"It's like Joseph Stalin once said. 'Dark humor is like food...not everyone gets it.'"
Comedy is society's disinfectant. If something becomes too serious it threatens to become a sacred cow, and sacred cows begin to exert power over people that is oftentimes abused. You can manipulate entire swaths of people by making something beyond judgment or making it a faux pas to criticize it. Comedy cuts right through this armor and makes the thing in question manageable, less affecting, or less frightening.
Even the devil fears humor. As C.S. Lewis said, "Above all else, the devil cannot stand to be mocked."
However, some people struggle with the concept of dark humor. Crude jokes and vulgarity are often dismissed as unnecessary or even harmful to society.
I don't agree with that even a little bit.
Dark humor is necessary for many reasons. Soldiers, doctors, or police officers like my dad and brother often use dark humor because the darkness they deal with daily requires a certain kind of off-color humor to make the world a little less intense. By matching the darkness of the humor with the darkness of the moment, the darkness itself becomes a bit lighter.
But there's also a quality to dark and vulgar humor that exposes the truth in ways that clean humor can't. Sometimes, it takes a grotesque joke to truly highlight how grotesque a sacred cow is.
For instance, the show "South Park" is a masterclass in slaughtering these socially sacred cows. If people are taking something a little too seriously, you can bet Matt Stone and Trey Parker are going to come along and use their brand of vulgar humor to expose it and invite you to laugh at it with them. They don't just reassure people that it's okay to laugh at something after mainstream culture tells you it's not; they use vulgarity to show you the vulgarity in the thing the mainstream is worshiping.
(READ: The Most Important Show on Television)
Yesterday I wrote about the hype around the highly anticipated video game "Grand Theft Auto VI" and how some conservatives immediately got up in arms about it due to the vulgar nature of the game.
Yes, it's absolutely true. The GTA series is known for allowing players to take part in awful crimes, including murder, theft, assault, and prostitution...it's also one of the best commentaries on modern society I've ever seen.
(READ: GTA6 Is Not the Target Conservatives Are Looking For)
The world of Grand Theft Auto is one of exaggerated vice, shallowness, and selfishness, with bombastic characters and situations laced to the gills with vulgar and dark humor. It's a franchise that has caused both the left and the right to breathlessly speak out against it. There have been legal actions taken against Rockstar over it, politicians like Hillary Clinton have tried passing legislation around it, protests have erupted over it, and there was, is, and will be an endless parade of pearl-clutching commentary over the games.
And yet, it's one of the best-selling games of all time. "Grand Theft Auto 5," in particular, is now over a decade old and is still selling units to this day, amounting to 190 million copies of the game sold and accumulating $7.7 billion to date.
Why is the game so popular?
For a few reasons. Firstly, like "South Park," the GTA universe tells a brutal truth about society through exaggeration. Although a lot of what happens in these games is fictional, the underlying satirical comedy that pulls no punches against any group makes for a more honest realm to be in, and there's an odd comfort in that. It allows you to laugh at the serious parts of society and take a bit out of a sacred cow.
Secondly, the real world is a dark place, and we do quite a bit to bring light to it. Like the soldier or the police officer, sometimes that means whistling in the dark. GTA is one big dark joke that people can take part in that makes the seriousness of the world a little easier to deal with. You can be as chaotic and sadistic as you want and not hurt a fly in real life, and moreover, it is a big stress relief. Despite what you may have heard from people like Joe Biden, multiple studies show that gaming reduces aggression.
These facts, along with the fact that the gameplay is immersive and fun, simply create a good time that allows people to treat a pent-up and corrupt society with healthy irreverence. In a way, you could say that the GTA franchise, like "South Park," is a good thing for society even though it looks like the worst thing.
Dark and vulgar humor isn't for everyone, and that's fine. You won't find many people at the front row of the church enthusiastically talking about what "South Park" got up to recently, but the brutal truth is that these people aren't going to be the ones to defeat or overcome some of the darker parts of our society. Sometimes, fire has to be fought with fire, and a Sunday sermon from a pastor isn't going to speak the necessary language for everyone else to understand why something should be laughed at or shrugged off.
Sometimes mockery needs to be vicious, and the truth needs to be spoken in ways that cut through the window dressing and oft-abused Christian language we put on things. Telling the truth isn't always proper and orderly, but it is necessary, and sometimes there are ways of telling the truth that work better for certain situations than others.
