This is Improbable Page 25

  Some of what’s in this chapter: The man who studies sick jokes • Christian End and some dead sports fans • Complications involving brown tree snakes, poisoning, and a parachute • A brief history of certain necrophilia laws • TIT, GAS, and variations of the F-word • Valuing of dead artists • Digging around in churches • The screw-in coffin • The knife muncher

  The Birthing of Sick Jokes

  Alan Dundes liked to study uncomfortable jokes and the people who tell them. As his 1979 study called ‘The Dead Baby Joke Cycle’, published in the journal Western Folklore, explains: ‘Dead baby jokes are not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. They are told mostly by American adolescents of both sexes in joke-telling sessions with the intent to shock or disgust listeners. “Oh how gross!” is a common (and evidently desired) response to a dead baby joke. Teenage informants of the 1960s and 1970s indicate that dead baby jokes were often used in a “gross out” in which each participant tries to outdo previous joketellers in recounting unsavory or crude folkloristic items.’

  To Dundes, when a large group of people persistently make uncomfortable jokes about something, it’s something they are uncomfortable about. Thus, he writes that dead baby jokes are popular in the US because of ‘the traditional failure of Americans to discuss disease and death openly ... many Americans prefer not to say that an individual is dead or has died.’

  Dundes, a longtime professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, is himself dead, having entered that state in 2005.

  He appreciatively blamed England for introducing ‘sick humour’ to the US, arguing that probably the American variety ‘was inspired by a minor English poet Harry Graham, who specialized in light verse and amusing doggerel. In 1899 he published Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes and one rhyme in this volume ran as follows:

  Billy, in one of his nice new sashes

  Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;

  Now, although the room grows chilly,

  I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.’

  In another study, ‘Polish Pope Jokes’, Dundes presents samples representative of many different varieties of Polish pope jokes, and remarks: ‘It was probably inevitable that the Polish-Americans’ hope that the election of a Polish Pope would curtail or contain the Polish joke cycle would be in vain. Quite the opposite occurred. The election provided a fresh impetus for a new burst of creativity in the cycle.’

  A Dundes’ monograph called ‘Six Inches from the Presidency: The Gary Hart Jokes as Public Opinion’ examines the joke cycle touched off by the withered candidacy of Gary Hart, the front-running Democratic party candidate for the 1988 US presidential election. The joke frenzy began when newspapers published photographs of Hart, in the absence of Mrs Hart, installing a young actress on his lap during an overnight trip ‘from Miami to Bimini on a boat with the unlikely but apt name of “Monkey Business”’.

  Dundes’ best-known book is called Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore. It explores the many variants of the German proverb ‘life is like a chicken coop ladder – shitty from top to bottom’. In 174 pages, Dundes plumbed the anal/erotic nature of German culture, and presented evidence for his thesis that Teutonic parents’ overemphasis on cleanliness gives their children a lifelong love of scatological humour and imagery.

  Dundes, Alan (1979). ‘The Dead Baby Joke Cycle.’ Western Folklore 38 (3): 145–57.

  –– (1979). ‘Polish Pope Jokes.’ Journal of American Folklore 92 (364): 219–22.

  –– (1989). ‘Six Inches from the Presidency: The Gary Hart Jokes as Public Opinion.’ Western Folklore 48 (1): 43–51.

  –– (1984). Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore. New York: Columbia University Press.

  Christian End Investigations

  Despite being blessed with a colourful name, Professor Christian End demonstrates that one can make significant discoveries by looking at unglamorous questions.

  End, based at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, specializes in probing the psychology of sports fans. In the year 2009 he blew past his professional competitors, who generally confine their interest to the living, when he published a study in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills called ‘Sport Fan Identification in Obituaries’.

  End and three colleagues examined 1101 obituaries in nineteen American and Canadian newspapers. For each, they noted whether or not the deceased was identified as being a sports fan. (They give this example of a clear indicator: ‘She was a fan of the Red Sox’.) And they noted whether the individual was a man or a woman.

