A house at the corner of Emerson Ave and Westchester Dr. is decorated with hazmat and chemical waste bins that pokes fun of ebola on Oct. 23, 2014 in Dallas. (Kirsten Kearse/The Dallas Morning News)
Don’t get me wrong. I love dark humor. And if anyone is going to engage in death-related themes, Halloween is absolutely the time to do it. But decking your Highland Park house out in hazmat materials and quarantine paraphernalia is in the worst possible taste.
Ebola isn’t funny. A person died here. Others had their lives turned upside down by this disease. More than 4,000 people are dead in West Africa from it.
One of my close relatives proposed that we go out on Halloween wearing Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital surgical scrub uniforms or something similar. I thought about it long and hard, not wanting to be a fuddy-duddy. I ultimately decided it was an extremely bad idea. Nerves are too raw to joke about this. There’s been way too much upheaval. Presbyterian has seen a serious dropoff in business, as have businesses around the hospital.
It took a long, long time — more than a year — before any major comedian was willing to make jokes about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks. We’ve now acquired enough distance from 9/11 to develop a sense of humor — not about the attacks themselves but about the ridiculous mentality behind those who staged the attacks. And probably in the not-too-distant future, we’ll acquire a sense of humor about something related to Ebola.
But anyone dumb enough to joke about it now, say, on an airplane, is going to be escorted off by guys in hazmat suits. A world of pain will follow for the joker. People take this way too seriously.