Confused about whether to make a terrorism-related wisecrack as you pass through security? Consult this handy guide
As a leading member of the liberal intelligentsia, I am petitioned on an almost occasional basis for pearls of life advice. What, people want to know, is my single most important tip for happy and successful living? Today, because the world can't fairly be expected to wait any longer, I've decided to reveal the answer. It is this:
Don't make jokes about having a bomb in your luggage when going through airport security.
This advice is counterintuitive, I realise. And, regrettably, it comes too late for a 63-year-old man named Alejandro Hurtado – known to friends, I suspect, as an "inveterate joker" with a "ready smile" who "loves to laugh" – who prompted the partial evacuation of Miami International Airport on Monday after allegedly telling a gate agent he had dynamite in his bag.
In reality, he didn't have dynamite in his bag, as bomb squad officers ascertained when they arrived on the scene. It was, Hurtado explained, a joke.
Not a funny joke, admittedly. But then, jokes made in airport security queues so rarely are. Last month, a hockey coach and funny guy named Peter Freisema triggered the evacuation of Anchorage airport when he joked, according to a member of airport staff, that his friend's bag (can you guess the punchline?) had a bomb in it. Friesema protested that he was actually asking "what if my friend's bag has a bomb in it?", but I'm not sure this improves matters much.
The Transportation Security Administration's blog regularly features similar side-splitting remarks. "I have eight bombs on me," one passenger is quoted as saying; another, at Gulfport-Biloxi airport in Mississippi, "stated that he 'possibly had a bomb in his bag'. He later explained … [that] he thought the statement would get him through security faster."
Look. It's true that the TSA presides over an ineffective, privacy-invading regime of "security theatre". It's true that a real terrorist probably wouldn't make a joke about terrorism. And there's no justification for outrageous over-reactions to bomb jokes made by people who aren't, at that very moment, in airport security lines, Paul Chambers's tweet about Robin Hood Airport being the canonical example.
I'm even willing to admit that there's a fine line between a joke and legitimate security-related conversation: of all airport jokers, I feel the most sympathy for the US Airways pilot Elwood Menear, who in 2002 asked a Philadelphia airport screener, who was fussing over tweezers in his carry-on, "why are you worried about tweezers when I could crash the plane?" He had a good point.
But you still shouldn't make jokes about having a bomb in your luggage when going through airport security.
Why do people do this? (And they keep on doing it, year after year.) Some, including the "eight bombs" japester mentioned above, seem to be drunk. A few may suffer from mental issues, in which case I should try to extend more compassion.
But the rest, I suspect, are in the grip of what Edgar Allan Poe called "the imp of the perverse", that dark but ubiquitous human urge to do exactly the thing you mustn't do: to jump off a cliff, or say the most offensive thing possible, precisely because it would be so appalling to do so. (Psychologists suspect that the urge may exist to help us rehearse how we deal with fear.) If I'm honest, I can imagine feeling a heady thrill in the seconds between making a bomb joke and being hauled off for it.
But you still shouldn't make jokes about having a bomb in your luggage when going through airport security.
And if you absolutely must, please at least try to think of one that's actually funny.
OK, thanks.