According to the Daily Mail, somebody’s in deep water for selling an ice tray which lets you create a replica Titanic from ice, complete with four icebergs.

Titanic boffin Brian Ticehurst described them as distasteful, adding “hundreds of people died in the tragedy … how long will it be before this firm makes ice cubes of the Twin Towers to commemorate 9/11?”

My first impulse was to dismiss of Ticehurst as a humourless toff—I know I’ve seen plenty of pop-culture send-ups of the Titanic disaster—but it got me thinking — how soon is too soon to poke fun?

The Titanic sank 97 years ago, and to me, it feels like it’s completely OK to make a joke about it. Massive disasters which happened centuries ago, such as the Black Plague or the Potato Famine, also feel like fair game — that I play in a band with a song called “Potato Famine Waltz” is testament to this.

The Holocaust, on the other hand, happened 64 years ago, and it’s definitely not OK to poke fun at that. Same with the World Trade Center disaster.

I suspect that I feel it’s OK to poke fun at things which have no living survivors, provided a reasonable time has passed. Maybe I’ll save this for my Mathematics thesis.