ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that there is a distinct sub-category of sick humour—namely those sick jokes that draw upon and refer to contemporary, ‘disastrous’ issues or events—which particularly deserve attention. Merely to have present a joke which relies centrally upon images of violence, violent disaster, death, disease, or sexual practices regarded by some as perverse will surely introduce sick humour into a joke. Sick disaster jokes renounce the realist’s epistemology, which offers for the subject an objectivity that it can determine as exterior, and they do this with great joy, agonistic conviviality and a thematic prejudice towards inversion, recurrently depending upon language play. Sick disaster jokes are thus repeatedly potentially potent vehicles for a bottom-up carnivalesque critique of the postmodern condition, always inconclusive but also always unsettlingly transgressive, opening up hostile performance meanings by their references to established formal conventions.
