BRITT PETERSON

Humor requires distance — we’ve been living in a constantly refreshed state of “too soon” for jokes about school shooters ever since I graduated from high school, two months after the Columbine attack... psychologists ... have developed a framework called “benign violation theory” to describe events that lend themselves best to humor: a violation or a threat, but one from which the joker is somewhat removed. It’s unclear exactly how much distance we need to laugh about something as cataclysmic as nuclear attack.

Humor requires distance — we’ve been living in a constantly refreshed state of “too soon” for jokes about school shooters ever since I graduated from high school, two months after the Columbine attack... psychologists ... have developed a framework called “benign violation theory” to describe events that lend themselves best to humor: a violation or a threat, but one from which the joker is somewhat removed. It’s unclear exactly how much distance we need to laugh about something as cataclysmic as nuclear attack.