Okay ... it's officially "tomorrow." Where's that story?
Okay... So another short story from my UNT days in the dorms.....
So ....cue the squiggly horizontal lines on the screen from old school TV as we fade back in time....
Meanwhile, full-time studies at UNT, living in 'Bruce Hall' and jokingly known as "the old man" of the hall, taking the 2nd semester of the two part Theatre history class. Along with teaching Astronomy labs, and dealing with the *worry* for the upcoming Y2K *F*E*A*R*... Having had some hard stuff happen 2 summers before when I lost 2 grandfather's... 2 weeks apart.
Often the lobby was filled with a couple solid "circles of friends" just like the cliché family room..... Talking about many deep topics at litterally any hour of the day, night, or wee hours of the morning!
In context, history just doesn't have a solid flavor of humour to its textbooks. The only ones that barely starts to broach this topic is the Theatre history textbooks that document plays. RTVF have a parallel with their textbooks with documenting movies and TV shows as well as radio shows....
I was walking in the entrance to the dorm after the nights labs at the observatory, it was about 1AM, the usual suspects where having a talk/debate/heavily sarcastic laugh about history and the idea of what would be funny the morning of January first....
Then I sat down and kinda got a "brief, if laughable clift notes".... Banter continues for a good hour plus, it's at least 2:30AM....
Folks are starting to head to bed... As do I....
I'm waking up the next morning, getting around... Post my W.O.P.O.T.D. on livejournal then grab my Unicycle, backpack and head to the cafeteria for breakfast before theatre history class....
Sitting at the big round table, thinking about the two extremes: comedy and tragedy...
I start to think about timing....
Classes occur....
Time to return for lunch.....
Wander in and join several and I'm still thinking about this differential....
I bring up the episode of the "Johnny Carson's Tonight show" that had actually talked in the monologue about when was the safe time to start making jokes about the space shuttle blowing up after it's launch.... And how the NASA acronym was now morbidly funny: Need another Seven Astronauts
That's when I came across with and said....
The idea (given the physics classes had also added to my thoughts as to this topic)
.... It's an equation that is always in flux.
The one element that seperates these two "ideas" ... Comedy and tragedy stories are seperated by *time*.... Morbid humour. Black humour. Sarcastic humour. Death humour. All this stuff is eventually something someone will laugh at, it just depends on how much *time* it takes to shift to a topic that can be laughed about.
So, around dinner time I started to share this .....
Then a few years later... 2003, and when this shuttle accident over Texas happened a few of us wondered when the 1st jokes will start to show up from this event..... That's when I was able to bring up this equation again and it definitely had a lot more traction and no one saw any disagreement on this idea.....
... @electrymonk, only 35 minutes????
(Movie quote reply, "Laugh it up fuzzball.")
(Sideways glance & wagging index finger)
"You know, I've a track record of insomnia posts here silly....."