World having the laugh last

By ELEANOR BLACK

Humour can soothe the heaviest heart, but people are not yet ready to laugh about the terrorist attacks on the United States.

The e-mail jokes, cartoons and doctored photographs which usually inundate the world just days after a tragedy are this time merely trickling out.

The tragedy in New York and Washington is still too fresh for humour, say sociologists.

The magnitude of the event may mean we never see the funny side, just as we never laughed about the killing fields of Cambodia or the Nazi death camps, says Nick Perry, associate professor of sociology and media studies at Auckland University.

Professor Perry says humour is a survival strategy used by people in times of extreme stress, when they have no other way of dealing with their anger and sense of helplessness.

America's aggressive pursuit of a military strike to soothe the nation's grief means people do not yet need jokes, he says.

"Humour at a time like this looks exploitative and in bad taste and I don't think it's going to happen."

Another sociologist, who preferred not to be named, said humour was used to question the majority view. He expected that we might soon see bleak cartoons and ironic one-liners doing the rounds.

"It's a way of posing those difficult questions: How could one country be so hated? When will it be okay to ask those questions?"

But one image doing the rounds, of British comic Rowan Atkinson (best known for his bumbling Mr Bean character) dressed in robes as "Bean Laden", looks set to become an e-mail classic.

While New Zealand media are steering clear of war-related jokes of any kind, Auckland University's student publication Craccum is breaking the mould by poking fun at the American people.

Last week's list of 10 reasons living in New Zealand is better than living in the US included "Americans talk real funny" and "Americans are fat".

News editor Mark Easterbrook said the magazine wanted to take a different approach to the tragedy.

"We have so many Muslim students we wanted something little to lighten things."

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