Sick jokes highly contagious

A CORONAVIRUS walks into a bar …

The barman says: “We don’t serve coronaviruses here.”

The coronavirus says: “Well you’re not a very good host.”

The joke may be in bad taste, but in times of crisis humanity has always turned to humour to deal with adversity.

“It is gallows humour – you might as well laugh,” said comedian Dave Hughes, who is recording his 2Day FM radio show Hughesy and Ed from his Melbourne home.

“The kids wander in and I put them on air,” he said.

“One of the biggest things I want to teach them is to laugh at the ridiculousness of life.”

The fact that everyone else is in the same predicament is ripe for humour.

“But we tread a fine line between humour and offending people,” Hughes said.

“I just hope that the people who cannot see the funny side of life are not listening.”

History has shown it is important to know your audience. Jokers who cracked witticisms against Stalin in Russia or Hitler in Germany very often “disappeared”.

Jessica Milner Davis, from the University of Sydney and co-ordinator of the Australasian Humour Studies Network, said that no matter how bad the situation, humour always appeared.

There had been jokes through the worst moments in history, from the Spanish flu epidemic to Allied soldiers in World War I trenches, who contributed humorous articles to newspapers.

“Jokes were circulating in the British press straight after the sinking of the Titanic,” Dr Milner Davis said.

A Belgian university is collecting COVID-19-related jokes because “everybody all over the world is finding their inbox swamped with these things”, Dr Milner Davis said.

“As soon as shocking or terrible events occur, the almost immediate result is a slew of jokes about it,” she said. “It is an index of how stressed people are about this topic.”

Dr Milner Davis said some experts believed that it was a way for people to put the hype around a problem into perspective.

“The truth is we just don’t know,” she said.