Black/Dark Humor & Blackbirds

As Nick Neely writes about in "Blackbird Humor" on Audubon's blog, there was a strange incident in Beebe, Arkansas with the massive death of red-winged blackbirds. They just dropped out of the sky on New Year's Eve.

Since I'm a bird lover and the red-winged blackbird is one of my favorites, this is saddening, and I find the whole deal eery in a Biblical sense.

In his post, Neely explores the dark humor associated with how people have talked about what happened, which is one of the better explanations of dark humor that I've seen in a while. As humor goes, dark humor is my favorite since, as one of my students from long ago described it, "Dark humor, it's sort of funny. But then again it's really not once you get to thinking about it."

One of my favorite short examples of Dark Humor comes from George Carlin: "The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A death. What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, and you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating... you finish off as an orgasm."

If you're interested in browsing more aphorisms of Black/Dark Humor, click HERE, HERE, and HERE.

If you're so inclined, post one of your favorites from the links or from elsewhere.