DARK HUMOR

 

As an adult I always had a dark sense of humor. This wasn’t a problem because I was a Marine Corps Artilleryman and we were all pretty twisted. The first time I got any strange looks, I had changed jobs from Artillery over to Communications. During our “Welcome back to civilization” brief after an Afghanistan deployment, the safe driving instructor told us a story of a young woman texting her boyfriend while driving. She ended up dying in the bottom of a drainage ditch. Her last text was “Where u at?”. I said maybe he answered that he was in the ditch. I thought that was funny, but apparently no one else did. I told my wife this story, still chuckling over my own cleverness, she shook her head and gave me the stink eye.

I actually have one of these.

Fast forward 7 years, I’m watching Amazon’s Patriot with my wife and laughing my ass off when he pushes a coworker in front of a truck for the second time because the poor bastard was starting to recover his memory about the first time. If you haven’t seen Patriot, and your humor is dark, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Anyway, my wife turns to me and starts going off. “What’s wrong with you, how is this funny?” “Too dark!” So I asked her about the movie we watched the prior weekend, UHF. She said that one was “GIRII GIRII,” Japanese for right on the edge. I was a little surprised by this, she had never complained about my humor being too dark before. After a lot of my jokes, she would tell me that was wrong, but she would still be laughing. Somehow Patriot crossed a line.

I prefer dark humor to toilet humor. Robin Williams screaming that he is “Rainbow-Fucking-Randolph” is funnier to me than anything I’ve ever seen in a Jim Carrey movie. Or Snatch, when Cousin Avi kills Tony while trying to shoot the dog, funnier than “The price is wrong bitch”.

How did I get this way?

 

I blame Dr. Demento, a weekly radio show that played weird and funny songs. I used to listen to it every Sunday night on my little transistor radio under my pillow.

It started innocuously enough: Wet Dream

One of my all-time favorites: The Scotsman

Little darker: Dead Puppies

My intro to Tom Lehrer: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park

Weird Al: You Don’t Love Me Anymore

More Tom Lehrer: Masochism Tango

All of these are GIRI GIRI to my wife, funny and really close to the line, but not quite over.

My wife says this one is over the line, but it did the impossible, made a pedo clown funny: Kinko the Clown

Even now just singing it to myself puts a smile on my face.

I have learned and don’t make as many jokes in front of people as I used to. I did piss my Sister-in-Law off once: she is an awesome lady, but she got my redneck truck driving brother to walk in the https://www.walkamileinhershoes.org/challenge. We were talking about that while drinking beer and got on the topic of wife beatings. I told two of my favorite jokes:

What does a woman do when she gets home from the Woman’s Shelter?

The dishes if she’s smart.

And…

What do you say to a woman with two black eyes?

Nothing, someone already told her twice.

She knows I love her and if someone was beating a woman I cared about, it would be a bad day for that son of a bitch, but holy shit, she was mad. She didn’t yell, but you could tell. No long term harm but my wife was flabbergasted that I would tell those jokes in public. I figure that because I don’t beat my wife and I have a very dim view of those who do, there is no reason to be offended by my telling the jokes. If I had beat my wife, and then told those jokes, I could understand the anger.

I will close with my all-time favorite example.

My wife really hates that one, but I have listened to it many hundreds of times and I still laugh every time.  It starts sounding like a love song, every line adds a little more of a twist until you realize the truth.

Usually YouTube comments are a dumpster fire, but this one was perfect:

Edgar Allan shakespeare 2 years ago

I wish I could forget this song so that I can experience listening to it for the first time again.

I don’t think I’ve been offended by a joke since I was 13, and most if not all of the Glibs seem about the same, so let me know your favorite things that are not appropriate for normal people.