Suicide is a Scream, a Meme, and a Killer Joke

And also a rope. Or, an ode to David Foster Wallace.

Content warning: descriptions of suicidal ideation and jokes about suicide. Read at your own peril.

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Hey David Foster Wallace, I know why you killed yourself. Roped yourself, as the kids say. Me too bro. 

That was my message ten years ago in a proposed speech as an OGS: Outstanding Graduating Senior.¹ I thought I could address DFW, mirroring his famous 2005 This is Water commencement speech at Kenyon.² But back then, I was a different kind of OGS: Obviously Gonna Suicide. I was unprocessed, seeking an audience—a raw slab of meat bleeding out in public. It was unbecoming. Somewhat undignified. But worst of all, too serious. 

Guess who didn’t get to speak at commencement.³

While I’m free of suicidal ideation now, I’m still not free from writing about suicide, sorry :) I used many normal and many weird methods⁴ to climb to a decent place, but coping with the absolute nadir was its own beast.

For me, this many-headed monster met its match with dark humor.

Inside of you are two wolves

A Scream

Why did I want to kill myself? I was in good company; 1 person dies by suicide every 40 seconds.⁵ Sure, the world sucks and life is absurd and meaningless. But plenty of people keep rolling that boulder back up.⁶ There is no singular reason for suicide. 

But what we do know is that suicide is a scream for help. A meaner or ignorant person might say it is a cry for attention, which…well, no shit. Someone who attempts suicide needed attention at some point—or many points—in their lives. They were cast aside or received the wrong kind of attention. As DFW wrote in This is Water, “Most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.” 

So why are people dead inside already? Also a complex question. 

My culprit was trauma. All kinds of it, since I was a kid. Physical abuse, medical neglect, sexual violence, emotional damage. My body was smart and shielded me in every way it could. I know its survival methods worked because I live. But sometimes they worked too well. Long after the shocks, my body stayed tethered to the past, believing itself a watchful sentinel who guarded me from harm. But it became my warden instead, holding me hostage in that pitch-black pit. Trauma reverberated through time,⁷ severing me from others—and from myself. 

While severed, I lost the ability to trust myself. 

While severed, I confused violence for love and safety for horror. 

While severed, I thought suicide was the natural end and my final destiny. 

The beast in the pit tore me apart. But dark humor came with thread and needle, weaving fibers between the severed pieces. I felt the stitches forming, a small rebellion. Laughing until I was in stitches, laughter stitching me back together, over and over again. 

Can’t trust a bitch, especially not yourself

A Meme

That essay I wrote for the commencement speech? Thank God it wasn’t chosen, not only because of the cringe. Thank God it wasn’t chosen because I could have inspired a slew of suicides around me.⁸ Suicide has a funny tendency to spread, as if it were socially contagious.⁹ This copycat effect gives suicide a uniquely viral, meme-like¹⁰ quality. That’s why media must responsibly report¹¹ on suicide, else we end up with a situation like Anthony Bourdain, who killed himself in a similar fashion to Kate Spade two days after her death.¹²

Now hold on. Isn’t joking about suicide pretty irresponsible? Wouldn’t suicide memes increase suicide contagion? It’s a great question, and the public health community debates¹³ the question with compelling evidence for either side.  

For me, dark jokes about suicide worked. Laughter needs no overwrought explanation; it lives in my gut. Give me all the suicide memes—they cut through the static in my brain, interrupt all my thoughts. That many-headed beast? It was my own mind, my own thoughts replicating kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself.

The great hydra is a mind virus and suicide is one strange, strange meme. But humor is a meme too; it spreads just as fast, if not faster. There’s no better way to counter a dark meme than with an even blacker one.

In meme-on-meme warfare, may the best meme win. 

Because sometimes, life makes the punchline worse

A Killer Joke

Threads of dark humor stitched me together. But it was communal laughter that turned the threads into something stronger, a rope I grabbed onto with all my might that slung me up from the bottom. Why were dark jokes shared among friends and online communities so effective for coping with suicide? For me, making a killer joke about suicide in good company took away its power.¹⁴

So let me tell you a killer joke.¹⁵

Clippy was the very competent precursor to suicide pods

A Swiss suicide startup claims they’ve got a “peaceful exit” pod in the woods. All mentally terminal people can die with dignity at just 18 Swiss francs a pop. 

An American woman wants to kill herself. She is the perfect client, riddled with physical pain. She presses the button from inside the pod. Her death is an achievement, they claim.  

Except she is found with strangulation marks around her throat. Only one witness was there, the CEO. He is arrested.¹⁶ 

The machine didn’t work, so the CEO strangled her.  

