Psychology

Bringing Some Mania To the Media, Gushing With Gallows Humor

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It’s no surprise to anyone who has worked in Journalism (or had loved ones who have) that people working in the Media either develop a dark sense of humor over time or have one to begin with. Gallows humor isn’t uncommon in people who experience physically or psychologically stressful and challenging situations in their line of work. It’s something that research has consistently shown to be true for Medical Professionals, First Responders, Veterans, Journalists, and others who regularly encounter difficult and unpleasant things in their line of work.

This makes perfect sense, considering the well-established connection between humor and stress reduction, as well as the impact it has on depression and irritation. Dark Humor is, for many people, a Coping Mechanism that helps to stave off depression and distress in response to traumatic experiences, and not exclusively those associated with one’s occupation. It’s been compared to “whistling past the graveyard” by some.

Several studies have been conducted on the correlation between Dark Humor and Trauma, available from organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the American Medical Association. The overall effectiveness of this kind of outlook (as far as catharsis is concerned) is debatable, but the prevalence is undeniable.

That being said, my tendency toward Gallows Humor can run a bit darker and deeper than most. Some of that could be related to my secondary career as a horror author and a certain desensitization that goes with intentionally exploring some truly taboo and horrific topics, as well as the worst aspects of my own human nature. It could be a result of Childhood Trauma combined with my career choices. It could be something in the way I’m hardwired. I do know that my greatest enjoyment concerning jokes and comedy has always leaned in that direction, at least as far back as I can recall. My suspicion is that (at least in my case) it’s a combination of all of the above that influences my brand of humor as it stands today.

One of the ways my humor manifests in my career as a Journalist is in a fascination with both alliteration and rhyme, especially in places where it’s thoroughly inappropriate. Some of my colleagues can appreciate my perspective, and even the inherent humor behind my statements and suggestions, while others find it perplexing and in poor taste. I suspect some of the latter individuals would find themselves less shocked by my occasional outbursts and the like if they’d been working in the industry longer than they have.

When I was still working in Western South Dakota, during the late summer of 2022, there was a murder that took place at a mobile home in Box Elder, the town that is butted up against Ellsworth Air Force Base. I typed up a quick Limerick and sent it via text to my News Director so that it would be the first thing she’d see when she woke up for work that morning. I received a one-word response a short while later, “No!”

Naturally, I wasn’t sincerely going to incorporate anything like the following rhyme into my scripts for the Newscast, but that didn’t change how amusing I thought it was to imagine doing so.

There was a middle-aged man in Box Elder.
He hated a woman and felled her.
He’s under arrest.
Despite his protests.
He was caught trying to run from the trailer.

In May of this year, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared the month to be Wildfire Awareness Month. When we were covering the story, I suggested a poem for the reporter we were assigning to it. I don’t consider the following poem to be particularly dark, but I understand how and why it was nevertheless unacceptable in practical terms.

Top fire officials share an outlook that’s quite concerning…
Offering tips to keep Oregon’s forests from burning.
Governor Kotek signs a new declaration.
Wildfire Awareness Month is her creation.
The fire cache is stocked up with much-needed supplies.
What you can do to avoid a scorching surprise.

There are several more incidents of me attempting to insert levity where most people would insist it does not belong, and I suppose I should share a few more examples. Some of these may be a bit grim, while others (I insist) are simply funny.

It was May of 2024 when Washington’s former Attorney General, Bob Ferguson, was campaigning for Governor. A Republican activist recruited two men, also named Bob Ferguson, to campaign as Democrats as well, going so far as to pay their filing fees and handle the registration of their campaigns. Those two fraudulent campaigns were ultimately withdrawn from the race because it’s a Class B Felony to intentionally mislead or confuse the election as they were. I put the story together for my Newscast and suggested that I should use a graphic saying, “Two Bobs, One Gov.” The way I looked at it, anyone who picked up on the reference to “Two Girls, One Cup” wasn’t likely to complain about it.

In October of 2024, one of our reporters provided a multi-part explainer on how the new Ranked-Choice voting process works because Portland had implemented Ranked-Choice for the Mayoral Race. When he was delving into how tabulation of the results would be performed, I opted to tease the story with, “What to expect when you’re electing.”

That same month, there was an Officer-Involved Shooting in a Taco Bell drive-thru, and I suggested we should lighten the tone by saying the individual who was shot had been trying to make a run for the border. I wasn’t alone in making bad jokes associated with that particular incident. Things like Glock-o Bell may have been tossed around for our amusement.