  The End team was testing a novel theory. ‘It was hypothesized’, they write, ‘that a greater proportion of men’s obituaries than women’s would mention the deceased individual’s sport fan identification.’

  They learned that twenty-four percent of the dead males were celebrated postmortem as being sports fans, but only 7.7% of the women were accorded that distinction. Thus, End and his co-authors, report, their hypothesis was proved correct.

  End sub-specializes in a rather different aspect of sports fandom psychology. It is epitomized by his 2003 monograph (done with a different four collaborators) called ‘Perceptions of Sport Fans Who BIRG’. BIRG, the study explains for readers not familiar with this branch of psychology, is an acronym for ‘basking in reflected glory’. The End oeuvre includes at least two other published studies that delve into the multidimensional puzzle of sports fandom BIRG.

  The inquiries of this Christian End extend far beyond sports fandom.

  In a 2007 study entitled ‘Unrealistic Optimism in Internet Events’, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, he and another three collaborators ‘assessed the tendency for individuals to be unrealistically optimistic about internet related activities’ such as downloading music, ‘using maps’, ‘finding a bargain’, and ‘finding a sought item’. The report’s major discovery was that ‘heavy internet users’ are more optimistic than ‘light users’ about succeeding at those tasks.

  In 2010, End broke new ground. Working with yet another combination of three colleagues (one of whom, Shaye Worthman, also laboured on the obituary study), he published ‘Costly Cell Phones: The Impact of Cell Phone Rings on Academic Performance’. For the study, university students were asked to watch a video and take notes. Then the researchers tested the students about the video, and evaluated their notes. For some individuals, the video session ‘was disrupted by a ringing cell phone’. Those students (1) ‘performed significantly worse’ on the test than the ones who were not interrupted, and (2) took crappy notes.

  Thus came the researchers to their great discovery. In their words: ‘The hypothesis that the cell phone rings would impair performance was confirmed.’

  End, Christian M., Jeffrey L. Meinert Jr, Shaye S. Worthman, and Gregory J. Mauntel (2009). ‘Sport Fan Identification in Obituaries.’ Perceptual and Motor Skills 109 (2): 551–54.

  End, Christian M., Beth Dietz-Uhler, N. Demakakos, M. Grantz, and J. Biaviano (2003). ‘Perceptions of sport fans who BIRG’, International Sports Journal 7, 139-149.

  Davis, M., and Christian M. End (2005). ‘The Economic Impact of Basking in the Reflected Glory of a Super Bowl Victory.’ International Association of Sports Economists Conference Papers, http://ideas.repec.org/p/spe/cpaper/0524.html.

  Dietz-Uhler, Beth, Elizabeth A. Harrick, Christian End, and Lindy Jacquemotte (2000). ‘Sex Differences in Sport Fan Behavior and Reasons for Being a Sport Fan.’ Sport Behavior 23 (3): 219–30.

  Campbell, Jamonn, Nathan Greenauer, Kristin Macaluso, and Christian End (2007). ‘Unrealistic Optimism in Internet Events.’ Computers in Human Behavior 23 (3): 1273–84.

  End, Christian M., Shaye Worthman, Mary Bridget Mathews, and Katharina Wetterau (2010). ‘Costly Cell Phones: The Impact of Cell Phone Rings on Academic Performance.’ Teaching of Psychology 37 (1): 55–57.

  Perfecting the Drop-Dead-Mice System
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  If you’re going to lace dead mice with poison, and drop them from helicopters into a rainforest in Guam in such a way that they become entangled high in the trees, where they might murder the brown tree snakes, but you want to avoid (as much as possible) having the toxically tasty mouse corpses fall all the way to the ground where they could instead get gobbled by coconut crabs, perhaps you should graft them onto something like a parachute. Peter Savarie, Tom Mathies, and Kathleen Fagerstone of the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colorado, did just that. At a symposium in 2007, they told all about it in a report called ‘Flotation Materials for Aerial Delivery of Acetaminophen Toxic Baits to Brown Tree Snakes’.