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Was this murder, shitty customer service, or insane commitment and follow through? 

Or was this whole startup an elaborate scam so that the CEO could get paid to strangle people in the woods?

Imagine growing this business model. Every pod needs a strangler. Do things that don’t scale.¹⁷

You’ll eventually need to import H1Bs, maybe cut deals with private prisons for cheap felon labor. Get some of those death row inmates to relive their glory days. Or you could create a whole new revenue stream by charging regular citizens to strangle for stress relief.

“Do the right thing AND process your anger,” says the marketing material. “Imagine he’s your deadbeat dad. Better than smashing bowls in a rage room!”

CEO watching the suicide pod fail so he can get hands-on customer experience

And a Rope

I keep coming back to This is Water. DFW references the old cliche “the mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master” to illustrate that thinking won’t save you, thinking is what got you here. He wrote that people who commit suicide with a firearm most often aim at the head: “They shoot the terrible master.” 

So what about humor, then—not thinking. Would DFW have found the suicide pod darkly funny?¹⁸ Yes, I think so. It’s a surreal situation. Life imitates the most macabre art. But I also think he would be too intellectual, too cerebral about it. He wouldn’t laugh with abandonment, with playful enjoyment. His laugh was a dry, rusty sound, an old sharpened sword—not a thread, not a rope. An attack mechanism, irony wielded to be droll, distant, deadpan. For DFW, humor was another thought maze where he met a dead end. 

DFW’s extraordinary mind couldn’t think its way out of being a terrible master. He hung himself three years after This is Water.¹⁹ This great mind I admire choked itself out. This great mind gave him enough rope to hang himself.

I think of him often. I wonder if he could have thrown away the sword. And I wonder if his rope could have been a lifeline instead, thrown overboard, and rescued him from his drowning thoughts. I wonder if humor—a great belly laugh—could have transformed his rope into something absurd, something hopeful, into a human hand, a connection that said I hear you, please don’t go.  

I don’t know. 

But I do know that when I couldn’t trust my mind, dark humor offered me a rope. 

I took its hand and I never let it go.²⁰

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Thanks to the following for their amazing feedback across various versions:

Justin

, Kiana Elkins,

Kuriakin Zeng

,

Dolores Lucero

, Jennifer Scott,

Phi Pham | @phiunit

, Brian Smith, Quinn Zeda, Benjamin Milham-Marks,

Janette Barnard

,

Martyn Ross

,

Matheus Felipe

,

Happy Pixels

, Adya Singh,

Rachel Madrigal

,

Coco Liu

,

Anna Reich

,

CansaFis Foote

and

Rose

.

Special shoutout to CansaFis who found the shiny dime, found DFW, and reviewed all 3 versions, Brian Smith who shared his wisdom and knowledge,

Anthony Marigold

+ Mary Elzey +

Ethan Musolini

for the POP breakout session, Janette Barnard and Martyn Bromley and Josh Burgener (idea/feedback gym buddies who helped me realize I should use footnotes like DFW did and to make collages, new memes, new jokes), and to Rose who thoroughly commented v3 which prepped it for publication.

1. Nominees from the various business school departments had to duke it out. We were asked to throw an essay into the ring for consideration. Poor School of Accounting. If they didn’t regret nominating me then, they should really consider it now. I wasn’t even a great accounting student, having nearly failed External Reporting II. Fucking pension calculations.

2. DFW referenced shooting yourself in the head in front of the graduating class. To be clear, his essay wasn’t endorsing suicide.

3. I missed a chance to ruin the happiness of thousands of graduates and their families. Life mirrors itself. I also didn’t get to make a speech in high school, but that was valid. I was salutatorian. No speech for second place.

4. Highly effective methods were physical shocks to my system (ice baths, staying up all night), EMDR, hate reading political opponents with the intention of hating them forever but quasi falling in love with them instead, financial risk taking (TBH, gambling), multi-day fasting, ketamine. Mildly to very harmful methods were the suicide hotline, some therapies like CBT, several pharmaceutical drugs, reading too many books, etc. Quite a non-exhaustive list.

5. That translates to 700,0000 suicides worldwide each year. If you want a spoiler for the rest of the essay, check out this dry academic paper here.

6. Why must we imagine Sisyphus happy anyways? Maybe he’s still suicidal and copes with dark jokes while bouldering. 

7. Poetically, William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” For Wikipedia hounds, see PTSD and CPTSD. And for a fun combo of dry academia, insight, and controversy read The Body Keeps The Score. I find it funny that the author Bessel van der Kolk was allegedly abusive himself. Therapists, especially famous ones, can lack introspection. Alice Miller is another example.

