Humans have never outgrown their love of blood sports. We like to call ourselves civilized, and we outgrew the bloodsports for a while, and contented ourselves with boxing and football (either flavor), but then we invented Mixed Martial Arts, and now we have gungasms in media and real life.
Now, we call our blood sports "comedy" - a show like "Ridculousness"
This unholy spawn of "America's Funniest Videos," (1) where the biggest laughs were the the golf club to the nuts, and people falling off roofs and other injuries.
Now, just from one episode of "Ridiculousness," it's clear to me that now we find broken necks and ruptured kidneys hilarious. Oh, we don't see those yet, but didn't "Time Bandits" - and later fiction like "Shadowrun" - predict the comedy (2) of seeing people maimed and killed? Yep, they did. And now we watch people fall hard on brick corner work and slam into the ground chin first and not move, and we laugh, and laugh - while the asshole buddy with the camera just stands there filming, instead of rushing to aid his immobile friend.
Yeah, fucking hilarious, watching people hurt themselves, cripple themselves, or maybe die, doing foolish stunts, or sometimes everyday things (like riding a bicycle and slipping on grass).
We're a sick species.
(1) Good Lord, how is this show still on the air, and not been starved by YouTube??
(2) COMEDY of death and dismemberment. Not to be confused with mere gladiatorial death sport entertainment, as depicted in "The Hunger Games" and predicted long before Suzanne Collins by Ray Bradbury in "Fahrenheit 451" (complete with the wall-sized televisions showing us the 24-hour coverage of the robot drone hunter rushing for the execution.)
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