Some thoughts on dead baby jokes

I don’t know anyone who’s never heard or told dead baby jokes (crude, very simple jokes designed to evoke an emotional reaction of disgust along the lines of “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies? You can’t unload bowling balls with a pitchfork!”). I told them myself when I was young; they seem to be a staple of American culture.

Or rather, that part of American culture that’s between, say, ten years of age and fourteen years of age. When you get above a certain age, dead baby jokes abruptly cease to be a part of your social landscape.

Over the last several days, ladytabitha has been sharing very creepy pictures of spiders with me. I know that the links she’s sending me will take me to creepy pictures of spiders; I’m not especially fond of spiders; yet I look at them anyway.

But I didn’t come here to talk about dead baby jokes or spiders. I came here to talk about the nature of reality.

To some extent, everyone constructs an illusion about the world we live in. We all like to feel safe, secure, and protected, and the reality is that none of these things is ever really true; a drunk driver, a careless mechanical engineer, or a religious extremist with heaven on his mind can intrude into our lives without warning at any moment, no matter where we may be.

It’s impossible for a person who is constantly in fear to function. So we build a set of emotional defenses, or construct an illusion of safety, that protects us emotionally; this illusion serves us because the fact is, the odds of a sudden and guesome death in a stadium collapse or at the hands of a terrorist, while not zero, are extremely small.

But we’re still fascinated by those things that frighten, disgust, or shock us.

That fascination takes many forms. When we’re young and unsophisticated, we tell dead baby jokes–which, crude as they are, are a mechanism for probing that simultaneous fascination and disgust. When we’re older, we watch Nightmare on Elm Street. As we become still more sphisticated, we read about Nazi atrocities and turn Stephen King into a cultural phenomenon.

Is it genetic? Is it hard-wired into us? I think it is.

The world is not always a pleasant placel there’s plenty within it that’s gruesome and horrifying. That fascination, I think, is an evolutionary adaptation; we’re fascinated by what’s repulsive because we live in a world where these things exist, and we need an emotional mechanism to deal with them. Without that compelling fascination, we would simply seek to avoid these things–stripping us of the tools to handle them when they happen.

So we tell dead baby jokes, and look at spiders, and read Stephen King, and develop a sort of gallows humor about it all. In the end, laughing at the Void does help protect us from it.

22 thoughts on “Some thoughts on dead baby jokes

  1. I think you’re right. I’d expand on this slightly to say that there are those of us for whom that mechanism doesn’t work quite right. The frightening/gruesome images come in, but the emotional mechanism to deal with them in the moment does not form. So either we end up paralyzed as you’ve mentioned, or we find ways to strengthen that net of illusion, to create boundaries farther out or upstream. I personally loathe Stephen King and similar type novels/books, and rarely knowingly take them in. And I’ve stopped reading newspapers and listening to the news because I find I can’t get the images of children floating in backyard pools out of my head (or the poor little boy who died of exposure because his stupid uncle left him alone in a freezing car when he went out hunting). I don’t think this avoidance necessarily “strips me of the tools to handle such events when they happen” (to paraphrase what you said), but instead frees my energy to focus on what is needful in the moment, rather than keeping me spinning around and around about something I can’t influence. It’s a fine line between denial and letting go.

    • I’m on this end fo the spectrum

      I also don’t enjoy watching violent movies because the violence sickens me… though I can tolerate a bit of kickign and yelling now… it starts to get on my nerves rather quickly (sort of ruined the first and second LOTR movies for me)….
      I used to be afraid to lose my temper because I never wanted to hurt anyone in ANY way….
      I actually went to see Pet Cemetary and HATED it…. I went to see Schindler’s list because it was an important movie but I was crying hysterically by the end of it and it took me several hours to stop crying….

      Yeah- there are those of us who are extremely sensitive- so avoiding watching this stuff is probably a good idea….

    • Hmm. I’d say it’s likely that, as with any behavior with a genetic component, it works differently in different people.

      If the mechanism for coming to some sort of emotional terms with the frightening doesn’t work in some people, then there’s nothing wrong with creating illusions to defend against those things–provided those things don’t come crashing through the front door.

      Which sometimes happens.

      In an industrialized, wealthy, developed country, I think we’re much better protected against these things than our ancestors were and than people in other places are; for us, the ability to deal with things which are frightening or gruesome or shocking is not as necessary. So not having that ability works, most of the time.

