It is said that confession is good for the soul. Columnists can be guilty of gallows humor.
The origin of that bit of wisdom about confession is unknown to me. Perhaps it was an early pope. Or, maybe it was a fundamentalist evangelical preacher seeking souls to come pouring down the aisle, tears flowing, guilt grabbing hold, ready to pledge their life and pocketbook wherever conscience and newfound faith steers them.
“You’ve already started,” readers must be saying at this point.
But, before we get very far into such a ticklish subject and just in case some poor soul out there doesn’t understand the term, let’s apply some definition.
Gallows humor is humor in the face of or about very unpleasant, serious or painful circumstances, according to Wikipedia. It is any humor that treats serious matters – death, war, disease, crime, how I comb my hair – in a light, silly or satirical fashion.
I suppose any profession can employ gallows humor, particularly if the regular functions of a job present such serious situations that momentary reality can be avoided by applying some humor. Obviously, death is the result of a “gallows” (hanging) sentence, thus the appendage for that humor genre.
In the news business, we are frequently confronted with extremely serious news that must be reported. A great deal of gallows humor is to relieve the gloom that can saturate someone. One analysis describes it as being able to laugh at evil and error to show we have surmounted it.
Reporting crime, death or any tragic occurrence and poking fun within the quarters where the work is done, is fairly commonplace. It doesn’t mean we don’t care or that we even think it is funny, but that we merely are shunting the gloom by combining morbidity and humor.
My earliest recollections of gallows humor came in a radio program (yeah, radio, as in before TV and yes, wiseacre, I’m that old). My family sat around the four-foot tall Western Auto Truetone radio and listened to shows – comedy, drama, adventure – almost like we watch the boob tube, er, uh, TV today.
The Great Gildersleeve, a 1940s radio program, occasionally featured a character, an undertaker, named Digger O’Dell. That’s a pretty good jump on gallows humor right there. Digger’s voice was pretty somber, almost eerie sounding. He was referred to as “the last one to let you down.”
All deaths – whether the actual occurrence is a significant news event or not – are at least reported in one area of the paper, labeled obituaries.
Generally, newer and less experienced members of a small town newspaper’s news staff are assigned to handle obituaries. In earlier times, almost all obits were written entirely by the news staff. Today, funeral homes do a decent job of writing death notices or obits that require just a bit of editing and rewrite to conform to newspaper style.
While many community newspapers now charge for formal obituaries, family members can purchase space (often through a funeral home) at the paper to print their own fashioned obituary (within the bounds of good taste and law).
Still, some papers attempt to “enhance” their death notice columns with some heading or label other than “Deaths” or “Obituaries.”
With the gloom of overseeing that segment of the newspaper’s reporting, sometimes gallows humor infects the obit “editor.”
Reporters at most small newspapers regularly draw the sad task of editing the obits and building the page where they were displayed.
Tiring of the chore and trying to lighten the time spent at the task, they often come up with some lulu names to apply to his sad space: Cadaver Palaver and Casket Basket among them.
Maybe you can now understand why those in this business are sometimes accused of morbidity or gallows humor. After years doing obits, it’s a matter of the preservation of sanity.
Willis Webb is a retired community newspaper editor-publisher of more than 50 years experience.