  Tree snakes have lived in Guam only since the late 1940s, explain Savarie, Mathies, and Fagerstone. Critics maintain that the snakes have: eaten to near extinction some native birds, lizards, and fruit bats; preyed on poultry; bitten small children; and ‘cause[d] power outages by climbing on electrical transmission wires’. Thus came a clamour to get rid of the snakes.

  The most obvious way to do that, as certain biologists see it, is to get dead mice, ‘treat’ them with acetaminophen, stuff the tempting acetaminophen/mouse treats in PVC tubes, and put those where the snakes are. ‘However’, complains the report, ‘PVC tubes are not practical for delivery of baits to remote areas of jungle or the forest canopy. Further, it is important that baits entangle in the canopy and not fall to the ground where they can be scavenged by non-target animals such as crabs.’

  Shortly past the turn of the century came an innovation: small parachutes ‘hand dropped from a helicopter have been used as flotation devices for entangling dead mice in the forest canopy’. Those early tests used parachutes made of either plastic or corn starch – but the one can take years to biodegrade, and the other dissolves too quickly in the wet.

  Savarie, Mathies, and Fagerstone tried several alternatives.

  In a trial run, thawed frozen dead mice ‘attached to biodegradable jute netting by a 30.5 centimeter-long cotton thread to a rear leg were deployed by hand from a US Navy Knighthawk MH-60S helicopter from about 30 meters above ground level’. Then came the tests with parachutes, some made of paper, some of a biodegradable plastic-like material called Ecofilm. The scientists also tried – in place of parachutes – paper streamers, paper plates, and paper cups.

  To track these assorted plummeting agglomerations, the researchers glued a radio transmitter to each mouse’s abdomen.

  Detail: Methods, with respect to brown tree snakes and toxic deliveries

  Each configuration gets the job done, say the team, ‘However, a problem with the two parachutes and the paper plate and paper cup is that threads have to be secured to them for attaching the dead mice. This is a time-consuming effort.’ The best arrangement for dropping thawed, frozen, poisoned, dead, radio-equipped mice from a helicopter into a tree, they indicate, is simply to attach a paper streamer to some cardboard, and hot-glue the cardboard to a rear leg of the mouse.

  Savarie, Peter J., Tom C. Mathies, and Kathleen A. Fagerstone (2007). ‘Flotation Materials for Aerial Delivery of Acetaminophen Toxic Baits to Brown Tree Snakes.’ Managing Vertebrate Invasive Species: Proceedings of an International Symposium, Fort Collins, CO, 7–9 August, 218–23.

  Some Call it Love, but Most Call it Necrophilia

  John Troyer, a newly arrived scholar at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society, dug up evidence of a little-unappreciated gap in the law. His study, called ‘Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorization of Necrophilia Laws in the USA’, appears in the only-occasionally-ghoulish journal Mortality.

  Troyer spotlights an incident that frustrated the police and the courts of one American state. He writes: ‘In September 2006, Wisconsin police discovered Nicholas Grunke, Alexander Grunke, and Dustin Radtke digging into the grave of a recently deceased woman. Upon questioning by police, Alexander Grunke explained that the three men wanted to exhume the body for sexual intercourse. In the Wisconsin state court system, the three men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and attempted theft. None of the men could be charged with attempted necrophilia, since the state of Wisconsin has no law making necrophilia illegal. What the Wisconsin case exposed was the following gap in US jurisprudence: many states have no law prohibiting necrophilia.’

  Troyer sketches the court’s dilemma: ‘Since [the victim] was already dead at the time of the alleged crime and therefore no longer a person before the law, her body was legally recognized as human remains and not as a victim... Nicholas Grunke, Alexander Grunke, and Dustin Radtke were then charged with the remaining illegal acts, namely, damage to cemetery property and attempted theft of movable property, a category that included [the victim’s] corpse. What shocked many of the case’s observers was that even if the three men had actually succeeded in taking the body from the grave, they could have only been charged with theft of private property since [the victim’s] post-mortem body belonged to her parents.’

