It’s not funny! It’s hysterical!

It has become so easy to create hysteria that sometimes I worry that humor itself is endangered, to say nothing of free speech.

We’ve all heard the apocryphal story about the man who was arrested in an airport because he saw a friend named Jack and yelled “HI JACK!” The moral lesson was never to talk about or joke about hijackings in any way at airports. OK, I can live with that. It is downright foolish to engage in antics like that, and it is an excellent way to get bumped from your flight and maybe even get your name entered into a data base of people who aren’t allowed to fly.

I thought about this when I read about white powder pranks. An ordinary bag of flower in the hands of a mischievous child has the potential to create urban pandemonium. So does an ordinary piece of rope if tied into a hangman’s noose and simply left anywhere in plain sight. I don’t like the idea of giving mischievous brats who might simply want a day off from school such unbridled power. Harmless commonplace objects should not have such power.

Nor should a silly cartoon image of what looks for the world like a cutesy little teddy bear. I must be out of touch (and maybe I run in the ‘wrong” circles), but until this morning, I had seen the bear image floating around, but I  not heard about the special, um, context. It seems the bear — “Pedobear” — is a cartoon character that was invented to ridicule pedophiles and pedophilia.  But it has taken on a life of its own, and is generating popular hysteria. Citywide alerts have been issued. Parents are being warned about men in bear suits.

Check out the video here (which turned out to be hysteria-mongering by dimwitted, hysteria-mongering police).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=V_lmMmYAyow

And if you think that sort of thing is hysterical, by all means check out the pictures of Pedobear labeled as Muhammad!

“Pedobear” looks too much like the Grateful Dead dancing bear for comfort.

Might there even be the implications for Captain Kangaroo’s Dancing Bear?

Nooses and white powder are one thing, but I think allowing cutesy images be transformed into images of danger goes too far. Pretty soon, “the children” will be afraid of everything, and the result will be mothers clamoring for more laws.

I only stumbled onto this meme because I wanted to understand the context of a picture caption that read “Before There Was Pedobear There was this guy. Who is infinitely scarier.”

I guess it is scarier, but when I was a kid I enjoyed being scared by horror movies, and my friends and I would have laughed ourselves silly over the idea of a dirty old man in a bunny suit. Besides, the kids in the picture don’t look especially scared. Not as scared as they would be by a TSA screener pulling down their pants. (Probably not a good idea to joke about that at airports either.)

A humor hysterectomy is in order.