In November of last year, I found a story from Alaska about a beached fin whale near Anchorage. Part of the story focused on a mother who homeschools her children, and how she used the carcass as supplemental material for biology lessons. While putting the story together for my Newscast, I added a graphic that said, “A Whale Of a Lesson,” and I’m still pretty proud of that.

In April of this year, we were discussing updates to the police investigation of a mother and her children who were found hanging in their home a couple of weeks earlier. It wasn’t a quiet environment when I muttered (thinking it was only to myself), “I’m just hanging with my family this weekend.” It was, however, quiet enough that one person did hear what I said, and their response seemed to display both appreciation and shock at what I’d just said.

There is a walking trail near where I live in Vancouver, featuring various gnome figures and fairy gardens, because several children use that path to get to school. It provided a little bit of magic as kids made their way to and from school, and the nearby community put a fair amount of time and effort into contributing to those additions to the trail. People being who they are, it’s no surprise that someone came along and started destroying the gnomes, and I proudly wrote a script that said the community intended to fight back against the “gnome wrecker.”

It wasn’t long ago that we learned of a sperm race taking place at the Hollywood Palladium in LA, complete with a tiny racetrack and high-resolution cameras monitoring the speed and motility of the sperm cells facing off head-to-head. We chattered about that on and off for a couple of hours, leading to a deeply unserious environment. One of our photographers said he could fly down to LA to shoot the event, and I asked if we could refer to that as a new form of “skeet shooting.”

From what we were seeing, the main event appeared to be a contest between sperm from a white man and a black man. I asked how long it would take for the racists to start in with accusations of “fast-twitch flagella.”

Some of these are dark, and some are inappropriate, but they’re also emblematic of what it can be like to work in the field that I do. This may go some way toward explaining my attitude at times when I’m discussing politics and other topics as well. Combined with my deeply-rooted cynicism, my tendency to find humor in things that might not be inherently humorous occasionally causes issues for me in my personal life, more often than my professional one. There’s a degree of amusement to be found in my professional environment being where some of my least professional comments are the most acceptable. But, the reality is that we understand one another there, and we understand how some of the things we expose ourselves to would wear us down far more quickly if we didn’t find a way to laugh through the pain and whistle past the graveyard.

Santa’s Package by Nikki Noir & S. C. Mendes

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I didn’t know Santaphilia was a thing until reading this story from Nikki Noir and S. C. Mendes. I can’t say I was surprised, just that it never crossed my mind to imagine there might actually be an official term applied to individuals with a Santa fetish. As a bearded man named Nikolas–who also happens to celebrate a December birthday–it almost seems disappointing that I’ve missed out on an opportunity to capitalize on this fetish existing.
There’s so much more to this story than just Amber’s frustrated attempts to find a man who is willing to fulfill her fantasy of making love to the Jolly Old Elf himself, though that does set the stage quite nicely.
Rooted in a possible hallucinatory experience when she was 12-years-old, Amber’s fixation on Santa begins at the same point when her family life falls apart. Saint Nick sits her down and tells her she’s special, warning her that life is about to become more challenging and assuring her that she’s strong enough to make it through everything. Ten years later, is it finally time for Santa to return?
At its core, Santa’s Package is a tale that delves into the potential ambiguity of that point where mental illness and legitimate visitation might coexist. How easily can our perceptions and attitudes be manipulated? Are there cases where someone seemingly insane is actually the victim of experiments and sinister machinations?
Santa’s Package may not answer these questions for you, but it’ll certainly raise new questions to consider and explore, and isn’t that what the best literature is meant to do? There’s a whole lot of potential inquiry crammed into this relatively small package, but if you’ve had the pleasure of discovering this one under your tree, you should certainly enjoy it.

Santa’s Package was released through http://www.godless.com as part of the AntiChristmas event for December of 2021. You can obtain a copy for yourself by going to the website or by downloading the Godless app for your mobile device. The link is below:

