When Jay Leno announced last Monday that the cadaver scandal is the most embarrassing thing to happen at UCLA since last year’s football team, Westwood residents might have been the first to laugh: He found an easy audience.
Ever since the story broke that the director of UCLA’s Willed Body Program had been selling pieces of donated cadavers, the campus has been saturated with dead body one-liners, obscene puns, and yes, even more comparisons to the school’s sports teams.
Letters to the editor and the MyUCLA forums are full of remarks about grave concern for the future of the program – especially because heads will roll once the university picks up the pieces. The only thing missing is a light bulb joke.
All of a sudden, cadaver jokes are no longer the lone territory of first-year medical students. UCLA – maligned by Leno as “Used Cadavers, Legs and Arms” – has become the punchline for comedians across the country, and amateur comedians are having a field day, too. (To his misfortune, David Letterman’s show was in repeats last week).
There’s nervous laughter coming from many who wonder why such tasteless humor is making them smile.
One answer comes from a professor who explains why cadaver jokes using everyday phrases like “right-hand man,” “giving the finger” or even “giving head,” can be funny.
“The body is such a fertile source of metaphors and dual meanings,” said sociology Professor Melvin Pollner. From an academic perspective, cadaver humor is a delicious example of violating the assumption that the body is sacred and should be treated with respect.
“When you’re dealing with the body, you’ve got a lot of potential for incongruity,” he said. After the story broke, as Pollner put it, “Well, it turns out the sacred body is meat.”
“Instead of it being priceless, no! There’s a price on it,” he continued. “UCLA ... turns out to be like a meat department in the store.”
If anything, the scandal has allowed people to giggle about a subject that is ordinarily too disturbing to make fun of.
“I think part of it is the taboo around dead people. It makes things all the funnier,” said Mary Roach, author of “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.”
Roach, who said she doesn’t know what the answer to a cadaver light bulb joke would be, describes the laughter as a coping strategy.
Tony Friscia isn’t amused. A UCLA graduate student who teaches an undergraduate class in dissection anatomy over the summer, Friscia said if he can’t get cadavers to work on, he can’t teach the class. He knows some of the people involved in the program, and the jokes have hit a little too close to home.
Roach can sympathize. Her book was released just as her brother-in-law was dying. Her in-laws, she said, told her, “That’s great, we don’t really want to hear about it.”
Social distance is an important ingredient for appreciating sensitive jokes, Pollner said. It explains why Sept. 11, 2001 was off-limits for comedians, and why families or coworkers of those involved with UCLA’s cadaver scandal probably don’t find the situation funny.
Pollner, who is teaching a course on the sociology of humor next quarter, said the jokes are slowly “dying off” because their appeal is tied to the timeliness of the issue.
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