What’s So Funny About A Squished Toad?
by Ruth Ann Harnisch on 01/29/10 at 2:35 pm
Day 29
I love a good documentary. When I was in television news, I produced several ”mini-docs,” and I appreciate what it takes to tell a true story in provocative, interesting ways.
My Sundance Film Festival schedule is always doc-heavy. I was especially looking forward to Cane Toads: The Conquest in 3D. (The director introduced it as “Avatoad.”)
It was educational, and it was also hysterically funny. The audience howled with laughter, and I was guffawing along with the rest of the crowd. And I’m still feeling terrible about that.
The documentary details the history of cane toads in Australia, where they now run rampant and are a horrible nuisance. (Imagine your lawn alive with hundreds of toads. And they’re poisonous. Pets who bite them die.)
Aggrieved Aussies employ an imaginative variety of methods to rid themselves of the pestilent toads. It’s like a Road Runner cartoon come to life, complete with toads strapped to fireworks and launched in an explosive shower of aerial pyrotechnics. One man demonstrates his prowess at running over toads in the road. With each squish, splat, and pop, the audience laughs harder. I was right there with ‘em. It was funny. Except it isn’t.
Back in my TV news days, I reported on some Hare Krishna devotees who did not make a move to brush away the flies that buzzed around them. They did not kill anything. I thought they were nuts, not even responding like a normal human. I mean, who doesn’t shoo a fly?
In the decades since then, I’ve become more sensitive to the way we humans think so much life is disposable, for our own convenience. Anyone who isn’t a vegan endorses killing for their own convenience. I find it interesting that someone who is so pro-life when it comes to human babies thinks it’s funny to say “There’s plenty of room for all of Alaska’s animals – right next to the mashed potatoes.”
I’m still eating meat. My family still engages in fishing and we allow hunting on our property. But I no longer step on insects if I can avoid it, and I’m likely to help an arachnid out the door instead of smushing it in my home. So I haven’t evolved as much as PETA might like, but I’m not as insensitive as I used to be.
I am still feeling queasy about my helpless laughter as the toads exploded.
Was I influenced by the crowd? (I don’t think so. I think I would have laughed if I were alone.) What is there inside me that was so amused by the macabre panoply of execution methods?
Last night I saw The Shock Doctrine and there were some shots of the Abu Ghraib atrocities . The military personnel involved thought the naked poses of their prisoners were funny.
Today I am meditating about what I have in common with those torturers, and I am sensitized to the cultural cues that encourage laughter at the genuine suffering of another.
3 Comments
Rosemary
Jan 29th, 2010
But you see, it is precisely the laughter than induced you to think about cues that encourage laughter at suffering of others. Art/representation always does that. Which is why Maus, or Mother Courage, or any number of words makes us either laugh, or feel a sense of the absurd . . . but, if we are like you, we think, we reflect.
But then, I am a fan of LOLCats, in which countless doogies meet their demise by feline!
Leigh
Jan 29th, 2010
Thanks for sharing your thoughtful insights.
I had my “Ah-ha” moment when I was first served quail after enjoying their beauty on a trip to south Georgia. First time I has eaten anything that actually resembled its living counterpart.
Acknowledging that sanctity of life – any life – is one of the characteristics that elevates us above the animals.
That said – I probably would have laughed too.
Jonathan Harwell
Jan 29th, 2010
Seems like you might need to cut yourself a bit of a break. I completely understand you’re impulse to question your laughter. A caring, engaged person would do just that. But I don’t think laughing in this film means you need to cancel your PETA membership or subscription to National Geographic. I’ll bet you didn’t seek out this film hoping it would be Faces of Death: Amphibean Blood Lust. Surely your impulse to laugh isn’t related to the sad acts at Abu Gharib.
Sometimes it’s attractive to think of humor as this barometer of ultimate truth that when wielded by Jon Stewart, Jonathan Swift, and Oscar Wilde says something important about people and culture. But is that always the case? While Freud has pontificated about jokes and the subconscious, Mel Brooks has said, “Tragedy is when I get a paper cut. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Sometimes it’s funny to watch something as mindless as someone stepping in a bucket. I hope I’m not a rationalizing humorist, but I’m not sure I want to understand why comedy sometimes has a body count.
In these situations I am reminded of E. B. White’s famous quote that seems oddly relevant if not prescient. “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” Of course this is not to say your post wasn’t interesting, but what makes us laugh is so complex we could argue about it forever. I could argue gallows humor isn’t a lack of sensitivity but a coping mechanism for hypersensitivity, but just typing that makes me feel a bit dull.
Jane Goddall was on The Daily Show recently talking about her friends she considers a bit overboard in their walk (lockstep?) with PETA. Jane had a birthday party with a cake. Her friends were shocked Jane would serve something containing eggs, and Jane’s reaction was, “It’s a cake.” And even the Dalai Lama has acknowledged the human inclination to swat a mosquito.
Glad to hear Sundance is providing you grist as well as fun. Hope all is well.
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