Odd title, but I'm pondering...

There is a blog out there running a (spoof) 'driveby Baptisms' competition where people are invited to drive through puddles, soak people and claim it as a baptism.  Well, no, it's not proper immersion, but that's another story.

Normally I would find it funny.  But not this week.  This week I watch TV footage of places I've been, or where people I know live or work, under feet of murky flood water.  Suddenly soaking people with puddle splashes seems quite, well, sick really.

Andy Amoss picks up the some of the tensions that emerge as we observe the suffering of others at close quarters whilst getting on with comfortable lives - afterall, I am in my nice flood-free manse, high(-ish) on a hill able to blog about it all.

I don't want to become a Victoria Meldrew but sometimes funny just isn't.  I recall reading somewhere that what makes humour permissible (or not) is the context - if the joke is told from within a community/context it is OK, if it is about/against it it isn't.  So far, so good, but the driveby Baptism thing is totally outside of flood-soaked Britain, and is a joke within/"against" certain Baptismal traditions.  So maybe the context of the hearer/reader matters too.  If there were no floods here, I'd be laughing along with the best (or worst) of them (even if I think splashing pedestrians is a bad thing; making waves when there's no one to drench is fine).

Maybe it's just a fact of life that one person's funny is another's bad taste?  But maybe it's not a bad thing to ponder it now and then.