Humour is not a word anyone expects to find near this story. But it is there, threaded through the record in two very different forms — the jokes a horrified public told about him, and the small, dark moments of levity that actually happened around him, inside the jail cells and interrogation rooms where his story was still unfolding in real time. Both are worth looking at honestly. Neither is comfortable.
The jokes that swept the country
Within two weeks of Jeffrey’s arrest, jokes about him were already circulating nationally. On August 6, 1991, The New York Times ran an editorial addressing the phenomenon directly, arguing that the jokes existed because “there is a need for people to distance themselves from the horror.”
That explanation is a reasonable one, and it was echoed by people who had no choice but to sit with the horror professionally. Anne Schwartz, the reporter who broke the story and covered the trial from the front row, later wrote that many of her fellow journalists told jokes throughout the proceedings specifically “in order to keep their sanity.”
But distance may not be the whole story. Within months, a publisher named Hart Fisher had turned Jeffrey’s crimes into a comic book through his company, Boneyard Press, and described the appeal to television cameras without any apparent discomfort: “It’s something you can’t get anywhere else — if you like the truth, if you like something a little bit more fresh, a little bit more bloody, we’ve got the meat.” That is not the language of someone trying to create distance. It is the language of someone selling proximity.
The joke cycle sat inside a larger pattern that scholars have since traced through the entire “serial killer” media boom of the early 1990s — the same years that gave the culture Hannibal Lecter as a sanitised, almost lovable version of the same figure. Anthony Hopkins later recalled being approached by twelve-year-old children asking him to perform Lecter’s “fava bean” line for their entertainment. Somewhere between the Times editorial and the comic book and the children asking a fictional cannibal to do a bit, the line between “processing horror” and “consuming it as entertainment” gets difficult to locate.
Jeffrey was not insulated from any of this. Letters reached him in prison keeping him “up-to-date on the latest ‘Jeffrey Dahmer’ jokes,” according to his father’s own account, and reporting from inside the jail described him as “visibly perturbed” by the jokes that followed him even among fellow inmates. Whatever function the jokes served for the public telling them, for the man they were about, they were simply one more form of the notoriety he could not escape.
The humour that actually happened around him
Separate from the joke cycle is something stranger: a handful of genuinely dark, unplanned moments of humour that occurred in the actual rooms where his case was being handled — not jokes told about him from a distance, but small human moments that happened to be, in a bleak way, funny.
The most widely cited is also the earliest. Minutes after Tracy Edwards escaped Apartment 213 and police discovered what was inside, one of the responding officers radioed dispatch: “The intoxicated Asian naked male [laughter heard in background] was returned to sober boyfriend.” A second officer, informed he’d be heading back to the station, added: “My partner’s gonna get deloused at the station” — followed by more laughter on the recording. This is gallows humour in its purest form: officers who had no idea yet what they’d just walked into, laughing at a domestic-dispute call minutes before it became one of the most notorious crime scenes in American history.
Inside the jail itself, the record shows a mix of hostility and small, incongruous moments of connection. Guards placed Jeffrey under 24-hour suicide watch — a light kept permanently on, flashlights turned on his face as he tried to sleep, three guards watching him urinate “and laughing as well,” according to Brian Masters’ account. He once sharpened his toothbrush in protest of what he considered unfair treatment, a small act of defiance that cost him a night sleeping on the concrete floor in his underwear. And yet amid the hostility, Masters records one genuinely tender moment: a guard, stepping away from his post for fifteen minutes overnight, told him simply, “Now don’t do anything stupid, Jeff.” Masters calls it “a tiny moment of connection” — and it is hard to disagree.
Jeffrey’s own complaints about jail carry a dry, almost absurd quality of their own. Asked what the days were like, he described having “nothing to do but watch the ants crawl around on the floor,” and described the bed bugs at night as something you could feel “jumping on your eyelids and nose.” A former inmate told the Milwaukee Sentinel that the guard posted outside his cell “reads him the paper, and talks to him about what he did to people and things” — offered as evidence of favourable treatment, but reading, out of context, almost like a description of an unlikely daily routine between two people stuck in a small space together.
Even the investigators had their own strange footnote. Detective Patrick Kennedy, who spent hours across the interrogation table extracting Jeffrey’s confession, moonlighted off duty as McGruff the Crime Dog, touring Milwaukee schools in a furry costume to teach children about the dangers of drugs. The man who sat with Jeffrey through some of the most disturbing testimony in American criminal history spent his weekends in a dog suit warning eight-year-olds about strangers.
Why this belongs in the record
None of this softens what happened. The jokes, the comic books, the gallows humour on a police radio — none of it changes the seventeen lives that were taken, and this memorial has never tried to weigh one against the other. But humour is also one of the most honest windows into how a society actually processes something it cannot fully absorb, and how the people closest to a case — reporters, guards, detectives — survive proximity to it day after day. The jokes told about Jeffrey say more about the country’s appetite for monsters than they do about the man himself. The small, dark moments that happened around him say something quieter: that even inside the most controlled, hostile environment imaginable, ordinary human behaviour — boredom, dry humour, a guard’s offhand kindness — kept finding its way through.
Sources cited
- Schwartz, Anne E. Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.
- Masters, Brian. The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer.
- Dahmer, Lionel. A Father’s Story.
- Kennedy, Patrick, and Robyn Maharaj. Grilling Dahmer: The Interrogation of the Milwaukee Cannibal.
- The New York Times, editorial on serial killer jokes, August 6, 1991.
- Academic discussion of the joke cycle, comic book publication, and Hannibal Lecter comparison drawn from a scholarly text on Dahmer and the construction of the serial killer figure in media.
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 