Here is an interesting article discussing this:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/News/911doniger.html
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The philosopher Ted Cohen writes that "laughter is an acceptance of the world, like god's laughter," standing the doctrine of lila on its head; but he also writes that "joking is almost always out of place when it is a kind of avoidance; a laugh should not be a deflection from something else that needs to be done."[26] Here we must again distinguish between the use of humor and masquerade as a temporary repression of reality and as a way of working through reality.[27] Black humor is designed precisely to uncover the naked truth, however painful that flaying may be. Terry Southern reported a conversation he had with Stanley Kubrick about Dr. Strangelove, in which Kubrick told him that he was going to make a film about "our failure to understand the dangers of nuclear war." He said that he had thought of the story as a "straightforward melodrama" until one morning when he "woke up and realized that nuclear war was too outrageous, too fantastic, to be treated in any conventional manner." He said he could only see it now as "some kind of hideous joke."[28]
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Gallows humor presents us with a world that is hopeless but not serious. After September 11, many people whose initial, quite understandable disinclination was never to get into an airplane again, overcame that nervousness by saying, to themselves and others, "If we stop flying, they win." This formulaic statement became so common that Chicago's Second City comedy troop developed a sketch in which a "clay arts" teacher insists to his depressed class, "If we don't glaze our pottery today, they win,"[40] while the producers of Fox's MADtv rejected a stronger version about "sleazy lawyers declaring that they should defy terrorists by living their lives normally and so it was their patriotic duty to sue their mothers."[41] I want to say, if we stop laughing at our own tragedies, they win. But if we can laugh in the face of the bullies who would destroy us, then we have won. To do this is to say, "Your grim, humorless world is not going to destroy our fragile world of self-mockery. We can still mock ourselves, and you. You are not going to get us. We win." The situation is hopeless but not serious, and, if war is play, peace is all that is serious.
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