C’mon folks, It’s been over a week! Ten years ago, when Princess Di abruptly kicked it, I heard the first tasteless joke within 24 hours - when I walked into work the next day (“What was Princess Di’s favorite movie? Crash!”)
Hot young, very eviable star, the Mary-Kate Olsen connection, the fact that he starred in a controversial ‘gay’ movie, where’s the low-brow humor?
Of all places, I’d imagine that the SDMB would have had a few chucklers already.
As Joel McHale said on The Soup (which regularly makes horrible, tasteless, and very funny jokes about anyone in the public eye): In all the years we’ve been doing this show, we have never once had any reason to mention Heath Ledger’s name.
He then asked the rest of the media to stop being weasels.
Yes, Heath Ledger made a gay-themed movie, which was serious and well-respected. Other than that he never drew any tabloid attention. His death is just sad, and there’s really nothing to joke about.
Now when Britney goes, OTOH…
Thank you. Your answer was much better than the one I was composing in my head.
I also came in here to mention the Soup comment. He was pretty squeaky clean while alive.
The jokes about those douchebags that drove off the runway are much funner and easier. They write themselves!
I actually made a tasteless Brokeback Mountain joke on the day he died. Something about not having to quit him anymore.
Nobody laughed. 
Fox News tool, John Gibson mocked Ledger’s death and made some lame “quit you” joke. Nothing Gibson said was funny and he just looked like a complete douchebag.
I don’t think OD’s lend themselves to jokes very well.
Not just, he also looked like an ignorant douchebag. He credited the character of Ennis (Ledger’s role) with saying “I wish I could quit you” when it was Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) who said it.
Accidental OD, if that’s what it was (the toxocology reports have not come back yet). He was exhausted and had insomnia which led him to take sleeping pills, plus he had walking pneumonia at the time. With all that, he could have had a heart attack.
No hard drugs were found at his apartment, and he did not commit suicide.
It was a tragic accident.
Well, OK, but…
Christa Mccauliffe never drew any tabloid attention at all, and her death was pretty damn sad, and she was just a high school teacher, not in the public eye at all. And I was only eight years old at the time, but even I knew that the answer to the question “Where did Christa Mccauliffe spend her vacation?” was “All over Florida.”
I mean, Heath Ledger seems like he was a pretty good guy, but he’s no cleaner and his death is no sadder than the deaths of dozens of others about whom tasteless jokes have been told. The OP asks a reasonable question.
I don’t think many eight year olds hang out around here.
Has the OP tried Something Awful or Fark or one of those kinds of places? They might have what he wants.
They’re here.
And, wow, they’re universally not funny. Not “unfunny,” as in mean-spirited (though some are), but just plain not good jokes.
We’re too busy with the Jeremy Beadle jokes on this side of the pond…
I think the difference is in the range of people aware of certain events or celebrities. Ledger is very well known to the 20-30-somethings, maybe only fairly well known to the 40-50- crowd, but older people really don’t know who he is. Most 60, 70, 80-year-olds knew who Princess Diana was, knew about McAuliffe on the space shuttle, etc.
Plus, there’s the shock factor. Actor gets beheaded, basketball player contracts AIDS, teacher BLOWS UP in space vehicle. An actor ODing (either accidentally or by suicide) is not as shocking as it once was.
Just a couple opinions, not sure of their validity, of course. . .
Sir Rhosis
Diana’s death and the first shuttle disaster were huge media events. Anyone who watched television or stood in a grocery store checkout line was bombarded with images of both. In the first case, there were several paparazzi on the scene. In the second, the event itself was televised. Heath Ledger died alone, away from cameras. Although it may seem like he’s gotten a lot of attention, it isn’t anything like the saturation coverage of the other events. Plus, although Ledger’s death made a lot of people sad, he was never unofficially canonized the way Diana and the astronauts were. Jokes about them had the cachet of being transgressive and anti-establishment. A joke about a promising young actor who dies young is just crass and pointless.
Pretty lame jokes- accounting jokes due to his last name (Bart Simpson hasn’t heard these I guess) and various generic dead guy jokes- nothing creatively specific to him in the bunch.
Personally I refrained from posting this to scans_daily (and other comic boards), but if you insist (crudeness and actual humor not guaranteed):
My first thought was wow, I can tell you right now who killed him:
Yeah, I’m a geek.
The general reaction amongst people I know was ‘Wait a minute. Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse are alive and Heath Ledger is dead? How is that possible?’ Which is sort of a joke, though not in the set-up/punchline model. It’s also not really a joke about Heath Ledger, but about Spears and Winehouse.
I think it’s mainly just that Ledger was fairly private and normal and people didn’t know a lot about him. That makes him both harder and less interesting to mock.
Are you seriously suggesting that there won’t be any Heath Ledger jokes because his death was sad?
I don’t think you quite understand the nature of the sick joke.
Not really a joke in the technical sense, but I have a very high-strung friend who sent me an email about a conversation we had recently where I apparantly agreed to something that I don’t remember agreeing to. It set up a long, irrelevent chain of misunderstandings and he was ranting about how much it screwed him up, and in the middle was this:
“…but you didn’t give me the opportunity to discuss that, and, in fact, you agreed with the plan and then denied it ever happened. Take a minute to think about how CRAZY this makes me. I tell ya, if my masseuse weren’t on her way, and these sleeping pills weren’t so potent, I might be totally unable to relax.”
That made me bust up laughing. The fact that, in the middle of this giant diatribe he threw this in, priceless.