Got it. Thanks.
I don’t understand this at all.
Often things are funny precisely because they really shouldn’t be funny. This is such a thing.
Just going to say one thing - there’s a world of difference between finding something funny, and posting on the internet that you found it funny.
One of those you likely can’t control, the other you definitely can.
Funny, like sexy, is in the eye of the beholder (I think Gene Siskel said that).
So no, I am not telling anyone what they should find funny (or sexy).
Be how you want to be. I watched the video and it made me sick.
mmm
See, I find this funny, but under no circumstances would I watch the video…
Yeah, i never intentionally watch video of people dying. I once viewed a photo montage of a pig being slaughtered, and that was bad enough. (I’m cool with videos of surgery and of meat butchery, fwiw. It’s the watching something die that i hate.)
If you see the video and find it funny because it’s so ironic or incongruous, the decent thing is to feel bad about finding it funny.
I didn’t watch the video, I’m sure my mental image (which is rendered in the style of the animated interludes in Monty Python’s Flying Circus) is much funnier. Actually watching the video seems creepy.
The existence of the video is what I think sets this apart from our every day gallows humor. It makes it much less abstract. If it had just been a standard news story we’d have snarked and moved along.
That’s a lot different than ‘I just watched a man die and I laughed and laughed and laughed.’
[checks “priest killed by falling crucifix” on 2026 Bingo card.]
Being the sort of guy whose disdain for organized religion rivals only his spirituality, I don’t have anything useful to add with regard to our deceased priest. I would like to point out, however, that there is absolutely zero evidence of this being a TRAGIC event.
An accident does not a tragedy make. There is nothing to say the crucifix fell as a result of the priest’s character flaw, or that it was the climax of a well-prophesied and inescapable fate. The thing just fell on his head and he died. A guy. Sad, yes. Tragic? get outta here.
I wouldn’t rate this a horrible death, either, to the recipient. Instant, with zero anticipation or pain.*
*I guesstimate massive brain damage and severed spinal cord, at a minimum.
I was thinking a Charles Addams cartoon with a squashed priest and Pugsley holding a screwdriver, but yeah, as a dark humor joke, funny, in real life, not funny. Like the kid who was shot by a friend because he “thought he was a squirrel”.
In strict Ancient Greek dramatic parlance you’re surely right.
Here in the 21st Century? That horse is out of the barn and into the next time zone. Your quibble is noted and dismissed.
With vanishingly few exceptions every death is a tragedy (in the modern sense) to the victim and their family. And is, to some degree, a diminishment of all of us.
The old saying that “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” may be true, but it’s not saying something favorable about human nature.
How about horrible for the parishioners, many of whom likely deeply cared for this man, witnessing what I presume was a bloody mess of his death?
As Mad Magazine pointed out, we’d have far less sympathy for the Addamses if we actually saw the hot oil land on the Christmas carolers.
It might be funny, but not as funny if a McDonald’s arch were to fall on Trump.
Well. Really sad for the family and the parishoners, ironic even. But I’d argue still not unjust enough, in a cosmic sense, to be tragic. I don’t think there can be an upside to a tragedy–hence the term being created to encompass inarguably bad/sad/unjust situations. The tittering accompanying this story belies an upside of some kind.
As for horses and barns, horsie would come back to the barn if the grammar police had an ICE-like presence on the streets. Words gotta mean something. Calling an event something more severe than what it actually is only dilutes the word and robs it of its meaning. Also, by allowing people to call pitiful annoyances (i.e. an underdone cupcake) a ‘tragedy’ we end up having to resort to adverbs for actually tragic things because “tragedy” now only means “slightly annoying”. I ain’t saying we need to get oppressive about it like the French, but there is nothing wrong with humiliating poor vocabulary and grammar usage. After all, without complex language we’re basically just monkeys.
Only one way to know for sure…
Now *that’s * funny!