Reflections on the Jonestown massacre of 1978

As a society, we sometimes tell jokes about some of the most horrific events--mass murders, disasters, and so on. Often the jokes start within a day or two of the catastrophe, even before the dead can be counted. Perhaps we do it as a coping or healing mechanism, or perhaps it's our only extant type of transmitting oral history in modern times. I'm just not sure. Maybe no one is.

Like you, certainly, I've heard all kinds of jokes about the Holocaust, September 11th, and recent mass shootings. I used to wonder why I never heard a good joke about [Jonestown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown) more than *three decades* after the fact, but then I realized that it was because the punchline was too long.

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