With the passage of time, what's considered fair play in the realm of dark humor changes enormously. If you pass by little-kids' carnivals, you might be amazed to see that the Titanic ocean disaster of 1912 has been recast as a modern-day jumpy house.
Back in, oh, say, 1920, that would have been regarded as appalling taste. The pathos of individual victims' deaths would still have been very vivid. Lots of people knew someone who died when the ship went down ... or shared some indirect tie through friends, neighbors, work colleagues, etc. What's more, the risks of another iceberg-related crash would have been the stuff of nightmares for anyone else crossing the Atlantic by ship. For a while, that was a very large group of people.
So the old rule that "there's nothing funny about death" would have applied.
But after a century, such personal ties are gone. What's more, no one crosses the Atlantic by ocean liner anymore. What we know of these disasters is a few sentences in a history book, or the much more palatable narration provided by a movie, poster, whatever. The events of 9/11 will live on forever as YouTube clips (or the like), but who knows? A century from now, the idea of slamming planes into a skyscraper may seem as quaint and open to caricature (!) as the Titanic crash.
Quora
*Wizard's Note: I do still find this tasteless, even today
Back in, oh, say, 1920, that would have been regarded as appalling taste. The pathos of individual victims' deaths would still have been very vivid. Lots of people knew someone who died when the ship went down ... or shared some indirect tie through friends, neighbors, work colleagues, etc. What's more, the risks of another iceberg-related crash would have been the stuff of nightmares for anyone else crossing the Atlantic by ship. For a while, that was a very large group of people.
So the old rule that "there's nothing funny about death" would have applied.
But after a century, such personal ties are gone. What's more, no one crosses the Atlantic by ocean liner anymore. What we know of these disasters is a few sentences in a history book, or the much more palatable narration provided by a movie, poster, whatever. The events of 9/11 will live on forever as YouTube clips (or the like), but who knows? A century from now, the idea of slamming planes into a skyscraper may seem as quaint and open to caricature (!) as the Titanic crash.
Quora
*Wizard's Note: I do still find this tasteless, even today
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