didn’t think it was funny !!! I will never forget how it made me feel.
Hey, ratty, when I saw this thread, Meet The Parents was the first thing that came to mind. Some parts of that movie were quite funny, but watching it, all I could think of was, “Why the hell are you sticking with that bitch? She sided with her parents every time.” I would’ve left after the first day and stayed in a hotel and refused to have anything to do with them. Also, I would’ve required a hell of a lot more groveling from the girl before I would’ve forgiven her.
But since that’s a movie, I’m not as bothered by it. It’s not as if Ben Stiller didn’t know what he was getting into.
I was watching Charlie’s Angels the other day and at the end, they run bloopers and such. There’s one scene in which Cameron Diaz runs up to her date to tell him she has to leave. In the blooper, she slipped during her run. She didn’t fall, just stumbled. Everyone laughed, including her (she couldn’t even say her line she was laughing so hard). Stuff like that is mildly embarrassing, but nothing is worse than if someone like that gets unreasonably angry over a little misfortune. Humility is good for us all.
Oh, and I laughed at the cow shit story for the same reasons you gave, ratty. If it had been my husband I would’ve laughed. And if anyone’s read any threads by me about my husband, you know I would never publicly humiliate him.
I detest those candid camera type shows, btw, because their intention is to humiliate someone meanly in public. I also have trouble watching game shows and talk shows, because I always feel vaguely embarrassed by the people on them.
I suppose I should add that if the victim is set up for the humiliation I never laugh, but if it is one of those freak things I do have a tendency to laugh. I also hated Meet the Parents, in fact I had supressed my memories of the movie until it was brought up.
I wonder if this is more of a guy thing. If this had happened to me, I would have expected my friends to laugh. If it had happened to them I would have laughed some. I still think it is a “there but for the grace of God, go I” thing.
I’m thinking not of Meet the Parents, but Welcome to the Dollhouse as the ultimate in being so uncomfortable watching someone on screen be utterly humiliated and totally beat down by everyone around her. Meet the Parents I could deal with, since I found humor in some of the physical comedy scenes like when he’s smoking out on the roof, but Welcome to the Dollhouse dredged up so many bad bad bad memories of being teased and ostracized by various fuckheads when I was a kid I could barely watch it. That’s the worst I’ve ever felt watching a movie in which a main character was humiliated.
But I found myself inexplicably laughing at certain scenes because Dawn was so awkward–like when she’s doing that little waving-her-arms-about dancing while sitting on the hood of the car–and I think that it was an involuntary response to how uncomfortable I felt. I probably would have cried the whole way through the movie if I hadn’t been laughing at certain points.
I’m a fan of slapsticky entertainment, like those damn funniest videos shows, but sometimes I have to turn away when I feel the discomfort coming on. Watching the American Idol recaps of failed contestants and the absolute reaming they got from the judges also gave me the creepies. I hate feeling embarrassed for someone else.
And for the record, I love the cow shit story.
Maybe I am warped, but I would have laughed my ass off if one one my friends stumbled back covered in shit.
I can’t give you any reasons why, but no matter how hard I try to stiffle my laugh, I damn near pee my pants when someone trips or falls (excluding the disabled or elderly or when someone crashes during my boyfriend’s motocross, I think those are scary). I know it isn’t nice, but I swear to God I can’t help myself.
Not too long ago I tripped and fell in the hallway here in the office and ended up doing a Superman flying thing across the floor. I was laughing so hard I literally had to crawl to the bathroom before I pee’d my pants.
A while back my sister tripped near the elevator door and landed half way in. The doors started going back and forth hitting her in the legs.
In spite of the fact she hurt her knee and spilled her water, the two of us had to grab our crotches (our own, not each others thankyouverymuch) to stop from peeing our pants laughing.
I wish I wasn’t like this, but I swear to God it is involuntary.
Diane, I think I would probably have laughed when the person returned, just because a person walking around covered in shit is an absurd situation. However, if the person seemed hurt by the fact that I was laughing, I’d apologize. I think the difference is how the other person reacts, really. If they are humiliated, I think it’s wrong to mock them by laughing – but, if they’re laughing too, it’s a coping mechanism.
I don’t see anything wrong with “gallows humor” – laughing at grave situations. Sometimes weird and horrible things are absurd. Let me give you an example. When my best friend died, it was a horrible ordeal for me and all of my friends. I went back to her hometown and stayed with her mom for the funeral and all that. I was sad, but I tried to find humor in things – for the sake of myself and the sake of my friends. I had never been to her hometown and everything was new to me. When we decided sleeping arrangements, I volunteered to sleep in my deceased friend’s bed, because the other people I was with were from this town and her bedroom had much stronger connotations. However, her mom was a little messed up by her kid dying, and had left my friend’s box of ashes wrapped in her bathrobe in the bed! It was incredibly creepy because she wore this bathrobe all the time, and plus, I had to sleep there. It got even more horrible when my friend’s mom tried to return this other robe that a friend I was with (that she had just gotten her for her birthday), but she hadn’t checked it and it was all cut up from the autopsy (my friend was wearing it when she died). But, all I could think was of the time I first met my friend, when I was moving into the dorms and got there so early that she was asleep. She frantically put on that bathrobe and ran to take a shower. I could only think “well, I guess I saw her for the first time in this bathrobe, and now I’ll see her for the last time in it, too”. At the time I found this deliciously funny. It’s a method of coping.
Gallows humor is completely understandable. I do it all the time in a strictly “laughing with” situation. “Laughing with” is different from “laughing at”, and I think that the OP is about is laughing at people who are in grave situations (those that cause injury, death, or humiliation). Laughing at someone is harmful. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad to find something privately funny – as with the OP, it was inappropriate to post a response to a grave situation that someone posted about with amusement.