https://godless.com/products/santas-package-by-nikki-noir-s-c-mendes

Get Me Out Of This Shimmering Oasis by Lucy Leitner

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It’s a depressing reality that we’ve all known people like @wellnesswarrior497. Whether in real life or online, at the workplace, in the classroom, or even in the checkout line at the grocery store, we have all surely run into the people proclaiming their high-vibration energy and how blessed they are. The same people telling us about fad diets, new types of massage, and how this or that crystal will help us manifest our best selves.
Get Me Out of This Shimmering Oasis is a story of that sort of person, shared with us as snapshots to her Instagram account. She gleefully tells us of her arrival at a new wellness facility, regaling us with the litany of ailments she’s overcome through various dubious methods. Within hours, it becomes clear that this facility might not be what she–and the other guests–expected. Sadly, it dawns on us quite a bit faster than it dawns on @wellnesswarrior497.
If you, like me, have little more than contempt for social media “influencers” and their pyramid scheming counterparts in our everyday lives, you are absolutely going to love this story. It’s hard not to feel a little bad for the vapid protagonist along the way, in the same way one might feel bad for a child who doesn’t understand what’s happening around them. It’s ok, though, that sympathy is easily overridden by a desire to never listen to the insipid ramblings of the two-dimensional loser any longer.
Leitner does not disappoint as she scratches away the veneer of sanity and health of people like the protagonist.

This title is available as part of the 31 Days Of Godless event over at http://www.godless.com or via the Godless app. The link is below:

Get Me Out of This Shimmering Oasis by Lucy Leitner

Why the Neurodiversity Movement Matters

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I was a reasonably young child when I was diagnosed with ADHD. I wasn’t one of those cases where the diagnosis was just being tossed around and applied to kids behaving as kids always have…in my case (as with many others back in the 1980s), it was a legitimate diagnosis. I was prescribed Ritalin at that time, and it did seem to do the trick–when I was in school. By the time I’d been home for a little while, I was twice as difficult to deal with as I’d been before the diagnosis and prescription. Before that, I’d been a handful–no surprise to anyone who knows me as even an acquaintance, even as an adult–after that, I was a holy fucking terror.
It didn’t take long before my mother stopped me taking the Ritalin, because it was ultimately a bit of an issue. If it had been a few years later, they probably could have found some sort of scheduled dosage that might not have produced the same negative side-effects. Whatever the case may be, life goes on.
Years later I was further diagnosed with passive-aggressive personality disorder, not to be mistaken with someone behaving in a passive-aggressive manner. They are two distinctly different things, though there are some commonalities in the manifestation of passive-aggressive personality disorder and an individual being a passive-aggressive asshole–but there’s no sense in going into that here. As with other personality disorders, there is no drug treatment associated with the passive-aggressive disorder–it’s a wiring issue rather than a chemical one.
Passive-aggressive personality disorder frequently goes hand-in-hand with anxiety disorders, major depressive disorder (MDD), suicidal ideation, and substance abuse. You might have guessed it if you figured there’s a reason I mention all of those things in particular.
You win the prize!
There is no prize.
Get used to disappointment.
In addition to these things I’ve already mentioned, there have been strong signs of PTSD related to assorted experiences from my childhood (both as a young child and in my teen years). With all of those factors combined, I like to think I’ve turned out to be a reasonably functional adult and a productive member of society. I definitely have my issues here and there, and I can certainly still be quite difficult to deal with in even small doses (depending on the day)…but, all-in-all I’m keeping it together rather well if I do say so myself–and I do, so don’t argue with me.
I wish there had been something like the neurodiversity movement when I was younger, or that it had been more well-established and well-known at that time. I spent most of my life feeling like there were things wrong with me as if I were broken or damaged in some way–and perhaps I was to some extent. I still frequently refer to myself as being precisely that. I laugh and joke about how I’m broken or damaged, dysfunctional and maladjusted…but there’s that kernel deep inside that curls up into a little fetal shape whenever I do it.
It’s ok, though, I’m a bit of a masochist.
The neurodiversity movement is focused on treating these (mostly high functioning) people as being nothing more than a natural (and sometimes valuable) thread of the overall tapestry of human diversity. It’s refreshing and more than a little bit liberating to be treated as if I fall into a spectrum of what can simply be called a person with a normal human brain–as preconditioned as I might be to consider it anything but normal.
There are a lot of us out here.
Some of us are more high functioning than and some less so, but there’s no cause to pretend that we’re somehow less than other people, regardless of where we fall on that spectrum. It takes some degree of patience to deal with some of us, myself included. Personally, I recognize how challenging I can be on a normal basis and I make concessions for that. I’m not exclusive in doing so. Most of us who fall into the neurodivergent categorization are well aware of these things and we’ve learned to cope (as best we can) and to provide a bit of leeway for others in our lives. This isn’t true for everyone, of course, as there are extreme cases, but a large number of us are just like everyone else, just with a little bit more psychological/emotional/mental baggage in tow.

For some additional reading on the Neurodiversity Movement, I’m including the following link:

https://www.understood.org/en/friends-feelings/empowering-your-child/building-on-strengths/neurodiversity-what-you-need-to-know