The Humor Behind the Gallows
James D. French. A murderer and coward. He was initially sentenced to life in prison for murdering a motorist in 1958 who picked him up from hitchhiking, but not wanting to spend his life in jail and too afraid to commit suicide, he also murdered his cellmate to compel the state to execute him. He was sentenced to death by electric chair in 1966. When giving his final words, French said “How’s this for your headline? ‘French Fries’.”
This is hilarious, right? But it also has an underlying sense of guilt because this man, although guilty of murder, was executed. This dark satire is known as gallows humor.
Gallows humor is a comfort tool many social workers use to treat serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way to feel more comfortable with it. But is it ethical to crack jokes about patients, who may be struggling either mentally or physically?
In a questionnaire about discrimination, proctored by researcher Elizabeth Sullivan, she asked participants the following question. “Many social workers report that they let off steam by using humor with their colleagues; or making comments which they wouldn’t want the clients involved to know about. How do you let off steam when you are with your colleagues?” Of the 65 social workers who responded, roughly two-thirds admitted to using gallows humor to relieve stress. They claimed it was “a useful mechanism” that “allowed {them} to vent all {their} uncomfortable feelings. This way {they} could face the patients and feel less stressed about those patients’ situations.”
The idea that gallows humor is a purging method was interesting when compared to the process of catharsis. Catharsis is a method in psychotherapy used to release and provide relief from strong emotional tensions. This is essentially what gallows humor does. The only disparity is that one is professionally practiced and the other “self-administered”. However, this similarity still doesn’t make it ethical.
Maybe gallows humor isn’t ethical. Perhaps the line between belittlement and harmless fun has become so blurred that gallows humor is viewed as “purging” but is just a process to disguise incompatibilities between derogatory thoughts and social work values. Does this mean it’s not as necessary for coping as previously thought?
The other one third of the respondents to above’s questionnaire think so. They expressed disapproval of the practice of gallows humor in the social fields saying that “the reflections and humor are very discriminatory, and perhaps not just letting off steam. It could be taking it a step over the border and using that particular humorous construction to actually belittle the client.”
Katie Watson gave her own personal experience on this view in her research paper “Gallows Humor in Medicine” in which she rushes to the ER after having received a deep cut from a piece of broken porcelain. She was taken on by a student who had never done the halo block anesthesia stitching (a method that blocks off the course of a nerve, numbing it, and in turn numbing the injury) that Katie’s cut would require. With encouragement from the supervising nurse, the student approached the task with care. But still unsure and hesitant about the whole procedure she probed the cut a little too roughly and caused Katie to flinch and grimace with pain. This resulted in a brief exchange between the supervising nurse, Katie, and Katie’s sister.
“Have you ever had a baby?” The supervising nurse asked.
“No.” said Katie.
“May I suggest you don’t?” The nurse joked.
“Hey!” Katie’s sister barked. “That isn’t nice! She’s being very brave.”
“I’m just saying! There are a lot of nice ones out there to adopt.”
While Katie took it as a way to lighten the mood and to say, “C’mon lady, you’re fine”, Katie’s sister took it as a belittling of her sister’s pain tolerance and was offended by it.
This doesn’t sound discriminatory. In fact it really just sounds like interpretation based on the situation. I think Peter McGraw of the University of Colorado really addresses this concept with his Benign-Violation Theory which states that people are amused by moral violations so long as they are harmless. When the tone of the threat is playful, or the setting safe, a violation that might otherwise elicit sadness or fear instead leads to laughter. What transforms these threatening violations into harmless jokes, according to the theory, is psychological distance which comes in four types, spatial, social, temporal, or mental.
Based on the above theory, Katie’s experience could be described as a mental distance because joking about not having kids due to the pain it causes is a hypothetical event that may same ludicrous if she had intentions of having kids. This would result in a moral violation that would cause a sense of disbelief and/or laughter. In contrast, Katie’s sister most likely experienced a social /Immoral/ violation because her sister, Katie, was clearly in pain jests about pregnancy didn’t seem to be appropriate to her at that time.
This discrepancy between how one situation can be viewed differently based upon position in the scenario leads me to believe that how gallows humor is viewed is entirely subjective. While some people may feel it’s okay based on their current position, others may find that same situation completely inappropriate for the use of gallows humor.
There is really no definite answer to whether or not it’s ethical. I’d be impressed if I could find the answer to ethics in a small paper such as this. However, this doesn’t mean that gallows humor should be promoted or condemned. It’s a concept that is entirely situational that I feel should be kept between colleagues or co-workers that will understand the humor for best results. Elizabeth Sullivan agrees, stating that “humor is a social activity meant to cement relationships based around shared systems of understanding.” Due to this belief, I would not walk up to a random Jewish person and crack jokes about the Holocaust. However, blonde jokes are always fair game!
