The Ne Plus Ultra of Black Humor

photo of Lenny Bruce’s arrest in l961 (Examiner Press)

Black humor tends to be inadvertent and often emanates from the most unexpected places. Would you expect an airline which had experienced two catastrophic incidents in one year to be the source of promotions which also could earn a prize in the genre, if such awards existed. Neither Pinter, nor Beckett could have thought this one up. In terms of absurdity it outdoes Ionesco, Genet or any of the practitioners of the so-called Theater of the Absurd. "In a Twitter Post, Malaysia Airlines Sends the Wrong Message," NYT, 11/28/14) read the headline of a small obscure piece in The Times. The Times article went on to report the following tweet from Malaysia Airlines, “Want to go somewhere, but don’t know where?” The Times piece also recounted a Twitter user's response that the promotion was “probably not the best choice of words for an airline that doesn’t know where one of its planes is.” You have to marvel however at the brilliance of the faux pas from an airline whose Flight 370 is still the subject of a massive search and whose Flight l7 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot out of the sky by pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists. Humorists like Lenny Bruce pushed the limits of what could be the subject of humor and today cable hosts like Bill Maher are constantly pushing the envelope. Maher recently said about the pope, “My hope is that someday he's going to have little too much sacramental wine and just blurt out, 'I'm not really religious, but I'm spiritual.'" But neither he nor his counterpart Jon Stewart could have come up with a doozer like the Malaysia airlines tweet. Perhaps truly black humor can only be produced both those who don’t see any light on the horizon.

Are There No Coincidences?

The two top stories in the news are the fates of flight 370 and the Crimea and the prospects for neither seems particularly hopeful. So what that someone in the cockpit programmed the plane to fly off its course. As much as the Times tried to make out of this “scoop,” (“Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer,” 3/17/14), it doesn’t lead us any further toward discovering the changed trajectory or the reason’s for it. Of course it did take about a week for the Malaysian government to enter the houses of the pilot or co-pilot and it’s hard to fathom the rationale for the delay. Traveling to the right column of yesterday’s front page of the Times, we read, “Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession, Defying the West.” But what can we really say about this? Obama and Putin are like two drivers with their chests pushed up against one another in an incident of road rage. Will they both return to their respective vehicles and simply drive away or will somebody actually get hurt? But the more profound question that those interested in the paranormal, who believe there are no coincidences, might ask is, are these two events in some way connected? One thing is certain they are both dead ends of one sort or another. NATO, the US and Russian will continue to be at loggerheads and the plane’s disappearance will continue to be a source of hope—though hope of what kind? Some day it will all make sense. The pieces of the puzzle will fit together. Hindsight is always 20/20 as the expression goes, but whether 370 crashed as a result of terrorism or malfunction, then the absence of the wreckage only prevents the families and friends of passengers and crew from getting closure.