The Power of Humor
Amidst the sad news from Michigan about the the three boys who went missing after their father attempted to hang himself is this suicide story from the New York Post:
"Woman leaps to her death on W. Side"
NEW YORK, NY, November 27, 2010 - A woman jumped to her death earlier today off a swank West Side hi-rise, authorities said.
The victim - who hasn’t been identified - leapt just before 9 a.m. from one of the upper floors of 505 West 37th Street near Tenth Avenue, authorities said. The luxury apartment building is located a block from the Javits Convention Center.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The impact of the woman’s fall was so powerful that it split the concrete sidewalk where she landed.
It's a sad story not just for the loss of life and attendant madness (moment of release, secret knowledge of death) but for the straight-faced nature of the report. We don't know who the woman was; we don't know what she accomplished and what she didn't; we don't know if she'd been depressed for a long time; we don't know if she was part of a tortured love affair; we don't know if somebody outed her for being gay on Twitter... All the sexy and interesting details that sell people on suicide are missing.
But when you read the comments on the story you dig deeper into suicide and suicide prevention:
Many people are disgusted with comments like these --
-- but I wonder if we couldn't have stopped this suicide by showing the woman who jumped how people would ridicule her. In School is Hell, Matt Groening gives the reader 3 reasons why not to commit suicide in high school:
No kidding about #2, especially in the New York Post comment section.
The most important thing to drill into people's heads regarding suicide is that if you're feeling suicidal, you need to call a hotline. That's something we should all be taught in health class. 800-SUICIDE is a real phone number that works, not just something I invented for It's Kind of a Funny Story; 800-273-8255 (the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) works as well.
Besides calling the hotline, though, the best way to talk yourself down from suicide might be to laugh at it.
Take Jim Knipfel's fantastic memoir Quitting the Nairobi Trio:
It begins with the author wanting to kill himself in graduate school -- but not wanting his family and friends to know it was a suicide. So he goes through an elaborate set of steps involving a knife, chair and duct tape to make his suicide seem like a murder. You don't want to laugh... but you have to, because Knipfel is that good a writer. After his faked-murder-suicide fails, he downs a lot of pills and then has a florid psychotic episode where he begins reciting Nietzsche in German. He wakes up in a psych hospital and the meat of the book begins.
Quitting the Nairobi Trio is one of the books I think about when I consider the power of humor. Humor's strength lies in its ability to make us step back from ourselves and look at our lives from the perspective of a skeptical observer. If she did commit suicide, the woman who jumped from the building in New York was so twisted and torn in her own head that she couldn't laugh at herself -- because if she could, she would have been able to remove herself from her ego and reconsider the situation. Suicide is the ultimate ego-trip. New York Post commenters are the cure.
"Woman leaps to her death on W. Side"
NEW YORK, NY, November 27, 2010 - A woman jumped to her death earlier today off a swank West Side hi-rise, authorities said.
The victim - who hasn’t been identified - leapt just before 9 a.m. from one of the upper floors of 505 West 37th Street near Tenth Avenue, authorities said. The luxury apartment building is located a block from the Javits Convention Center.
She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The impact of the woman’s fall was so powerful that it split the concrete sidewalk where she landed.
It's a sad story not just for the loss of life and attendant madness (moment of release, secret knowledge of death) but for the straight-faced nature of the report. We don't know who the woman was; we don't know what she accomplished and what she didn't; we don't know if she'd been depressed for a long time; we don't know if she was part of a tortured love affair; we don't know if somebody outed her for being gay on Twitter... All the sexy and interesting details that sell people on suicide are missing.
But when you read the comments on the story you dig deeper into suicide and suicide prevention:
- Nasty !
11/27/2010 2:01 PM
I know exactly where that building is. Tomorrow morning I will go there , Trip on the crack in the sidewalk , Take an ambulance ride to the hospital , Claim my back hurts , And hire A nice greedy [ethnic slur redacted] lawyer . I will then sue the woman's estate , The owner of the building ,And the City of New York . Unless of course 20 people beat me to it.I probably too late already . - YANKEESSUX
11/27/2010 1:40 PM
Has the concrete's next of kin been notified. Curley Concrete went all to pieces learning of his son's demise. The funeral for Charlie Concrete will held at Slate Rock Quarry in Stone Mason, VT on December 1st, 2010 at 3pm. Donations can be made in Charlie's memory to the Hard As A Rock Foundation. - Queen of Mean
11/28/2010 12:03 AM
Very Sad. It's such a depressing area of Manhattan to begin with. Right near the Tunnel and looking at New Jersey. I'd get Peter Falk on the case....are they sure she jumped or was it another faulty balcony rail?
Many people are disgusted with comments like these --
- Jimmy The Gooch
11/27/2010 3:50 PM
All you that joke. This is why people hate people from N.Y.C.. You make it bad for all of us. They say people from Philly have no class. Well we are not far behind. May God forgive all of you.
-- but I wonder if we couldn't have stopped this suicide by showing the woman who jumped how people would ridicule her. In School is Hell, Matt Groening gives the reader 3 reasons why not to commit suicide in high school:
- “Why you shouldn’t kill yourself in High School”
- Nobody will care
- They’ll make jokes up about you
- There’s no TV in heaven
No kidding about #2, especially in the New York Post comment section.
The most important thing to drill into people's heads regarding suicide is that if you're feeling suicidal, you need to call a hotline. That's something we should all be taught in health class. 800-SUICIDE is a real phone number that works, not just something I invented for It's Kind of a Funny Story; 800-273-8255 (the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) works as well.
Besides calling the hotline, though, the best way to talk yourself down from suicide might be to laugh at it.
Take Jim Knipfel's fantastic memoir Quitting the Nairobi Trio:
It begins with the author wanting to kill himself in graduate school -- but not wanting his family and friends to know it was a suicide. So he goes through an elaborate set of steps involving a knife, chair and duct tape to make his suicide seem like a murder. You don't want to laugh... but you have to, because Knipfel is that good a writer. After his faked-murder-suicide fails, he downs a lot of pills and then has a florid psychotic episode where he begins reciting Nietzsche in German. He wakes up in a psych hospital and the meat of the book begins.
Quitting the Nairobi Trio is one of the books I think about when I consider the power of humor. Humor's strength lies in its ability to make us step back from ourselves and look at our lives from the perspective of a skeptical observer. If she did commit suicide, the woman who jumped from the building in New York was so twisted and torn in her own head that she couldn't laugh at herself -- because if she could, she would have been able to remove herself from her ego and reconsider the situation. Suicide is the ultimate ego-trip. New York Post commenters are the cure.