Old Man Fight Prompts Ambivalence, Giggles

As is not uncommon with a leisure class that has known no real suffering, I tend to derive significant pleasure from the misfortune of others. Not genuine misfortune of real people, mind you--I'm not a dick--but I will confess that such plights in the abstract, when distilled to the slithering miasma of their vile essence, do make me smile. As fellow connoisseurs of this debased form of pleasure (after all, dear reader, you continue to peruse my literary tripe despite its clear lack of a moral compass), you too are aware of that special mixture of the taboo, the unexpected, and the absurd that the best of these evince. Exempli gratia: What do you get when you put a baby in a blender? An erection.

I'll give you a moment to let that one sink in.

Particularly when one takes into consideration the nature of my previous post, one wonders whether your dear author has indeed "gone off the reservation," a figure of speech I'm not entirely comfortable using, both because I'm not entirely sure I'm using it correctly, and even if I am, my white guilt makes me feel like I should contribute to a Native American scholarship program or something each time it's deployed, like putting nickels in a swear jar. Clink. There's your five cents, kid.

My point (oh, I have one), is that my frame of reference may have been inevitably skewed over the course of many, many years immersed in this sort of inappropriate tom-foolery. I know what I find funny, but of late, the better angel on my shoulder seems to be absent. Sure, I'll still laugh, but should I also feel guilty for laughing? Case in point:

I'm leaning towards not, but it's so difficult to be sure. The life-long grudge element of this fight (the two were rivals in the Canadian Football League roughly half a century ago, a league devoted primarily to moose hunting and being polite, I'm told) warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart. I'm Irish, after all, and grudges are one thing we do very well; my father, for instance, never liked the British and held a personal grudge against Pope John Paul II for the better part of thirty years. Then there's the irony of the olive branch offering instigating violence, and most obviously, the fact that they both clearly have one foot in the grave already. No disrespect to either combatant, though--I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the first punch from Sir Olive Branch would have cleaned my clock (clink goes the nickel into the scholarship for watchmakers' children).

But, yeah, old men fighting on stage at public event, which then goes viral on the internet...I can see how maybe I should feel a twinge of guilt for giggling at their misfortune, at least in the abstract. But I'm tapping the glass of the instrument on my moral dashboard, and it's not responding. I think I bought a lemon.

As is so often the case in my life, I find myself torn and unable or unwilling to make a final decision. I turn to you, dear reader, to guide me from this maze. Should I find this funny or not? The suspense is killing me.