People do many things, often invoking 'good fun' as their justification. This can include child abuse, petty theft, sexual exploitation, and even untimely or unnatural death. The trick to presenting humour in 'good fun' is understanding one's audience, and of course, understanding humour.
Here is what I learned from watching 'The Cowboys':
Yelling at a kid and calling him a whiner (sic) may, indeed, cure his stuttering; the key here is to let the poor kid know he was set up, and that the abuse was only meant to provoke him; needless to say, this is a risky procedure in almost any venue. I'm not sure what kind of an issue this procedure was in the 1800s. Today we tend to call it child abuse.
Stealing is generally considered a sin, whether you get caught or not. What I learned from 'The Cowboys' is when you steal booze, you usually get punished for it, whether or not you actually get caught. Also, gravy made from bacon grease may be an acquired taste in the Old West; today most people would simply consider it nasty.
Grown women propositioning little boys was probably as acceptable in the 1800s as it is today; whores and little boys really have not changed all that much. When whores and little boys chance to meet on the open range in the 1800s, one or more of several things may be true: it may be a chance meeting, in which case both parties would do to remember their manners; it is a Hollywood movie, in which case an adult will likely be along shortly, to both diffuse the situation and profer useful advice, or; it is NOT a chance meeting, in which it may be justly and certainly said that 'Things are tough all over'. This is a maxim of business, which like whores and little boys, has also not changed much since the 1800s.
Untimely and unnatural death is precisely what is implied through the name. We usually cannot forsee the circumstances by which someone meets their end, when it is as sudden and unexpected as this. Often items we consider innocuous become lethal weapons when calculating such circumstances after the fact. The young boy's eyeglasses may well 'choose' their moment to fall off his face, or their eventual fall may have been inevitable and this is simply a chance series of occurrences, but the dramatic foreshadowing (his eyeglasses will become the focal (pun) point of further death in this story) of the event is the real point of the film's action that we are to consider. We may even find the entire incident humourous, albeit a rather dark kind of humourous. Audiences for this type of humourous are as few and far between as eyeglasses in the Old West.
Humour, the Roman orator Cicero once wrote, appeals both to intellect and reason, and creates a feeling of indulgence and good cheer when properly received by its audience. Your posting achieves none of these things. I therefore suggest you try again.
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