Most comedy is tragic.[1] And laughing is an inherently selfish act, as Mel Brooks observed when he said, "comedy is when you fall in an open sewer and die."[2]

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/25/comedy-plus/

[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/mel-brooks-film-exc...

It doesn't sound like you really do disagree with the author at all. I never had the sense that he was trying to shame anyone. In fact he almost exactly echoes your 2nd paragraph:

> I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world.

I wouldn't joke about a nuclear bomb, but a nuclear scientist who died because of messing with that stuff?

>Simply bringing two pieces of metal together for instant death? It's absolute magic!

There wasn't anything instant about the death, from Wikipedia:[1]

  Despite intensive medical care and offers from numerous volunteers to donate blood for transfusions, Slotin's condition was incurable.[2] He called his parents and they were flown at Army expense from Winnipeg to be with him. They arrived on the fourth day after the incident, and by the fifth day his condition started to deteriorate rapidly.
  
  Over the next four days, Slotin suffered an "agonizing sequence of radiation-induced traumas", including severe diarrhea, reduced urine output, swollen hands, erythema, "massive blisters on his hands and forearms", intestinal paralysis and gangrene. He had internal radiation burns throughout his body, which one medical expert described as a "three-dimensional sunburn." By the seventh day, he was experiencing periods of "mental confusion." His lips turned blue and he was put in an oxygen tent. He ultimately experienced "a total disintegration of bodily functions" and slipped into a coma. Slotin died at 11 a.m. on 30 May, in the presence of his parents.

You have to admit that the setup of this experiment makes riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, with a .1% BAC, look like more responsible behavior.

The other people in the room got a couple years’ worth of rads from his mistake didn’t they?

I’m sure they rationalized not using an apparatus for this due to embrittlement, thermal expansion, response time, or all three. But from the perspective of someone looking back on this era 50 years later (now 80), Jesus fucking Christ.

Carpenter’s pencils as spacers would have saved his life.

In fact Wikipedia says he was a dumbass:

> The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.

> By Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin's hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver. Slotin, who was given to bravado,[11] became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions,

Yeah I’ve always thought the juxtaposition of 1) these high level experts with 2) one of the most dangerous objects we’ve ever created against the ways 2 was treated by 1 is part of the entertainment. Like its own unique and wildly unexpected category of the Darwin awards.

Yeah it’s sad but it is almost difficult to believe, so it ends up being kind of funny

Part of me thinks he'd laugh his ass off at the memes.

Hell, when the accident happened, he said, "Well, that does it."

Yep. It's like someone chain-smoking cigarettes while working with gasoline. There's a "yo, WTF?" humor to how reckless it is.

Off-primary use of a mundane hand tool being the only thing preventing a minor nuclear disaster is simply funny. Like God forming man from mud not with the fine tools of a master clay-worker, but a child's play-doh plastic carving tools and a couple toothpicks.

I can't help but feel like this (completely overlooked) facet played a part in the humor for its original audience. From a certain point of view, he was 1 more casualty of a weapon that went on to kill 150-240k people thereafter. Live by the sword, etc.

I wonder how much of that is all the WWII vets being gone and not being able to hear their thankfulness at not having to invade Japan the hard way (after what happened on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

More important is that physically dangerous workplaces have mostly been written out of popular culture over the past half-century.

Vs. if your day job routinely involves high voltages, roofing, heavy equipment, or other "one stupid slip, and your life is effectively over" situations, then you have a rather different outlook on this.

If one wants to ignore that German scientists were working on the bomb as well, and the American scientists just had more resources to pull it off first.

I think it's about that ecstasy in losing yourself in something that can sometimes cause you to lose your life.

The terrible consequences are definitely an implied part of the meme, otherwise it's just someone messing about with some pieces of metal and screwdriver and isn't funny at all.

The author seems to have missed the memo that the era of victimisation and virtue signaling is finally over.