Why is military humor so dark?

Alfred Brenner had just been hit by an IED. He was on the ground, a medic working on him, a sergeant major standing over the two of them, and he was praying out loud. Somebody leaned in and said what you are supposed to say. Don’t worry, bro. You’re going to be all right.

Brenner, bleeding, had notes.

“I’m like, ‘Have you seen any war movie ever?’ Like, they say that right before everyone’s going to die.”

Hear it at 6:11

Then, he says, “we’re laughing with each other on the ground.”

Hear it at 6:24

Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired USMC K9 handler and author, tells that story the way other people tell one about a flat tire. If you have served, you already get it. If you are the spouse, the coworker or the new son-in-law who just heard something at Thanksgiving that you cannot un-hear, this one is for you.

We should disclose a bias. One of our hosts does stand-up, and our own episode with a Marine comic is titled “Why Do Marines Treat Dark Humor Like Therapy?” So we asked people who do it for a living. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, eight Veterans explained the joke, which is the one thing you are never supposed to do to a joke.

Nobody sat down to cope

The clinical version says humor is a coping mechanism. Fine. Nobody in a fighting hole has ever said, “I am going to employ a coping mechanism.”

Maximilian Uriarte, a Marine Corps infantry Veteran, came back from two deployments to Iraq and started drawing Terminal Lance, the comic strip that half the Marine Corps has taped inside a wall locker. He says the early strips were angry. He also says he had no idea he was working anything out.

“I don’t think that I was thinking of it in that way as being cathartic. I was just doing it because it was fun.”

Hear it at 25:11

He only saw it years later, looking back over the whole pile.

“It is this me decompressing a lot of that stuff in a way that makes other people laugh too, and that helps me because I’m like, I’m not crazy, right? Like this was stupid, right?”

Hear it at 25:28

Read that last part again. The joke is a question. This was stupid, right? And the laugh is a few thousand people answering yes. That is most of what dark humor does in uniform. It checks whether you are the only one who noticed.

Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran, mortarman with 1/6 and comedy creator, got out over leadership and now makes skits about, in his word, the clowns. It began with one boot camp story told to a camera.

“That was me just telling a natural story, being my natural self.”

Hear it at 36:37

Uriarte has been watching his audience for fifteen years and has reached a conclusion about it.

“They will laugh about anything. They can turn anything into a joke and have a good time with it.”

Hear it at 57:23

It is how the unit keeps score

Civilians give awards for doing well. The military also gives them for doing badly, and those are the ones people keep.

Nick Merrick, a former U.S. Army Green Beret, founded Green Beret Racing, where a team from each branch races an off-road car. There is a championship trophy. His favorite is a different one: the Broken Axle Award, voted on by the other teams, for the most boneheaded mistake of the season.

“These guys screwed up, whatever. We’re going to make fun of you, but it’s in who we are.”

Hear it at 18:08

His shop used to keep a wall of shame, with every part anybody broke hung up on it. The guys asked why. Then he watched them walk visitors over to it and tell the stories.

“The trophies are great, but also the memories come from those things that are hard.”

Hear it at 18:44

That is the mechanism. Getting roasted for the mistake is how you find out you are still on the team after making it. Silence would be worse.

And every unit has the one person whose job this is, whatever the billet says. In our interview with SSgt Nicholas Milsap, an active duty Marine Corps recruiter, the table got to remembering a Marine who started every patrol morning in Afghanistan with something unprintable, before the sun was up. What he was for got said plainly:

“It doesn’t matter what’s going on, he’s going to make sure that you laugh because he’s going to laugh through the pain.”

Hear it at 7:18

Later, it is how you tell it

The joke does a second job after you get out. It decides who you are in your own story.

Greg Cope White, a Marine Corps Veteran, author of The Pink Marine and TV writer, waited decades to write about Parris Island. Written the day after, he says, it would have been a story about a victim. Distance gave him something else to work with.

“You can step back, you find the funny and you find the moments and you think, ‘Oh, yeah. I don’t have to just be a victim.’”

Hear it at 2:11

Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, actress and firefighter EMT, went into acting and found an industry that was delighted by how easily she could cry. She explains how that works.

“It’s like, ‘No, it’s not on cue. It’s just because I’m so mentally unsound. Now pay me for being mentally unsound.’”