I’m REALLY klutzy, and, hence, fall down or walk into things quite a bit.
When I do one of these things, I almost always laugh out loud, because a) it lets the people around me know that I’m ok, and b) it lets them know that it’s ok to laugh too.
Quite often, watching someone slip and wipe out on a banana peel is funny, just because of the legs in the air, look of horror on the face, etc. However, I’m totally horrified at any sort of social embarassment when it happens to another person (I don’t actually get embarassed - I’m way to much of a ham). I also think that when someone sets out to humiliate another person, it’s not funny, it’s mean.
I guess the falling-on-the-banana-peel thing is because it’s the sort of thing that can happen to anyone. This is assuming no major injuries are sustained.
And just before anyone thinks I’m a big mean cow, let me point out again, I wipe out on a regular basis, and I always think it’s funny, and when I retell the story later, my friends always laugh.
Yeah, that’s what an ex-boyfriend told me when I started weeping during the gang-rape scene in The Accused. Thing is, knowing that Jodie Foster wasn’t really enduring a violent and lengthy sexual assault didn’t make that scene any less harrowing to watch.
I’ll explain it - it’s because I’m a heartless bastard. I’m not the wussy bleeding heart I thought I was. I didn’t just spend the entire day caring for the great unwashed on crappy wages. I didn’t have to check 35 rooms this morning in case there was the dead body of a teen junkie in there, and during this time, I didn’t have to carry a radio with me in case I was attacked by a resident, or have to carefully avoid the heaps of HIV+ and Hep C+ sharps left discarded in rooms covered in blood, vomit, piss and shit. I didn’t, in fact, just spend ten minutes crying over this when I got home.
We had a break-in at work yesterday, a man trying to cut the face of the girl who’d snatched his wallet instead of providing ‘services’. After it all calms down and we’ve protected the girl and helped her feel safe and calm, my manager who has been dealing with this for 12 years says “Well, all we need now is an OD, a stabbing and a block fire call-out”. The office simultaneously cracks up. Gallows humour is about right, yes.
Life is pretty goddamned fucked-up enough to worry about the ‘nearlys’. In fact, if you have a life like mine, you HAVE to laugh at the nearlys, and I am very thankful if it really is the case that your worries are so few and far between that something as stupid and silly as my pitiful thread is worth your heart being broken. Leo would expect no less from me than to laugh, I would expect no less from him, as we’ve both had enough ‘shit’ to know when it’s funny or not. I’ve been knocked off my bike by a bus, nearly gone under its wheels and had the whole damn busload laughing at me - did I think ‘heartless bastards’? No, I laughed with them because life, when it continues to exist, HAS to be funny. Being knocked on your butt and flying arse-over-tit IS funny, providing you get away with nothing more than a scraped knee. Leo dines out on the tale, he can hardly make his way through it for his own laughter. After calling me a very nasty word that night, he joined in with my laughter and hasn’t stopped for years.
You keep fretting over nasty non-smokers and heartless buggers writing mean threads about their “friends”; I’m honestly pleased for you if that’s all you have to worry about. But myself, I’m going to keep fucking laughing whenever and wherever possible, as in this life the opportunity doesn’t come nearly enough.
I wish I could, really. But as I said, I swear to God I can not control myself. It is so bad that I couldn’t even control it when my kids were little and would wipe out. For example, my oldest son was pushing his big truck up and down the hallway really fast when for some reason it stopped. He did a front flip over the top and landed on him back. There he was laying there halfway crying because he had knocked the wind out of himself and I can hardly pick him up because I was laughing so fucking hard. In fact, I am laughing now just thinking about it. I honestly can not help myself.
Whatever. :rolleyes:
Please tell me you know the difference between a comedy in which the character is shown to be humiliated or foolish or even trip on a banana peel and a drama showing a gang rape.
For you to even make that ridiculous comparison is a bit over dramatic, doncha think?
Of course I can – heck, I even knew that movies weren’t real before you told us. Whether you’re watching a “hilarious” comic scene that makes you cringe or a dramatic scene that makes you snicker like a schoolboy, it’s all just make-believe right?
If something humilating happened to Diane while we were in Vegas- say, someone slipped her a laxative in her morning orange juice and she got diharhea right there on the Strip, I certainly wouldn’t laugh.
Or, what if she were walking along and someone crept up behind her and pantsed her in front of a roomful of people? I know I wouldn’t laugh at that.
Why is it funny when people are humiliated? Because some of us have a sick sense of humor, I guess. ::shrug:: As long as you’re not pointing and laughing at folks, I don’t think it’s a huge problem.
Laughing at someone else’s humiliation is part of human nature. That doesn’t mean that every single human can identify with it, but it does mean that it’s a very common response that defies easy explanation. Hell, it was funny 2500 years ago when Aristophanes wrote about guys staggering around with painful erections after their wives boycotted the marriage bed to prove a point. It’ll be funny 2500 years from now when “The Alpha Quadrant’s Funniest Home Tridees” runs the clip of the toddler getting caught in the antigrav unit, bounces up to the ceiling, and pees on everybody’s heads.
I can everyone’s points here. Sometimes humor is a great way to allieviate pain or to try to lighten things up. However, if someone were deliberatly set up, I’d find it cruel and likely not laugh. If someone simply fell, whether or not I laugh is a crapshoot(no pun intended…). If a bully gets their just desserts, I would certainly at least feel satisfied.
As for movies, it’s actually pretty hard to get me to laugh. I don’t find movies like “Meet the Parents” or “Freddy Got Fingered” funny, but “The Producers” or movies like “The Naked Gun” tend to crack me up!
