ALWAYS:

Those who see dark humor as blasphemy misunderstand the human inclination to turn to comedy in the face of tragedy. It's a sad sort of posturing that conveys a rigid and ineffectual understanding of moral seriousness and solemnity that no one is actually rejecting or contradicting with jokes made at Russia's expense. In Ben Lerner's 2014 novel, 10:04, the protagonist remarks on how humor worked where the "elegy cycle" couldn't:

The Challenger joke cycle, which seemed to exist without our parents knowing, was my first experience of a kind of sinister transpersonal syntax existent in the collective unconscious, a shadow language to Reagan's official narrative processing of the national tragedy. The anonymous jokes we were told and retold were our way of dealing with the remainder of the trauma that the elegy cycle initiated by the Reagan-Noonan-Magee-Hicks-Dunn-C.A.F.B (and who knows who else) couldn't fully integrate into our lives.

The narrator goes on to say that the Challenger jokes weren't particularly good, interesting, or even funny--but wonders if they could be thought of as "bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time."

Joking can also work as a digestive aid, or a way to metabolize despair rather than be consumed by it. "Morale wins wars, solves crises, is an indispensable condition of a vigorous national life," wrote Arthur Upham Pope in 1941. This is as true today as it was then. And humor assumes a base level of optimism because it is a shield against despair, even when it is tempered by caution and grief.

There is a paradox to comedy: It "must attract and repel at the same time," wrote Paul Woodruff in 1997.

"Comedy itself sometimes separates what is laughable from what we are supposed to care about," Woodruff writes, "and this may be part of the way it defines community--we, who laugh, versus the outsiders at whom we laugh." It's not that Westerners are trying to turn the Russian-Ukrainian conflict into a superhero narrative of good guys and bad guys, but to reinforce that Putin has chosen a path that puts him at odds with the rest of the world.

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