Hear it at 30:52

That is her joke about her own hard years, and she is the only one who gets to make it. We are just passing it along.

Jo MT, a 20 year Air Force bomb loader and stand-up comedian, has been on stage for three years. His act is his life with the serial numbers left on.

“For comedy for me, I love to be the 99% truth and the 1% false.”

Hear it at 29:33

He wanted to do it for about ten years before he did. He was at a military club on an Air Force base, watching a comic work a room full of airmen, and what he noticed was the room.

“I saw how much joy he was bringing to everybody else.”

Hear it at 31:29

Then a civilian hears it

Here is where it goes wrong. The joke was built for people who were there. Take it out of that room and it lands like a confession.

Brenner gives talks now, and he has stood at the front of the wrong room more than once.

“You’re like, ‘Oh, I almost died.’ And then you try to tell a joke. They’re like, ‘This isn’t funny.’”

Hear it at 5:47

Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, hit the same wall professionally. He moved to Los Angeles to get better and found that nobody would put him on.

“My comedy’s pretty rough. I was Vegas started, came out of the Marine Corps.”

Hear it at 37:53

The clubs did not want it. The big military entertainment tours wanted bigger names. He describes a small crisis.

“Who are my people, man? Who am I supposed to be performing for?”

Hear it at 38:39

Then he remembered the Marines who used to tell him he was wasting his life if he did not become a comic. He mailed 400 letters to Marine Corps units with one offer in them.

“I’m a Marine. I’m a comic. I’ll come perform for you guys anytime, any place for free.”

Hear it at 39:24

One unit training at Camp Pendleton wrote back. He drove down alone, in case it was a disaster, and did 45 minutes for 250 Marines.

“I had that moment. I was like, ‘This is my crowd. This is what I’m supposed to be doing.’”

Hear it at 40:19

That turned into the Rapid Fire Comedy Tour, a nonprofit that says it has been taking stand-up to military units in the field and in the barracks since 2018.

So the material was never the problem. The address was. D’Angelo is exact about what happens when the same words leave the room they were made for and get posted where anybody can find them.

“People are like, ‘Can you believe they said this?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, but we’re joking.’”

Hear it at 51:20

It is why he will not do a weekly podcast. He knows what he sounds like when he gets comfortable.

Is there a line?

Our guests do not agree, and one of them does not agree with his own earlier self.

When D’Angelo started booking units, he asked each one a considerate question.

“These guys would hit me up for shows and I would go, ‘Oh, is there something you guys don’t want us to talk about? Like, maybe there was a suicide in the unit.’”

Hear it at 56:29

He calls that a mistake now. Not the kindness. The open-ended offer.

“That just opens the door to censorship.”

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These days the unit gets a warning up front and can take it or leave it.

“Just so you know, we talk about race, gender, sex, violence, politics, drugs, rock and roll, and a lot of other explicit stuff.”

Hear it at 56:54

Most say come on down. Some say “thanks for the heads up. Our command’s not going to let that fly.”

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He would sooner hear that before the drive. And notice what he did the one time a unit handed him a short list that included no jokes about suicide. He agreed, and by his account every comic on the bill kept to it.

Uriarte draws his line somewhere else. He will use the strip to make a point he cares about, as long as it stays funny.

“Humor should be the key. It’s the cornerstone of Terminal Lance.”

Hear it at 57:16

And he thinks a joke can do work an argument cannot.

“If you can make a joke about it, you can make people laugh along with you. You can kind of shift the vibe, you know, and that stuff is real.”

Hear it at 56:41

Then there is the order of operations, which outsiders usually miss. On our 4th of July panel, the talk turned to how Veterans help each other carry the heavy stuff, and somebody at the table put it in eight words:

“We grieve and then we joke about it.”

Hear it at 15:18

Grieve is first in that sentence. The joke is not a way of skipping it.

So why is it so dark?

Because the material was. People make jokes out of what they have lying around, and for a few years what these eight had lying around was heat, boredom, bad leadership, fear and, for some of them, blood. The jokes are the same size as the days were.

If someone you love tells one that stops the table, here is what our guests would have you know. They are not telling you it did not matter. Brenner was praying when he made his. The joke is how he lets you stand next to it for a second without either of you having to fall in.

And if the jokes have stopped, if a person who used to be the loud one has gone quiet, that is the thing to pay attention to.