Literally the day after the Penn State story came up, I heard some real “gems” from co-workers. Heck, there were Challenger jokes on the school bus home that day. How about you guys? Do they usually show up pretty quick?
As you mentioned with the Challenger almost as the news is reporting it. The quicker the better I say. Humor is the best way to deal with tragedy.
Never forget the difference between tragedy and funny.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Funny is when you fall and break every bone is your body.
I was hearing Bobby Kennedy jokes even before he was pronounced dead. :eek:
Really? It was my perception that the people making Challenger jokes the next day weren’t particularly sensitive to begin with. Maybe they hid it really well.
I heard a joke about the World Trade Center very soon after the second tower collapsed. At the time, news about the attack on the Pentagon was just breaking, and reports about the crash of Flight 93 were starting to rise above the chatter. FWIW, I didn’t find the guy’s comment particularly clever or funny.
I think it was September 12th but no later than September 13th, I heard a young girl say, “That is soooo September 10th” when referring to something out of date. I found ti very clever.
Gilbert Gottfried tried to tell a joke at the roast of Hugh Heffner, about two weeks after Sept 11th. There were boos and cries of, “Too soon.” Gottfried told The Aristocrats joke instead. I think that was the official end of the national mourning period.
SFC Schwartz
“Gallows humor”, that is.
And almost immediately after Challenger, this also became a much-discussed phenomenon in the media.
(Missed edit window. Mods, you really ought allow 10 minutes!)
Article (first page only): http://www.jstor.org/pss/1499820
As I heard Baxter Black say one time - “If your friend gets thrown from his horse and into the barbed wire fence, the first thing you do is check if he’s all right. If he is, you start telling the story right away. If he’s not, ya wait a couple days.”
Back after Columbine happened, when paranoia was still high, my school got a bomb threat. My friends and I were joking around about it while it was going on.
I was making 9/11 jokes on 9/12. Some of us just handle stress and tragedy with humor. Yea, it’s inappropriate, yea it’s crass, and it’ll always happen.
There is a precise formula for determining this. We’ve all heard that comedy = tragedy + distance. But the “distance” component is made up of two sub-components: time elapsed since the event, and personal identification with the event. The magnitude of the tragedy also plays a role, which is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the comedy. There are still people who get offended by Holocaust jokes, even though it happened some 70 years ago, because, well, it was pretty horrible. Whereas the Inquisition was also pretty horrible, but happened long enough ago that it’s pretty safe for jokes.
So a revised formula would look like this:
Comedy factor = [(time elapsed since event) * (personal distance from event)] / (magnitude of tragic event)
Back to the OP: Don’t leave us in suspense. Share some of these Penn State jokes.
A cover-up like that – who the hell does this Paterno think he is, a Cardinal?
I heard that about 2 days after the news.
Years ago, I visited an 84-year-ols shut-in lady. She regaled me with about 15 minutes of Jeffrey Dahmer jokes. Finally I asked her how she had so many jokes so soon – that had only been on the news on that day. She said it was easy – just change the name in Ed Gein jokes.
Penn State jokes I’ve heard ( I make no claims as to the “humor” of these):
An older woman who goes after young men is a Cougar. An older man is a Nittany Lion.
WE ARE! PAEDO STATE!
Apparently Sandusky was big on the huddle. And that he was just recruiting early.
As soon as I think them up 
That’s wonderful.
I wish I could remember all the Jim and Tammy Baker jokes.
I heard Osama Bin Laden jokes almost immediately.
I think most jokes about a tragedy/scandal are written within 1 minute of the news breaking: somebody is watching the news and the line just comes to him.