: Picture the following situation: a passenger aircraft nearly 300 people on board suffers a catastrophic failure, making the plane almost unflyable. The flight crew are struggling to maintain control,

@Tiffany377

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Picture the following situation: a passenger aircraft nearly 300 people on board suffers a catastrophic failure, making the plane almost unflyable. The flight crew are struggling to maintain control, to somehow get the plane on the ground while also knowing that they have to keep it away from populated areas because if it does go down, if they lose their fight, they don't want more people killed. They're struggling with the controls, straining physically and mentally. An unbelievable amount of tension, a scene of fear and stress...and the pilot cracking jokes.

From the initial question, I assume you'd consider this bad writing. A typical example of sloppy screenwriting and bathos, written by talentless screenwriters obsessed with having dramatic scenes kneecapped by jokes breaking the tension. Thing is though, this really happened. Al Haynes, the pilot of United 232, cracked jokes as the crew was struggling to keep the plane under control, and replied to the Sioux City Approach when they told him they were cleared to land at any runway by laughing and saying "You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"

People joke and make wisecracks in horrendous situations all the time. I personally have been in a situation where there was a body on the ground, it couldn't be moved until a coroner had given the okay, and the police officer and I who were sitting on the scene were casually joking and talking about things like video games mere meters from the body. I've seen people laugh at absurdities in emergency rooms while people are frantically trying to revive someone, I've seen people crack jokes as someone's house burns down (every firefighter will have been at a scene where someone makes a crack about bringing marshmallows), it happens in battle, it happens in the bleakest of circumstances. There's stories and jokes that emerged from the Soviet gulags and Nazi death camps, for goodness sake. It's human nature for such things to happen.

One can argue that it might happen too much in a given work of fiction, but then again, I've been on scenes where people were constantly making jokes, sarcastic comments, quips, people were laughing, and so on. Quite honestly, having it not happen is something I'd consider as a sign of bad writing and a sign of a writer so fixated on making things bleak and grim that they don't have their characters behaving like real people.

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