I still enjoy many dark jokes internally too, but I definitely don’t share them with as wide an audience as I used to- I’ll make a joke about priests molesting kids to my husband, close friends, or immediate family, but I know that I can’t generally know who has been impacted by that, and I’m not trying to fuck up someone’s day with a flip joke.

I also don’t enjoy dead baby jokes nearly as much as I used to, because I’ve now known several people who’ve had a late miscarriage or stillbirth, or whose children died, and I can’t separate the punchline from the image of their faces while grieving or talking about the loss. I still like dark humor about things that directly impacted me, but for things that only happened to loved ones, I can’t see the humor anymore.