The small section of cyberspace that is not already enveloped by pornography is almost entirely devoted to Schadenfreude. To delight in the misery of others is the main reason that the under 25 set logs on. Everybody wants to catch the YouTube clip of some person or other horribly embarrassing themselves. When you step back from it, most of the blogosphere looks like a highlight reel of bloopers from newsmakers and celebrities. Certainly, you cannot explain the phenomenon that is reality television without allowing for our country’s morbid curiosity with things that get worse all the time.

I could ask the existential question—why is it funny to see someone get hit in the nuts? I could ask it, but I can’t answer it. Other people’s scrotumnal problems are just in that category of “things some people will always find funny,” right along with monkeys and midgets. Instead, I will ask the metaphysical question: can watching a person get hit the nuts be funny if you played no part in the assault? We are aware that bad things happen to people all the time. Just in the time it has taken you to read this far, somebody has been hit in the balls. Maybe even somebody you know. But since you didn’t experience it, since you didn’t sense it, you didn’t find it funny. The mere fact that bad things happen does not give us Schadenfreude; we have to in some way experience the reality of the misery in order to siphon the joy.

Video would seem like a great medium to capture this experience. You can see and hear the whole terrible thing unfold. Video combined with the Internet allows us to share the low points of other people’s lives with ease and speed. Unfortunately the best video can do is appeal to two senses. The human experience is so much richer than what we can hear and see. Without story and context every Quicktime clip is functionally the same clip: “Man gets hit in the balls, feels pain.” If you’ve seen it once, you’ve see it all. Even if you derive your Schadenfreude through the combination of a visual and written account, there is still too much left out. No story can recreate the sensation of a can of beer hurtling past the tip of your cigarette on its heat seeking journey towards your buddy’s left testicle. Moreover, pain alone is but one aspect of unhappiness and torment. We need to be able to bring to bear all of the important context clues to know, for sure, that something terrible has happened.

Schadenfreude is pleasure from other’s misery, not pleasure from a minor inconvenience. Anybody with a sense of humor might well laugh at a person who slips and falls in the snow. That is not Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is deriving child-like glee when a person falls in the snow right on the spot your dog just peed in. It is that personal joy you get from knowing that the person will smell like your dog’s pee for the rest of the day. You need to know enough of the context to believe that the people that you are laughing at are in utter distress. That’s how you find the funny.

Therefore there are or at least should be a couple of rules to Schadenfreude. I humbly suggest some simple guidelines to distinguish Schadenfreude from its less interesting cousin mockery. The first rule is obvious: you have to be there. No eyewitness account can recreate the depth of human experience. I’m always surprised about the kinds of little things I remember years and years later. I remember the “I can’t believe you brought me here as a date” look on my wife’s face right before she fell down the only three steps at the Guggenheim. I remember the decision to turn the music up louder that was being executed just as the cops walked into room. It is the details that rarely make it into the morning after emails that make a catastrophe all the more enjoyable. Nobody is ever lying when they say, “I guess you had to be there.”

Although this might sound a bit sadistic, the second rule of Schadenfreude is that to truly experience it, the terribleness has to happen to a friend or a well known enemy. You cannot truly delight in the misery of people you don’t know very well, because you’ll never really know if they are miserable or not. I’ve seen people vomit for all sorts of reasons in all kinds of places. But one of the very pinnacles of my life occurred when a guy I know vomited in the sleeve of his own jacket in a noble effort to avoid spewing all over the van we were riding in. I loved it because I knew what that jacket meant to him, I loved it because I remembered the muffled cries to pull the van over that went wholly ignored. I loved it because at that exact moment I knew he was truly and utterly miserable. Six years later I still get the giggles just thinking about it. Had it been just some random guy with some random jacket it would have been just another disposable experience from my life. Instead, because it happened to a friend, I laughed all the way home. You’ve got to know the person reasonably well to really be happy when they are in agony.

Now I think that what most dabblers in Schadenfreude don’t understand or accept is what I see as the natural evolution of rules 1 and 2. If you’ve got to be there and you’ve got to know the person, then I’m telling you that it follows as day into night that you have to also be partially responsible for the misery unfolding around you. It is not enough to innocently stand on the wall and watch. That is called being a voyeur. Voyeurism, while occasionally titillating, is always unsatisfying. Voyeurism is a no account, timid-ass way to glide through life. Voyeurs lack courage and have the creativity of sheep. In a word: boo.

If you are going to get some real Schadenfreude out of your life then you have to get in there and make yourself at least partially responsible for the bad things that happen to others. I remember my friend’s muffled pleas to vomit with dignity because I was the one shouting him down and convincing the driver that he should be ignored. I remember the look on my wife’s face because I forced her to go to the damn museum. I remember my roommate turning up the music because I demanded that the music be louder. Whenever something goes horribly wrong in a place that I am in you can rest assured that somewhere along the line I had something to do with it. You know why? Because I am not a punk. I’m not going to prance around in diabolic glee when everything comes crashing down if I had nothing to do with it. That’s just called being an asshole. Instead of the empty satisfaction of mockery, if I am going to laugh at your misfortunes I am going to give you the respect of being a causal factor in your misfortune. It’s sad to watch a friend suffer for no reason; it’s hilarious to watch a friend suffer and know that somewhere back along the chain of events, you are the reason. If I really think it’s going to be that funny to see some guy gets hit in the nuts, then Goddamn it, I’ll hit the guy in the nuts myself. That is how you earn the joy.

The issue is one of self reliance. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, no good can come to us that we do not ourselves work for. We must create our own happiness in this life, not trust to others in hopes that we can surf the wake of somebody else’s good fortune. Our culture has become detached from self reliance and our society is worse off for it. America has lost her will to go out and do for herself, so instead she tries to siphon off the advantages produced by others. We’ve become a country of voyeurs, of pornographers, of sheep. We’d rather send other people’s children to die for foreign oil than commit to becoming energy independent. We’d rather sit at home and Google porn instead of going out to a bar and meeting a real woman. We’d rather subject ourselves to Johnny Knoxville than go out and cause destruction for ourselves.

Proper application of Schadenfreude can save our country more so than any Pollyanna sugary sweet good doing can hope to achieve. Helping people acts like a salve to the soul, softening the reality of horrors. Helping is what society wants us to do when we become fed up with the way things work. When we help our friends we tend to feel warm, gushy, contented inside. Helping is the bedfellow of complacency. Mischief on the other hand is a manifestation of the discontented. It is restless. It is creative. It is how we go to the window, open it, and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Remember that a forest fire is a good thing for the forest.

Schadenfreude leads to civil disobedience, and lord knows we need to get some disobedience (civilized or no) up in this declining civilization. Systematically learning how to take pleasure and participate in the ruination of the lives around you can only lead to applying those lessons to society as a whole. Project Mayhem is the natural evolution of Fight Club and we all know that Fight Club starts with hitting someone “as hard as you can.” The system, the Man, the military-industrial complex, whatever you want to call it, they are winning and we—the young, the new, the ones with nothing to lose—we must stop them. Without oil the engine grinds to a halt; it falls to us to remove that viscosity.

That is why the rules I’ve explored for Schadenfreude are so important, especially for young people who think flaming on a blog amounts to anything useful whatsoever. Instead of sitting behind the unaccountable safety of your keyboard we need to challenge ourselves to go out and do something. Start a fight, plot the downfall of an enemy, ruin a dinner party, it doesn’t matter what—just make sure that the wheels of life do not roll over you unperturbed. Let us all get out there and start rocking the boat. Who knows what we could topple?

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