There are a number of darkly absurd laughs to be found in both the details and the composition of a Sunday WBRE article about a 74 year-old Dalmatia, Pennsylvania man’s death this afternoon in “a crash that involved one car and one train,” phrased as though typically it requires more than the one Norfolk Southern hauler. There’s that and the mention that the unfortunate decedent wasn’t wearing a seatbelt when his Subaru Forester was t-boned by the likely fast moving locomotive which, by the way, it’s “unknown whether there [was] any damage” inflicted upon it, per the NBC affiliate station.
However those respective elements of the source report – the very genre of which is already often strong enough to stand up a National Zero article on its own, even down to the gratuitous factual gap on how much damage the train sustained during the grade crossing collision in the Keystone State’s central Northumberland County – simply cannot outshine the basis of the cheeky headline.
The man’s first name was Darwin. Friggin Darwin Whitmer is the guy who thought driving around the crossing gates was a good idea and there’d be no consequences for it. Holy freaking shit that is so goddamned on the nose it’s actually anti-humorous, like something Babylon Bee fans would heartily chuckle at even while the writers struggled to fit creationism into the “joke.” Really the only issue is the man’s age at 74, a deep dent in the whole “Darwin Awards” premise given that he’s either long ago passed on his genes or didn’t and was statistically unlikely to do so. That name though, lol.