Tragedy reenacted as farce

Just to set up a little story, let me explain that I lost my old newspaper job this spring (no hard feelings) but have landed a new position elsewhere after coasting on severance pay awhile. There was an orientation session for new hires today, and part of the program covered what was to be done in the event of an active shooter in the workplace. The instructional video pulled few punches, showing what a live instructor aptly called a "Vin Diesel type" clad in militant black marching into a building, producing a shotgun and blowing away several people. The surviving workers demonstrated recommended methods of escaping, hiding or, if necessary, fighting the attacker. Unfortunately, the video's budget didn't allow for the use of master thespians, as became clear when characters attempted to emote. So maybe bad acting can ruin any mood or disrupt any purpose, or maybe there was a certain mood in the room two days after the incidents in El Paso and Dayton. All I can say definitely is that whenever one of the fictional employees was shown panicking, there was a lot of laughter in our orientation room.  I've long noticed that lots of people look for any excuse to laugh at something seemingly serious onscreen, and not only because that something has turned out unintentionally funny. For some, that impulse expresses a preference to treat everything in life, if not life itself, as a joke, in order to not look weak or like a whiner. Others may have other reasons for laughing and needing to laugh. And if people, for whatever reason, can laugh at a sincerely-intended instructional film about surviving a mass shooting within 48 hours of the real thing twice over, that impulse must be irrepressible. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm not quite sure.