Eva Bradley: Horrors just too dark for black humour

Black humour is an ancient tradition. All of us have had an experience where we found if we didn't laugh, we'd cry.

Only this morning I had a call from a friend to tell me she had cancer, and within minutes we'd resorted to some gentle jokes about the situation to diffuse the bomb of misery that threatened to explode around us at any moment if we didn't.

When you can't make good of a bad situation, often the only way forward is to make light of it and it is a testament to the human spirit that when we are burdened with the weight of bad news, we are still able to laugh half-heartedly at a lame joke.

It never makes things better, but sometimes it makes things bearable.

But there is a fine line between black humour and sick humour.

This week when (like every other person in the English-speaking world with access to a computer) I found myself watching the eye-witness account of the neighbour who came to the rescue of Amanda Berry and her fellow captives, I found myself almost falling off my chair with laughter.

No one does black humour quite so well as a black man and Charles Ramsey's comments about why a "little pretty white girl" would run into his arms will go down in history as a classic moment of slapstick. But should they? As soon as I had suitably recovered from his animated account of what went down in the Cleveland street, I felt immediately guilty about finding humour in such a dark moment.

What possesses a man to turn entertainer in front of TV cameras and a large crowd moments after he has just helped three women escape from a decade of imprisonment and alleged unimaginable abuse is beyond my understanding.

The interview has now gone viral and while I confess to having watched it several times and sent the link to friends, in hindsight this has left me with a dirty feeling because the story at the heart of Ramsey's rant is so utterly devastating.

Sometimes things are just too dark to see even the smallest shaft of light on the other side, and who would want to, at least at first.

The secret to black humour must surely be context, and audience.

There is a thin line between the gravity of the black and the levity of the humour.

Surely abduction and sexual abuse is a no-go zone for a bit of a chuckle.

When in a previous relationship with a police officer I was often surprised by the "cop humour" shared behind closed doors, until I eventually learned it was their way of coping with a job that most of us would find impossible, and as long as the jokes were made in private and in the spirit of "laugh or else cry", then where was the harm?

Juxtaposing the morbid and ghastly with the comic is just what we do to get by.

The only thing Charles Ramsey really did wrong was do it too well. In fact the jury remains out on whether he even knew he was being funny at all. All I can say is that if he was in it for a laugh, he's sure got some big testicles to pull that off, dude.