Last week two online events occurred that stimulated this question.

First, a train jumped the track in Chicago. There were no serious injuries; anyone taken to the hospital during morning rush hour was released by noon. The event yielded the following photo:

Seeing a train on an escalator, particularly when it could have taken the steps, provoked a smart ass comment from me on a friend’s Facebook posting. Another friend of hers took umbrage, saying that I should not make light of it and that I would not feel that way if I had been related to a victim.

Later that day I was on Quora.com. Someone had posted a reference to being sexually assaulted 20 years earlier. Another Quoran posted a light remark, while a third objected to making light of an assault.

These two incidents made me think: when is it appropriate to make light of tragedy, and when is it completely tacky, and, more importantly, what is the distinction between the two?

The first criterion that occurred to me was magnitude. I have only heard one joke about the Nazi Holocaust or Shoah, and I only heard it once, as an undergraduate. The size and nature of the suffering puts it beyond humor. [Digression for the joke: an old Jewish man was sitting beside the road watching the Nazis parade by during the early 1930s. He was smiling. Hitler approached and asked what he was smiling about. He replied, “When Haman tried to eliminate the Jews, we got hamentashen (pastries) and when Antiochus oppressed us, we got latkes (potato pancakes). I am wondering what kind of food we will have to commemorate your defeat.”]

However, it cannot simply be a matter of magnitude. World War II deaths as a whole were in the tens of millions, compared to the 6 million deaths attributed to the Shoah. Indeed, there were more Chinese deaths than Jewish deaths in World War II.

It might be that magnitude plus severity is a better measure. If we measure severity as a percentage of the population killed, then the percentage of the population in Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland are above 10 percent, a high level of intensity, and many of these were Jewish victims of crimes against humanity. In addition, the percentage of the Jewish population subjected to genocidal killing was much higher.

Besides the question of magnitude and severity, the question of proximity in time is pertinent. Arguably the Black Death of the 13th and 14th centuries had as profound an impact, but given that the events occurred 700 years ago, Monty Python was not criticized for making light of the plague in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Similarly, Monty Python has done skits on the Spanish Inquisition, whose excesses are a matter of historical record. Similarly, we have heard, or can imagine hearing, someone say, “Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” We cannot imagine someone saying, “Aside from that, how was the visit to Dallas, Mrs. Kennedy?” The difference is 100 years. None of us will be there to see if the second one becomes acceptable, but even 50 years after the event, it is still too raw for humor.

In addition to proximity in time, the proximity to the event of you and the audience make a difference: if the victim of the tragedy is in your audience, humor is unlikely to be appropriate, whether the audience is live or virtual.

Considering the number of variables involved, it is not difficult to overstep a boundary, especially when the humor police are watching. Someone with a comic bent has two choices: either keep humor private, or accept the likelihood that, even considering all the angles and possibilities of sensitivity, someone will criticize.