[steve-howard]

I think people just have different modes when it comes to tragedy. The first is empathy, where you think "holy shit a thousand lives ended suddenly." The second is a sort of abstraction where the people are more like characters in a story. I don't think people who tell dead baby jokes are actually thinking of how terribly sad it would be for an infant they loved to die.

[forgotpwtomain]

I think it requires a certain callousness of form though, you know reading the joke and then linking it to others.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it; I just think that it's an interesting observation that in a different culture no one would make the joke. Probably the dettached medium of communication (internet, anonymous) also has to do with this.