I haven’t mentioned the BP oil spill for the last 8 weeks, but that isn’t because I don’t care. Every piece of news I hear about it — and I can hardly help but hear and read about the spill; in addition to hearing about it from news outlets, I receive emails from the Sierra Club and/or Nature Conservancy almost daily asking for help and money — makes me die a little bit inside. The environmental impact is astonishingly bad already and the future looks like it will only get worse for a very long time.

This dire situation forces people to take some kind of response. You can throw up your hands and say it’s hopeless; you can leap into action helping to clean up; you can reassess and change your lifestyle; you can blame other people; or, best of all, you can joke about it. (These aren’t, of course, mutually exclusive responses, nor is this list exhaustive. Feel free to comment with other responses to this disaster.)

Joking about the BP spill — really, joking about BP’s response to the spill — doesn’t make the spill less bad or minimize its importance. I talked to somebody who simply cannot joke about it because she thinks joking means you aren’t taking the disaster seriously. I think that if you can’t see the humorous side in even these dark circumstances, you need to reassess the way you view life.

On that note, I present three excellent instances of BP-inspired black humor: