It seems that everyone, to some extent, is entertained by bad things happening to others. Even here in SDMB, we are quite gleeful about the trainwreck of Britney Spears, and we even have a Celebrity Death Pool that seems quite fun for the participants (even though the fun is coming from people’s deaths). In real life, I must admit to being enthralled (and embarrassed) by a nasty argument between a couple of strangers.
Is this wrong?
I would like to think it’s not, unless you’re adding to the misfortune or not stopping easily-preventable misfortune. But there’s still something slightly unsettling about getting any sort of jollies off of others’ serious problems.
I think most people would reserve that term for things that have some kind of effect. It’s wrong to steal, because it deprives someone of their property, for example - but even that is just that way because we all (well, mostly) accept it to be so.
I think we have various instinctive group behaviors that we use to maintain and enforce social behavior at a very primitive level, like entertainment by the misfortune of others, and gossip and jealousy and so forth.
I don’t think it is wrong, exactly, and imagine it would be hard for us to learn to function without them. Though, entertainment by the misfortune of others is just a bit higher on a slippery slope than is creating that misfortune for entertainment. Maybe it depends more on how exactly you define “wrong” than it does on the entertainment itself.
I think it’s pretty normal to be entertained by the misfortunes of those who have the means to prevent their misfortunes (Britney Spears and her repeated pregnancies, e.g.) and by those whose misfortunes are the result of bad behaviour (the robbers in Home Alone, e.g.). General misfortune that is obviously fictional is funny, too.
It’s pathologically wrong to think a starving AIDS patient abandoned and dying in Africa is funny.
And what Mel Brooks, said, too, as long as I don’t know you that well. Because bad things happening to you somehow makes me superior.
It also means, in an irrational cosmic sense, that since bad things are happening to you, maybe they’re less likely to happen to me. There’s an element of relief to it.
Enjoying the misfortunes of others, Schadenfreude, is perhaps most defensible when the sufferer is a famous person exposed to all as a hypocrite or a fraud. It’s least morally defensible, IMHO, when bad things happen to someone whom you know personally and you conceal your own glee at his or her downfall.
What Napier said. It’s ok and normal to find humor in the misfortunes of other under certain conditions (fiction, no real harm done, a “sliver of guilt”). It’s not normal or ok to cause misfortune for its entertainment value.
I believe something is only wrong if it harms others physically or emotionally. Watching someone fall down, it’s not wrong if you found it funny, but it’s wrong to laugh at them to their face and cause them embarassment.
It’s a bit of a gray area concerning, say, an African child dying of AIDS. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to laugh at that, though doing so will reflect negatively on your personality. It’s not wrong to be a jackass, until your jackassery actually harms another person. If you personally flew to Africa and visited a dying child just to laugh at them to their face, that would be wrong.
I think it’s fine to find humor in anything at all. What’s wrong is to cause or aid the misfortune, to by negligence allow it to continue, or to allow your enjoyment of the misfortune to become known to others who wouldn’t appreciate it.
I must chime in to say what a great word this is. I remember being introduced to it in a college literature class and thinking “Wow, there’s a word for that? Ha!”
