After reading this article in the last issue, I couldn't help but to think about all the things I've laughed about. In hindsight, some rounds of laughter may have been inappropriate at the time. However, after taking my trip down memory lane, I realized that our laughter at inappropriate things doesn't start with our generation.
In fact, laughing at the physical pain of others originated long before our time. It started in the 1890s when slapstick comedy became popular. Slapstick comedy consisted of exaggerated violence that would entertain the viewer. Actors used a board called a slapstick that made a loud sound when it hit something(implying the person was hit harder than he or she was). Slapstick can be found in classics such as The Three Stooges and variations of this humor in the recent hit Jackass.
Laughing in inappropriate moments isn't the problem here. Differentiating between the movies and real life is the issue we need to fix in order to make sure that, as the author says so well, the human race does not turn into cold machines.