Originally posted by: ricarleite
Now, this brings an interesting thing to mind... didn't you guys noticed how well Leia took that her planet was destroyed, all her people was dead, including her adoptive parents? Couple of hours later she was joking around saying that Luke was too short for a stormtrooper...

A planet is small beans in a galactic empire. The usual number of member worlds bandied about is one million, from Lucas's novelization of ANH. Alderaan didn't appear to be a city-planet like Coruscant, but probably wasn't as sparsely populated as Tatooine, so I guess it had a pretty average population. So the destruction of Alderaan killed about one-millionth, or 0.0001% of the Imperial population. In contrast, the September 11th attacks killed about 0.001% of the population of the United States. If we extrapolate the US into the Empire, the destruction of Alderaan was on the order of an Oklahoma City bombing or a Port Chicago explosion, which were certainly big disasters, but not big enough to force reogranization of the government or anything drastic like that. Within the Star Wars universe, Alderaan's loss was tragic, but really minor compared to the destruction of the Clone Wars, the Sith War, or the Great Hyperspace War. As an Imperial senator, Leia was used to looking at the big picture, and probably hadn't spent much time on her homeworld in years.

As for the loss of her family, we really have no way to know how deeply Leia felt that. She remembered her real mother*, evidently since she was a very small child. This could have put a wedge between her and her adoptive family. She is also first seen wearing her hair in a Nabooian style (cf. Padme's hair in RotS); while she may not openly acknowledge her Nabooian heritage, she longs for it. And again, as an Imperial senator, she had probably adopted a sort of cosmpolitan, international identity. Notice that she doesn't speak with Bail Organa's clipped accent, but rather an Outer Rim (or at least non-Core) accent; she probably picked it up as a child, travelling with her father throughout the sector he represented, or from a Rim-born tutor.

Finally, she had undergone hours of interrogation, and possibly torture, by a Sith Lord. That's likely to leave one a little mentally unbalanced, probably kind of numb and hopeless. After the destruction of her world, she realized she would soon be executed. That's when things start getting funny. "Too short to be a stormtrooper" wasn't a joke, anyway; it was a cut, a feeble attempt to emotionally hurt the person who had come to abuse or kill her.

* Padme Naberrie Amidala, who FAKED HER DEATH and buried a decoy, in accordance with the fake-Amidala theme running through the first two movies.