Member-only story
What’s so funny?
And more importantly: Why? Spoiler: Nobody knows.
When my father died, a family member told me he wanted to donate his body to science. I blurted out, who the fuck would want his body? We both started laughing like maniacs.
You may not find this funny because you don’t know my dad or you don’t know me. Or your beliefs might make you think my joke was crass and cruel. You might draw some conclusions about me as a person. Or you might connect with my way of dealing with a horrible situation — my dad dying just a couple of years after my mom, both sick, both alone, with Covid lockdowns fucking up all our plans to grieve together and with so many things unsaid between us. So I made a joke about how even the most desperate scientists would not want his decrepit, illness-ridden body destroyed by alcohol and drugs and cigarettes and bacon.
The best kind of humor to me is about the absurd, the incongruent, the violation of boundaries, the unexpected. If that’s not your kind of humor, cool, everyone is different and scientists have no clue why. Scientists don’t know why people think something is or isn’t funny and why your sense of humor differs from that of the next person. Researchers have many interesting ideas about this, but no firm conclusions.
