What does it say about us that every night on Broadway, theatergoers now gather to laugh at two terrible American tragedies, both of which occurred on April 14. John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and the Titanic struck an iceberg on April 14, 1912.

In “Oh, Mary,”  a play at the Lyceum since 2024, the assassination is the climactic moment of a series of salacious jokes involving a homosexual affair, followed by a cabaret act. In “Titanique,”  a musical that opened on Sunday at the St. James a block away, the Iceberg is a silvery draped drag diva who snaps a toy Titanic in half, but the characters survive and move to Las Vegas.

The first assassination of an American president and the gruesome death of some 1,500 people are being trivialized at a time and in a culture where political violence and mass shootings have become routine, and war mongering is currently the official position of the U.S. government. Has this bombardment of real-life catastrophes made us numb; are the shows’ attitudes a symptom of that numbness? 

Or are these tragic events seen as harmless targets because they happened so long ago? I can’t recall similar theatrical mockery of the 1963  Kennedy assassination or the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion.  Is using historical tragedies for comedy a safe way to gain the cachet of irreverences without actually offending (too many) people?

Are they even perhaps an effort at inoculation – a way of putting what’s happening currently into some kind of bearable perspective? Is making comedy out of tragedy an intrinsic part of the American character, an essential ingredient in our resilience?

It seems relevant to point out that Abraham Lincoln was attending “Our American Cousin,” a comedy and satire about American life and culture.

More on the actual assassination, below.

Actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at the Ford Theatre in Washington,D.C. on April 14, 1865.

Wilkes had access to the theater because of his profession. He was a member of a famous theatrical family, although the least illustrious member: Junius Brutus Booth, a great English tragedian, emigrated to the United States in 1821 and had three sons,  Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., John, and Edein Booth, a celebrated performer (often called the greatest American Hamlet of the 19th century) who became a theater entrepreneur, building the Booth Theater in 1869 — Broadway’s current Booth Theater is named after him.

Here are father and two sons performing in Julius Caesar, from left to right John, Edwin and Junius Sr.

John Wilkes Booth chose to murder the president during a performance of Our American Cousin,  a farce by Tom Taylor about a boorish but honest American who travels to England to meet his aristocratic family. Booth hoped the gunshots would be drowned out by the laugh line to this highlighted passage:

The Night Lincoln Was Shot: Minute-by-Minute Backstage With John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre