The Internet has never been good at observing the whole “tragedy + time = comedy” formula, usually substituting “volumes of snarky jokes” for time in that equation. You’ll have noticed it if you’re on Twitter and seen the countless swine flu gags that went around the past few days.

I’m not really an easily-offended dude, so it doesn’t bother me or anything, but I kinda get the feeling that this is a little different from, like, the slew of Bea Arthur jokes or whatever. It’s gallows humor, but in a very sincere way. I think we’re making jokes because we’re all about half-sure that we’re going to die from swine flu.

Maybe not consciously. Nobody I know is actually talking about how it’s gonna get us. We’re all talking about washing our hands and stuff. But shit, man – this is how far into the process of being convinced that the world’s going to end for one reason or another? You send a country through a twenty-month recession that boiled over into a genuine terrifying crisis about six months ago, and eventually people start looking for something tangible to be scared of. We’ve all been expecting seriously bad shit to come our way for a long time – maybe it’s losing our jobs, or finding out that the fields in which we want our jobs to be no longer exist, or losing houses or never being able to buy a house in the first place or foraging for berries and using our iPhones to smash open the shells on the nuts we find in the woods or being forced to watch Australian Rules Football because the NFL no longer exists or whatever -

But it’s been something for a really long time. And now that something could be something. We’ve spent two years feeling like something was going to get us, and it wasn’t the stock market or Tim Geithner or those ponzi scheme assholes or the bouncy dollar or the Icelandic economic chickens coming to roost down in Texas, because a lot of us – at least the ones cracking the does it turn you into a pig? jokes on Twitter – never had anything to lose there, not really. (broke x broke = broke, you know?) So the swine flu becomes funny because we think it’s going to kill us, because something like that has to happen, and it’s hard to feel like you’re being inappropriate or disrespectful when you’re talking about the thing that’s going to kill you. AIDS patients are allowed to make hilarious AIDS jokes. We’re all potential – probable? – victims of swine flu, so we’re allowed to laugh about it. Something’s been coming for us for a long-ass time. The fact that it’s called “swine flu” is kinda funny.

(Also, apparently the number of swine flu cases in Mexico, where the outbreak began, is decreasing as you read this. I’m no doctor or pandemic specialist or anything, but that’s not how the superflu spread in The Stand – I think that if that number keeps falling, even if new infections increase elsewhere, this thing isn’t that scary. Which means, among other things, that the next time something terrible threatens to wipe us all out, expect the jokes to start immediately.)