While much of human history has been anything but “fun,” but at least as modern observers, we can turn all that suffering into trivia questions, or, as this list demonstrates, memes. Perhaps it’s a very human superpower, to take some tragedy of the past and to shift how you see it mentally. After all, if you allow your past difficulties to dominate your present, you can hardly move on.
It probably helps that a lot of historical events were quite funny, from one perspective. For example, Rama IV, the king of Siam, offered to provide the United States with war elephants during the civil war. Try to imagine some pachyderms at Gettysburg, the thought is pretty comical.
Or that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George V of England, and Czar Nicholas II of Russia were all first cousins. There is nothing “funny” about the First World War, but the fact that his whole thing did look like a family drama at a distance sort of puts things into perspective. The more things change, the more things stay the same, as the saying goes.
Similarly, Tito, Hitler, Trotsky, and Stalin all lived in Vienna in 1913, as did Sigmund Freud (age 57) and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. If the subject matter wasn’t so touchy, it’s easy to immediately imagine all the sitcom-worthy scenarios that can arise with this colorful collection of individuals. Would really redefine the concept of “neighbor drama” when we consider what happened over the following three decades.