  2. I think you’re right. I’d expand on this slightly to say that there are those of us for whom that mechanism doesn’t work quite right. The frightening/gruesome images come in, but the emotional mechanism to deal with them in the moment does not form. So either we end up paralyzed as you’ve mentioned, or we find ways to strengthen that net of illusion, to create boundaries farther out or upstream. I personally loathe Stephen King and similar type novels/books, and rarely knowingly take them in. And I’ve stopped reading newspapers and listening to the news because I find I can’t get the images of children floating in backyard pools out of my head (or the poor little boy who died of exposure because his stupid uncle left him alone in a freezing car when he went out hunting). I don’t think this avoidance necessarily “strips me of the tools to handle such events when they happen” (to paraphrase what you said), but instead frees my energy to focus on what is needful in the moment, rather than keeping me spinning around and around about something I can’t influence. It’s a fine line between denial and letting go.

  3. I’m on this end fo the spectrum

    I also don’t enjoy watching violent movies because the violence sickens me… though I can tolerate a bit of kickign and yelling now… it starts to get on my nerves rather quickly (sort of ruined the first and second LOTR movies for me)….
    I used to be afraid to lose my temper because I never wanted to hurt anyone in ANY way….
    I actually went to see Pet Cemetary and HATED it…. I went to see Schindler’s list because it was an important movie but I was crying hysterically by the end of it and it took me several hours to stop crying….

    Yeah- there are those of us who are extremely sensitive- so avoiding watching this stuff is probably a good idea….

  4. Are you sure it’s not just because we’re a bunch of sick fucks? I mean, really, perhaps part of humanity just gets off on violent antsy cruel shit, and Steve King is just a socially acceptable way to get our rocks off?

    Is it genetically hard wired? No real way for us to tell. Some form of aggression triggers seem to be real, but here’s a kicker. We also have a set of triggers that, as far as I can tell, get us off on meditative states. Pretty much anyone I’ve ever met who’s practised meditation with any seriousness has gotten a really cool effect.

    The aggression trigger is easy to spring, but the meditation one takes more work.

    As for avoiding horror stripping us of the tools for dealing with it, well, I’d say that the people who (IMNSHO) deal with it best focus some attention on the opposite of horror.

    Not that this’ll make me stop reading Steve King or going to see violent movies. I love ’em. I liked dead baby jokes too.

    • “Are you sure it’s not just because we’re a bunch of sick fucks? I mean, really, perhaps part of humanity just gets off on violent antsy cruel shit, and Steve King is just a socially acceptable way to get our rocks off?

      Well, yes, precisely. The question is, why are we sick fucks? What makes us get off to this sort of thing? The answer, I think, is it’s genetic–it’s a survival mechanism. We gt off on it because people who don’t have no way to deal with it.

      “As for avoiding horror stripping us of the tools for dealing with it, well, I’d say that the people who (IMNSHO) deal with it best focus some attention on the opposite of horror.”

      I wonder if that isn’t a luxury, though. If you cannot escape horror–if your entire family was just gored by wolly mammoths or someone with a handful of explosives and a political grudge just blew the limbs off your child in a subway station–then having some mechanism to cope with that horror emotionally has a very real survival value, and I question whether or not simply turning away from it is an effective coping mechanism.

      • Well, yes, precisely. The question is, why are we sick fucks? What makes us get off to this sort of thing? The answer, I think, is it’s genetic–it’s a survival mechanism. We gt off on it because people who don’t have no way to deal with it.

        I’m not so sure. I’m always suspicious of evolutionary psychology tough. I mean, it might be. Or it just might be that we’ve trained ourselves to be numb to things that no animal would evolve to grow numb to. Why? I’m not sure. I don’t know if we’ll have a good answer to that one.

        I wonder if that isn’t a luxury, though. If you cannot escape horror–if your entire family was just gored by wolly mammoths or someone with a handful of explosives and a political grudge just blew the limbs off your child in a subway station–then having some mechanism to cope with that horror emotionally has a very real survival value, and I question whether or not simply turning away from it is an effective coping mechanism.

        I’m not convinced that people who have that happen aren’t, for the most part, more likley to act savagley towards each other when given brutal images and art afterwards.

        This is mostly a hypothesis, and it’s rather untested. It’d be ethicaly questionable to conduct an experiment on this by giving people literature after they’ve had a tragedy occur. OTOH, just taking data would prove interesting.

        Perhaps I should go back to school for a sociology degree 🙂

        • I think exposure to horror in the form of humor and other “safe” outlets better equips us to deal with horror that happens to us, or around us, rather than letting us behave better (or worse) to others.

          People who commit atrocities on others aren’t usually sick or psychopathic; they’re far more often just average, ordinary people who have for whatever reason been convinced that it’s okay to blow the limbs of small children in subway stations or feed people into ovens. I doubt that exposure, or lack thereof, to horror would change the behavior of such people at all.