8. Now, I wouldn’t have caused a lot of suicides since I am neither high-status nor well known, but this is one competition I am totally fine with never trying out for. No tiptoeing onto the field for me. We’ve got enough high scores with the likes of Poplar Groves or Robin Williams, whose widely reported suicide increased the risk of suicide clusters by 10%.

9. Also known as the Werther effect. Coined in the 1700s, the effect is named after the huge success of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which influenced fans to commit copycat suicides. I don’t think Goethe intended to write such a deadly self-help book.

10. Not realizing that he himself would become a meme, Richard Dawkins coined the concept of a meme in 1976 with his book The Selfish Gene, describing the meme as a unit of cultural transmission. When we look, we see memes everywhere. For instance, religions are also memetic, characterized by Dawkins infamously as “viruses of the mind.”

A whole field has sprung up to study memes: memetics is “a theory of the evolution of culture based on Darwinian principles with the meme as the unit of culture”, which is not to be confused with the mimetic theory by Rene Girard.

Girard’s theory famously influenced Peter Thiel to invest in Facebook. In thinking about it, his theory can actually be applied to suicide too: a fusing of the societal desire to kill the scapegoat with mirroring the desire to kill oneself, so that the scapegoated target IS the self.

11. Instead of causing copycat suicides/the Werther effect, good media can induce the opposite Papageno effect, named after “The Magic Flute” opera by Mozart, where a character plans a suicide but is saved by being reminded of alternatives. Quite an unconventional motivational poster. Want to kill yourself? The true answer is but an aria away.

12. It’s not confirmed that Bourdain read about Kate’s suicide in the news, but it feels nice and righteous to blame someone. I never lose an opportunity to blame mainstream media!

13. Suicide as a meme is not an original theory which damn, I thought it was for a moment. Foiled again. I did arrive at this conclusion independently and found the Atlantic article after.

In the article, psychologist Bart Andrews says he supports suicide memes and disagrees that memes like these contribute to suicide contagion: “It’s a way for them to anonymously communicate their inner pain in a way that’s artistic, super clever, and that people who are struggling identify with.”

And because I love being right: “Not a single public-health problem has gotten better by reducing conversation,” concludes Foreman of the American Association of Suicidology at the end of the article.

There IS a fine line between normalizing suicide content (thus contributing to social contagion) and destigmatizing suicide, so even if experts agree that expanding dialogue around suicide memes is good, we should be careful…oorrr we should just keep making suicide jokes. Which world would you rather kill yourself in?

14. There is probably a way to measure the power levels of a suicide meme. Come up with a metric, measure the meme-y level of suicide, assign it a score, and find some correlation with the meme level of a warring suicide meme. Could be a fun data science project.

15. I laughed my ass off at these jokes in this Reddit thread and repurposed them AKA happily stole them. r/redscarepod is one community of dark humor enjoyers that I fuck with.

16. As you can probably tell by now, this is a real story that happened recently. I don’t know the veracity of the Daily Mail reporting, but they do cite a few other newspapers. For the sake of the woman, I hope this isn't true. For the sake of humor, I hope it is.

17. Paul Graham would write a killer Airbnb-esque essay on the early day challenges of personalized stranglers.

18. It’s sacrilege to think AI could write anything like DFW or that I could approach DFW. But here’s a pale imitation of DFW telling the Killer Joke. Made by AI and myself through multiple rounds and multiple revisions.

19. Shooting the terrible master is fast. Hanging him is slow. What does that say about DFW and another man that I greatly admire Aaron Swartz, the hacker and free Internet champion, who both chose this unhurried, deliberate method?

20. Bonus meme footnotes:

Distracted Boyfriend: An ex would ask me this question (not cruelly, to help me) - “Why DON’T you just kill yourself then?” and I also started asking the question to myself. Indeed,  why procrastinate on suicide?

Trust No One: Even in this meme he’s trying to kill himself, respect.

Meme Collage:

• “Don’t kill urself ur so sexy aha” -  Once again the absurdity wins. No one is too sexy for that sweet sweet death, but it’s impossible to kill yourself when your himbo/bimbo/thembo texts you with that dumb Golden Retriever energy.

• “Man sentenced to death for failed suicide attempt” is truly the epitome of Task Failed Successfully.  

• “I’m such a failure that I would fail at killing myself and end up a vegetable.”  Self-flagellation; it’s super effective! And seamless logic too, can’t argue your way out of it. Guess you can’t kill yourself anymore.  

Clippy: Sometimes he is so (in)competent that you want to kill Clippy instead of yourself, which is quite (un)helpful.