  On 5 March 2008, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments as to how it might overcome the legal lacunae. The session began with a cheery ‘We are delighted to welcome with us West Salem High School students’.

  The fifty US states differ in their legal grasp of (and on) necrophilia, and the federal government offers them little guidance, but some nations are more organized in their view of the subject. The UK, especially, gives it special focus. Section 70 of the 2003 Sexual Offences Act is entitled ‘Sexual Penetration of a Corpse’. Section 70 explicitly, very explicitly, prohibits only the most canonical form of necrophilia. Troyer notes that ‘UK law seems to preclude other sexual acts [Troyer lists several of them] from being considered criminal.’

  The niceties of the law, especially those pertaining to uncommon activities, suffer a reputation for being abstruse, boring, dull. But Troyer has unearthed an exception. As his study points out: ‘Necrophilia is that rare kind of sexual deviancy that truly captures public attention with its abject perversity and titillating, lascivious details.’

  Troyer, John (2008). ‘Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorization of Necrophilia Laws in the USA.’ Mortality 13 (2): 132–52.

  The Australian Fascination with Car Crashes

  Australians are peculiarly fascinated by car crashes, contends Catherine Simpson, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney. Simpson explains how and why in her monograph ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road’, which was published in the Australian Humanities Review. ‘I explore the significance of the car crash in postcolonial Australia’, she writes, ‘and argue that car accidents are not only presented as an everyday and acceptable form of violence but that the attention to car crashes in Australian films suggests they figure as a moment of rupture in unspoken settler/indigenous violence.’

  Australian feature films present hour upon hour of vivid, compelling evidence. Aussie movie crashes explode or unfold in distinctly, proudly Australian ways. The national flair comes across not just in the surrounding scenery but, more important, in the style.

  Simpson explains that ‘Australia does not have glamorous, Hollywood-style, celebrity car accidents’. She quotes University of Queensland media and cultural studies professor Tom O’Regan on the differences between Australian and US crash cinemachinations: ‘Americans dream of freeway pile-ups and their exploitation films have “crazies” driving spectacularly through crowded city streets pursued by slightly crazy policemen ... On the other hand, Australians dream of cars coming over hills in the middle or the wrong side of the road.’

  Australia’s car crash fascination stems, in part, from its immensity of lonely open space. ‘Unlike Europe and many other parts of the world’, Simpson says, ‘if a vehicle breaks down or crashes in a remote area there is an outside possibility that no one will offer aid ... For most urban-based Australians, the idea of perishing “out there” in the bush after a crash looms much larger than its likelihood
... [This] taps into a deep-seated anxiety in the dominant Australian social imaginary that is connected to the notion of the land as not only hostile but invested with a power to do things to those who venture into it.’

  Simpson identifies the 1979 film Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson, as one that brought international attention to the Australian car-crash genre. Gibson plays a futuristic-yet-primitive lawman who pursues an evildoer over many miles of road, a relationship that culminates in a spectacular crash and the death of the evildoer; it is enhanced with other car crashes and the deaths of other evildoers, too.

  Although not mentioned in the study, Mel Gibson eventually moved to the US, where he had to adapt to American-style cinema car crashes in which, from an Australian’s point of view, everyone drives on the wrong side of the road. One could argue – though Simpson does not – that perhaps this intellectual clash of car-crash paradigms led to Mel Gibson’s eventual fascination with gory martyrdom, as exhibited in such starring film vehicles as Braveheart and Passion of the Christ.

  Simpson, Catherine (2006). ‘Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road.’ Australian Humanities Review 39–40.

  May We Recommend

  ‘Blood and Tissue Spatter Associated with Chainsaw Dismemberment’

  by Brad Randall (published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, 2009)

  The Royal ‘we dismembered two large pig carcasses with a small electric chainsaw in a controlled environment … These experiments have shown that a human body may be easily dismembered with a chainsaw, even a smaller electric-powered model … Despite popular beliefs fueled by crime scene shows on television and recent Chainsaw Massacre movies, postmortem dismemberment does not necessarily produce a large amount of blood spatter at a dismemberment scene’.