For comedy one needs to subvert expectations, and this is why making light of grave events (Black Comedy) is a big phenomenon.

There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.

Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.

>Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.

I think they made the connection to dark comedy:

>this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.

And later

>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.

Also Dr Strangelove... the subject matter doesn't get much darker but it is also quite hilarious.

Yeah, in spite of the author's claims to not want to be the humor police, this really just reads as someone who takes their work as a historian of nuclear weapons 'very seriously' and doesn't want it to be joked about. The SNL joke he identified as being particularly offensive ("Having received the Novel Peace Prize, the survivors of the nuclear bombings called the award the second biggest surprise of their lives") is ... pretty anodyne? It's not making fun of the survivors or glorifying cruelty, it's just contrasting the banal things people say when receiving awards with the extreme reality of having endured one of the most awful events in human history. That kind of juxtaposition is pretty par for the course in comedy, let alone dark comedy. And when it comes to engaging with the reality of awful events, not everyone wants to or has the capacity to treat them with the grave solemnity the author seems to expect.