Judd Frye and the dark side of "Oklahoma!"

I just returned from a marvelous production of the musical Oklahoma! by a local high school.  One of my students was in it, which is why I went, but I also love the music, having memorized most of the songs as a child.

But Oklahoma! has a dark side that I didn't know about, and that is the subplot of Judd Frye.  "Poor Judd is Dead" is a humorous song wherein Judd imagines his own funeral.  But what I didn't know when I listened to the music is that the song follows a hint by the leading man that Judd might do well to hang himself.  I didn't know that Judd is a lonely, violence-prone loser.  He is a "bad guy" in the play--but a bad guy who shows his loneliness and despair, the roots of his violence.

It's a little strange, really--the jolly joy of a romantic comedy mixed with Shakespearean-level tragedy.  The lonely loser has, moreover, a modern quality absent in Hamlet or Lear.  Stranger still is that one of the funniest musical numbers pokes fun at his self-pity.

Judd dies in the end, in a brawl with the leading man, Curly.  There is a mock trial in which Curly is found innocent by way of self-defense so he can go off with his new bride.  It's funny--sort of.

But what about Judd?  Where will he be buried?  Did no one care about him?

Does this seem more relevant to me because recently a lonely loser shot a bunch of kids in an elementary school?  Because my brother, who has Asperger's, is considered a loser by many?  Because the terrorist who set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon was called a "loser" by his uncle?

What about the losers?  We can't rescue them, we can't save them from themselves, if they are violent we cannot tolerate their violence, but is there nothing we can do besides make fun of them and be glad when they are dead?

Can we, possibly, create a context, a template, in which there is no such thing as a loser?  Did Judd create himself?  Or was he created by his context?  Or was it a partnership?

I don't know.  But the questions haunt me.