When a dingo eats a baby, everyone is surprised.

The phrase uttered, apparently, by Linda Chamberlain at Ayers Rock in 1980 and immortalized by Meryl Streep in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, was "the dingo took my baby." Chamberlain, who was cleared of the murder (initial inquest: death by dingo), was later convicted of it, then eventually cleared (here's a full account of the incident and its aftermath).

But it was as "the dingo ate my baby" that the phrase acquired a pop cultural popularity in the 1990s, being used by Elaine on Seinfeld ("Maybe a dingo ate your baby," delivered in a fabulous Australian accent), finding itself in the Buffy-verse as the name of a band (Dingoes Ate My Baby) fronted by Oz, and getting mentioned by Bart Simpson.

"The dingo ate my baby" is delightful partly because to American ears, "dingo" sounds funny--like so many Australian words derived from aboriginal ones (boomerang, billabong, kangaroo) it combines n-g and o sounds you don't get much in American English, and the cultural distance from Australia means that those differences can feel charming indeed--witness the astonishing success of Paul Hogan (cf. "that's not a knife"; I can't imagine Australians were proud, but who knows). On top of that "baby" is pretty funny, and then of course eating a baby takes things over the top, so that you have an almost perfect comedic phrase for people who don't mind poking occasional fun at the so-called culture of life (making fun of babies = no; getting a whole army into situations where they might accidentally bomb or shoot babies... go for it!).

Snooping around online will reveal that, with all the sympathy for genuine tragedy and bereavement typical of internet culture (and of Oz and Elaine and the Simpsons, for that matter), lots of lemonade has been made of the Chamberlain family's lemons. I found t-shirts for babies reading "Dingo Snack," a spoof in which Kathie Lee Gifford's dog (aka her "baby") is eaten by a coyote, a fake news thing called "Babies ate my dingoes" ("It's so that common folks can't go out at night walking our pet dingoes, for fear of wild youngsters coming out from the bush and eating them," says one concerned resident), and so on.

Humor about someone else's tragedy is funny partly because it crosses a line involving respect for the pain of others (that is, it's funny because it's dangerous: I've found jokes online about September 11, but haven't seen anyone making such a joke in public yet). It's also, I think, a way of marking a tragedy as "not mine" (easier to do with the dingo than with 9/11--when the tragedy is yours you're generally limited to a wry, bitter humor of the good soldier Schweik type).

The most intense example of this line has been, lately, a series of photographs taken to mimic Lynndie England's poses in some of the Abu Ghraib photos. I find the photos shocking, but I cannot be sure if they're offensive or brave; to some extent they must be readable in relation to Botero's series on Abu Ghraib, which has nothing funny about it, but in which the excessive bodies of his subjects speak somehow to the side of the tragedy.

I'm struck once again how little of this would be knowable (or even doable--especially the Lynndie England photos) without internet culture, which makes this kind of humor so much more widely available, and which produces simultaneously a sense of distance that makes the humor easier. This is the global village, I guess. Having never lived in a village I don't have a clear sense of what such a thing is like but I feel like "village" is not the right metaphor. Something's changing. Stay away from dingoes.