Making light from the dark

When is the right time to laugh at a situation? Are the rules set in stone, or is it a matter of judgement?

How soon is too soon? And who says so?
We’ve all been guilty of an inappropriate or insensitive comment at a party, usually when somebody within earshot suffers from baldness, or sports an incredibly big schnozz.
A good starting point to avoiding a social faux pas with the latter is to stop quoting lines from The Life of Brian, but the rules of civility gets a little opaque when the topic of discussion is a recent and awkwardly negative occurrence.
Trying to judge when it’s safe to talk lightly about a death, or somebody losing a testicle, is like trying to ascertain when it’s safe to eat a pizza you’ve just nuked in the microwave, without suffering internal bleeding – one false move, in either situation, and the end result is pretty much the same.
I got burnt in a different way at a local watering hole with a few cricket mates once, after ribbing a sensitive teammate about his batting average.
As the season had only just finished, the throwaway quip went over like a wrought iron hand glider and “Too soon!” they all cried over their pots of beer, in almost perfect unison.
Which seemed strange as all the ducks were in place: a group of mates, in a pub, in a country that suffers badly from tall poppy syndrome.
But sometimes the rule of “too soon” trumps everything in the universal game of sh*t stirring.
But it gets you thinking though: who exactly makes the rules on “too soon”? Apart from sexually frustrated girlfriends, of course?
Major retailers have played their cards early: there’s no such thing as “too soon”.
My old supermarket back in Mildura, like most really,  wheeled out the Christmas-related products usually around June; in a similar vein, Easter eggs were on the shelves not long after Ricky Ponting had tossed up on Boxing Day.
Being a former checkout boy, I’d often hear cranky customers bark: “Bloody hell, you’re selling Dennis Walter’s Christmas CD already?” more often than you heard What’s New Pussycat over the PA.
In comedy however, timing is everything. No comedian wants to tread too carefully, but they don’t want to be Michael Richards in a black comedy club either.
Traditionally, the comic floodgates open via text. I remember receiving “Cricket is a dangerous sport, it was only a matter of time before somebody was killed by a bouncer” one early Sunday morning.
Considering it was two days after David Hookes had been decked outside a St Kilda pub, that was clearly a case of too soon.
But at what point can the old adage “but we can laugh about it now...” be applied?
At what point are people fair game for wearing a really bad hair piece?
How much time has to pass before family members can finally stop the charade and admit to Russell Crowe that A Good Year was actually a pile of crap?
An acute social antennae, some charm and the ability to read faces, and dig yourself quickly out of a hole, are the essential tools really.
But we shouldn’t be too precious either.
In the days after September 11, the release of a film called Collateral Damage, the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger star vehicle (more a Leyland P76 than a Lamborghini) was pushed back due to the story’s similarity to the events at the twin towers.
A gross over reaction? Probably, although these were paranoid times, where a media analyst on CNN said it was the end of all action movies, especially those with lots of explosions, and crazy terrorists with guns.
He was partly right: society wasn’t prepared to watch any more Arnie movies, and the world eventually stopped talking about  9/11, like junior wizards do about Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books.
So the rule is we can all eventually find the humour in most things, as long as enough time has passed.
With one exception: Essendon losing the 1999 preliminary final to Carlton. Some wounds just never heal.