Awkwardly Sharing the Same Bed: Humor and Suicide

Skip the B.S. 

by Skip Eisiminger

“Let your enemy kill you, but don’t kill yourself.”—Hebrew adage

“[Suicide] is the privilege of humans, which the deity does not possess.”—Pliny the Elder

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/29/11—Thousands of us may exist, but I’m the only one I know of who collects suicide jokes.

Many of these are single-panel cartoons which show kamikaze lemmings back-flipping off a diving board, soaring toward heaven because that’s “what lemmings believe,” explaining to a cop why they don’t have a parade permit, sprinting toward the brink wearing a swim ring, pausing at the brink to smoke a cigarette, or racing over the brink suspended from a hang glider.

My favorite, by Paul Noth, shows a legion of lemurs going over a cliff as one toward the rear says, “Wait a minute. We’re lemurs! Lemurs!”

My least favorite, by Robert Mankoff, drawn in May 2004 when Iraq was rapidly going sour for George W. Bush, features a legion of lemmings approaching the brink while their leader says, “Look, I have my misgivings, too, but what choice do we have except to stay the course?” It was just too painful.

Lemming lore has been circulating since the early 16th century, when European folk believed the creatures dropped from the sky every spring. At the time, it was not known that they lived active lives under the snow during the Scandinavian winter and emerged in warmer weather from their burrows.

For reasons not fully understood, lemming numbers may multiply by a factor of five thousand every three or four years, which translates into mass starvation and panic. When a population bloom occurs, the harmless herbivores charge off to find something to eat. Along the way, some are pushed off cliffs or into rivers, but what appears to be a collective death wish is just a mad dash to survive.

Walt Disney Productions is thought to have given the greatest impetus to the lemming myth in modern times when the Oscar-winning documentary White Wilderness appeared in 1958. It’s not known if Walt knew the truth, but dozens of lemmings were killed by the contracted filmmaker who could not find any volunteers to plunge off a cliff in Alberta while a film crew waited in the detritus with cameras rolling.

So the producer flew up to the Yukon, purchased several of the mammals captured by Inuit children, and returned to complete the “Animal Kingdom Masada.” When the lemmings backed away from the precipice because their bellies were full and life was good, the filmmaker built a large turntable and placed it just below ground level with a layer of snow on top. When the “actors”were herded onto the rotating surface, it appeared in the edited film that they were moving as a group in panic. When the beasties refused to jump, workers with rakes out of view of the camera pushed them to their death.

Of course, not all suicidal humor involves lemmings.

There’s the comic ad for an exploding boomerang; Robert Mankoff’s Mob boss saying to his henchmen, “Now, assisted suicide—that’s a growth area for us”; Jack Ziegler’s hitchhiker on the bridge ramp with a sign reading, “Mid-span”; and Donald Reilly’s elderly tourist in a van telling a gas-station attendant, “Yes, Oregon’s lovely, but we’re just here for the suicide.”

If I had to select a favorite, it would be J. B. Handelsman’s physician speaking on the phone to a patient saying, “Before we try assisted suicide, Mrs. Rose, let’s give the aspirin a chance.”

An existential graffitist at Oxford University once scrawled, “100,000 lemmings can’t be wrong,” but the punch line, as I’ve tried to show, is based on a fallacy. Moreover, the wisecrack turns on the writer because there’s little humor in advocating suicide, appropriate as it may be under certain circumstances for the terminally ill.

One weekend, our son came home from a camp for emotionally disturbed children having pulled one of his favorite charges from a frozen lake three times in five days. Believe me, there were no suicide jokes told on that visit.

As for myself, I’ve known five successful suicides: a former boss and father of three, a poet friend and mother of two, a former student, and two children of colleagues. Appropriately, not one of the memorial services for these five featured any humor for the simple reason that there was none. The image I’m left with is of one victim’s forlorn fiancée, whose mascara had run down her cheeks and under her thin blouse. Seeing her hot, black tears as she was embraced by friends and family, I was reminded of a character in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall who argues that the point of suicide is not to end one life but two. Though suicide may have a narrow target, the buckshot inevitably scatters.

After one memorial service, the mother of a young man who’d taken his life called some hot-lines in Los Angeles where he died just to see what had been available. The first number was busy, the second took her number but never called back, and the third never even answered. No evidence exists that the young man tried to call any of these numbers, but had he, there was scant help, much less humor. A friend of the distraught mother said that if her son ever took his life, she hoped he would have the courtesy to make it look like an accident.

Given the fact that there are about 15 more suicide threats than suicides (the US averages about 30,000 annually), most warnings of self-injury are not serious though they must be treated that way. Some therapists argue that many who threaten to take their lives are telling a story in which the irony has failed. Like the mother who accuses her son of being a son of a bitch, they miss the irony of their own hyperbolic accusation, or they wink and no one sees it.

A minister friend, who works a local suicide hotline, says that every time he has succeeded in getting a caller to commit to an oral contract, the threatener has been stymied. The contract serves to call the bluff, yet all it requires is for the “signer” to contact the therapist before closing the curtain.

The ultimate irony is that the only animal which routinely kills itself is the smartest: Homo sapiens sapiens. But how wise are we when a part-time job that is not taken or a prescription that is not filled leads to an unnecessary death?

Now I wonder: would a collection of suicide gags be useful in showing how absurd self-murder often is? Timing the presentation, of course, is crucial, but if gallows humor preserves the mental health of the hangman,“The Lemming Collection”or something similar might be helpful in persuading someone to put the gun down. One self-directed snicker might save the day.