          Still, it does seem very human to be fascinated by horror, regardless of culture or custom, and I suspect very strongly that it’s because there’s a genetic component to that fascination. In fact, i suspect a lot more of human behavior than we might like to think has a genetic component…

          • I think exposure to horror in the form of humor and other “safe” outlets better equips us to deal with horror that happens to us, or around us, rather than letting us behave better (or worse) to others.

            I’m going to take up a differing view, which is that exposure to horror really dosen’t do it one way or the other for us. I’m not arguing that it makes us sick and less sensitized, but that it just dosen’t change things. I think what really helps people deal is messages of compassion and generosity.

            In fact, i suspect a lot more of human behavior than we might like to think has a genetic component.

            It’s a tricky proposition to prove, though.

  5. Are you sure it’s not just because we’re a bunch of sick fucks? I mean, really, perhaps part of humanity just gets off on violent antsy cruel shit, and Steve King is just a socially acceptable way to get our rocks off?

    Is it genetically hard wired? No real way for us to tell. Some form of aggression triggers seem to be real, but here’s a kicker. We also have a set of triggers that, as far as I can tell, get us off on meditative states. Pretty much anyone I’ve ever met who’s practised meditation with any seriousness has gotten a really cool effect.

    The aggression trigger is easy to spring, but the meditation one takes more work.

    As for avoiding horror stripping us of the tools for dealing with it, well, I’d say that the people who (IMNSHO) deal with it best focus some attention on the opposite of horror.

    Not that this’ll make me stop reading Steve King or going to see violent movies. I love ’em. I liked dead baby jokes too.

  6. For some reason, thinking about this, I keep coming back to the idea of the Total Perspective Vortex(tm). It’s that sense that you know that if you knew everything you think you know — the shock would annihilate your mind.

    So we build illusions around the things we know to protect us from them; paper houses of statistics and contingencies and useless precautions.

    What good is that seat belt and oxygen mask *really* going to do you if your plane falls out of the sky? Absolutely none, but it is the illusion of safety, and that is sometimes more important. Anyone truly concerned with passenger safety in the event of total engine failure, would include parachutes under the seats instead of lifejackets. But the odds of the average plane crashing are so low that such a precaution becomes statistically unnecessary — nothing more than a costly extravagance.

    So the airline engineers build this illusion for themselves that the odds of a plane crashing are too small to worry about, and put into place the means for the passengers to build a comparable illusion that even if something does go horribly wrong, there are procedures and devices in place to protect them from it. Somewhere in the backs of our minds, we know that putting yourself into a hollow metal tube with wings and hurling yourself at great speed over 6 miles straight up is a devil’s errand. But if we allowed ourselves to dwell on that, air travel as we know it would cease to exist.

    And yet…

    And yet, we as a species are endlessly fascinated by the footage of the debris field after a terrific plane crash. (I use the word ‘terrific’ here in its sense of sharing the same root as ‘terror’.) Why? Perhaps it is a quiet reassurance to ourselves that ‘there but for the grace of (insert deity or divine force here), go I’. Perhaps it is that such a confirmation of the existance of chaotic forces all around us causes us to pull the security blanket of our illusions tigher around ourselves, paradoxically making us feel *more* secure when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

    Or perhaps it is as Morpheus intoned: to be ready for something, we must first shed our fear of it. Our illusions can do that — remove the paralyzing fear of the unlikely outcome. Does that make us more ready should that outcome come to pass? Having never been in a situation where I have had cause to find out, I have to say that I honestly don’t know.

    And that in and of itself is a little scary.

  7. For some reason, thinking about this, I keep coming back to the idea of the Total Perspective Vortex(tm). It’s that sense that you know that if you knew everything you think you know — the shock would annihilate your mind.

    So we build illusions around the things we know to protect us from them; paper houses of statistics and contingencies and useless precautions.

    What good is that seat belt and oxygen mask *really* going to do you if your plane falls out of the sky? Absolutely none, but it is the illusion of safety, and that is sometimes more important. Anyone truly concerned with passenger safety in the event of total engine failure, would include parachutes under the seats instead of lifejackets. But the odds of the average plane crashing are so low that such a precaution becomes statistically unnecessary — nothing more than a costly extravagance.

    So the airline engineers build this illusion for themselves that the odds of a plane crashing are too small to worry about, and put into place the means for the passengers to build a comparable illusion that even if something does go horribly wrong, there are procedures and devices in place to protect them from it. Somewhere in the backs of our minds, we know that putting yourself into a hollow metal tube with wings and hurling yourself at great speed over 6 miles straight up is a devil’s errand. But if we allowed ourselves to dwell on that, air travel as we know it would cease to exist.

