When jokes aren’t funny (besides the ones we try to tell, of course)

September 27th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

In the words of R. Kelly, usually I don’t do this…but let’s break ‘em off a little piece of the moral outrage…

Call me sensitive, or grumpy, or whatever. It’s not OK to make suicide jokes, OK?

This is a bit of a sore subject, because I had a friend freshman year of college who decided that facing the impending Sunday morning was less attractive than jumping out of our 9th floor dorm’s window. An experience like that might make me touchy, I admit. I walked around campus for two or three months snapping at random people I heard making quips about the “new parachuting major Briscoe dorm was offering.” Not funny.

Not funny about my friend. Not funny about Terrell Owens.

Look, jokes are fun. We try - and fail miserably - to make them on this site every day. We joke about people we don’t know, and we make fun of lots of people, whether they deserve it or not. It’s a good time. If we couldn’t insult people we’ve never met, we couldn’t get through Joe Morgan’s grating on Sunday Night Baseball, for god’s sake.

But when you’re laughing at the expense of someone else’s mental state, someone who is confused and depressed and scared to the point that he finds it acceptable to stuff his stomach with sleeping pills, even though he is a rich, famous, best-in-the-league wide receiver, you’re only casting your own insecurities on someone who embodies everything you dislike about yourself. Don’t do it.

Usually, TO is the joke. He’s a clown; he fucks around all the time; he makes a spectacle of himself. This could be something similar, but I doubt it, and until I know for sure, I’m going to refrain from making any jokes about being a quitter or not giving 110% or the fantasy football waiver wire. That seems to be the safest, sensitive route for now. After he gets out of the hospital and starts screaming about how Jeff Garcia tried to anally rape him when he was passed out - if it looks like a rat, remember, it’s a rat - then we can get back after it.

Let’s hold off on the rips, at least for a little bit. Cool? Cool. Now enough with the moralizing - let’s talk some more about baseball and boozing with Mark Cuban.

(EDIT: Now that TO says he didn’t try to commit suicide - even though he probably did - I think it’s probably OK to unleash the fury. Probably.)