This article won honorable mention in the 2021 Michigan Interscholastic Press Association spring awards ceremony.
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Growing up in a divorced home, it hurts when jokes pass about divorce. It makes me feel like my past doesn’t matter in the long run. I feel targeted and put down. The same is likely true for people who have been abused, or assaulted, and people go around making fun of those topics.
Humor can be defined as having a quality of amusement. Cruelty can be defined as causing pain or harm to others intentionally, and the two shouldn’t mix.
According to an article written by Senior Editor of HelpGuide Lawrence Robinson, laughter is proven to improve moods, health, and sleep.
Having something to laugh at in life is vital, but laughing at others’ trauma is rude and detrimental to the healing process of that wound in someone’s life.
This is called disparagement or “dark” humor, and it has become the face of many major social media services such as Tik Tok. While this is what comedy has evolved to, these kinds of jokes are offensive. People take these jokes to heart and even label the source of the joke as “sexist” or “racist.” When people’s pasts and someone’s joke collides the “humor” quickly turns insulting and hurtful, like in my case, a joke passed about divorce.
Checking if somebody else’s feelings are at risk matters more than sharing a few laughs at their expense. Think before you speak. If someone has been assaulted, it’s insulting, to make jokes about rape, or if someone has contemplated suicide, it’s sickening even as a friend, to mock them for the scars on their bodies.
The moral of subjective humor is this: you should contemplate what you say before it leaves your mouth. Leaving others vulnerable because you wanted to be a comedian for a couple of seconds is repulsive.
While laughter might be the best medicine, empathy is the cure.