    And yet…

    And yet, we as a species are endlessly fascinated by the footage of the debris field after a terrific plane crash. (I use the word ‘terrific’ here in its sense of sharing the same root as ‘terror’.) Why? Perhaps it is a quiet reassurance to ourselves that ‘there but for the grace of (insert deity or divine force here), go I’. Perhaps it is that such a confirmation of the existance of chaotic forces all around us causes us to pull the security blanket of our illusions tigher around ourselves, paradoxically making us feel *more* secure when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

    Or perhaps it is as Morpheus intoned: to be ready for something, we must first shed our fear of it. Our illusions can do that — remove the paralyzing fear of the unlikely outcome. Does that make us more ready should that outcome come to pass? Having never been in a situation where I have had cause to find out, I have to say that I honestly don’t know.

    And that in and of itself is a little scary.

  8. Hmm. I’d say it’s likely that, as with any behavior with a genetic component, it works differently in different people.

    If the mechanism for coming to some sort of emotional terms with the frightening doesn’t work in some people, then there’s nothing wrong with creating illusions to defend against those things–provided those things don’t come crashing through the front door.

    Which sometimes happens.

    In an industrialized, wealthy, developed country, I think we’re much better protected against these things than our ancestors were and than people in other places are; for us, the ability to deal with things which are frightening or gruesome or shocking is not as necessary. So not having that ability works, most of the time.

  9. “Are you sure it’s not just because we’re a bunch of sick fucks? I mean, really, perhaps part of humanity just gets off on violent antsy cruel shit, and Steve King is just a socially acceptable way to get our rocks off?

    Well, yes, precisely. The question is, why are we sick fucks? What makes us get off to this sort of thing? The answer, I think, is it’s genetic–it’s a survival mechanism. We gt off on it because people who don’t have no way to deal with it.

    “As for avoiding horror stripping us of the tools for dealing with it, well, I’d say that the people who (IMNSHO) deal with it best focus some attention on the opposite of horror.”

    I wonder if that isn’t a luxury, though. If you cannot escape horror–if your entire family was just gored by wolly mammoths or someone with a handful of explosives and a political grudge just blew the limbs off your child in a subway station–then having some mechanism to cope with that horror emotionally has a very real survival value, and I question whether or not simply turning away from it is an effective coping mechanism.

  10. Well, yes, precisely. The question is, why are we sick fucks? What makes us get off to this sort of thing? The answer, I think, is it’s genetic–it’s a survival mechanism. We gt off on it because people who don’t have no way to deal with it.

    I’m not so sure. I’m always suspicious of evolutionary psychology tough. I mean, it might be. Or it just might be that we’ve trained ourselves to be numb to things that no animal would evolve to grow numb to. Why? I’m not sure. I don’t know if we’ll have a good answer to that one.

    I wonder if that isn’t a luxury, though. If you cannot escape horror–if your entire family was just gored by wolly mammoths or someone with a handful of explosives and a political grudge just blew the limbs off your child in a subway station–then having some mechanism to cope with that horror emotionally has a very real survival value, and I question whether or not simply turning away from it is an effective coping mechanism.

    I’m not convinced that people who have that happen aren’t, for the most part, more likley to act savagley towards each other when given brutal images and art afterwards.

    This is mostly a hypothesis, and it’s rather untested. It’d be ethicaly questionable to conduct an experiment on this by giving people literature after they’ve had a tragedy occur. OTOH, just taking data would prove interesting.

    Perhaps I should go back to school for a sociology degree 🙂

  11. I think exposure to horror in the form of humor and other “safe” outlets better equips us to deal with horror that happens to us, or around us, rather than letting us behave better (or worse) to others.

    People who commit atrocities on others aren’t usually sick or psychopathic; they’re far more often just average, ordinary people who have for whatever reason been convinced that it’s okay to blow the limbs of small children in subway stations or feed people into ovens. I doubt that exposure, or lack thereof, to horror would change the behavior of such people at all.

    Still, it does seem very human to be fascinated by horror, regardless of culture or custom, and I suspect very strongly that it’s because there’s a genetic component to that fascination. In fact, i suspect a lot more of human behavior than we might like to think has a genetic component…

  12. I think exposure to horror in the form of humor and other “safe” outlets better equips us to deal with horror that happens to us, or around us, rather than letting us behave better (or worse) to others.

    I’m going to take up a differing view, which is that exposure to horror really dosen’t do it one way or the other for us. I’m not arguing that it makes us sick and less sensitized, but that it just dosen’t change things. I think what really helps people deal is messages of compassion and generosity.

    In fact, i suspect a lot more of human behavior than we might like to think has a genetic component.

    It’s a tricky proposition to prove, though.

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