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COPYRIGHT 2005 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
When I arrived in the United States on September 12, 2002, exactly one year and one day after the attack on the World Trade Center, to study American humor, many people told me that I had come too late. "September 11 was the death of comedy," people would tell me. "After 9/11, Americans have stopped laughing." Most Americans felt that after these events, humor and laughter had become inappropriate. A year later, the nation's sense of humor still had not recovered completely. Humor about 9/11, as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had become known, was considered offensive by most people.
However, Americans still laugh after 9/11. They even laugh at the events of 9/11--albeit somewhat bitterly. The events of September 11 even gave an impetus to a new genre: cut-and-paste Internet jokes that were shared and spread around the world through e-mail, news-groups, and Web sites. This article looks at the way the events of 9/11 affected American humor. It discusses the temporary moratorium on humor in the United States, as well as the jokes that did emerge, both in the United States and outside, in the wake of 9/11. I will discern three different ways in which these events affected American humor: first, the suspension of humor; second, the call for humor as a means to cope with the events of 9/11; and finally, and most extensively, the jokes that did emerge about these events, notwithstanding the public discourse about the inappropriateness of such humor. The article will focus specifically on the new genre of Internet jokes about these events. I will argue that these jokes cannot be understood as a means of coping with grief and suffering. Rather, they are a comment on the serious and mournful tone of public discourse and media culture surrounding the events of 9/11, and a way for jokesters, for a variety of reasons, to separate themselves from that obligatory response.
Humor and Disaster
The attack on the World Trade Center is the typical event that gives rise to disaster jokes: highly covered by the media, much talked about, tragic but undeniably sensational. The explosion of space shuttle Challenger, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the death of Princess Diana are examples of other events that became the focus of disaster jokes. (1) The first jokes about 9/11 emerged almost immediately after the attacks. Bill Ellis reports finding the earliest American jokes about the attacks on September 12 ("A Model"). I collected the first jokes on Dutch Web sites on September 13.
The basis of humor always is some kind of humorous incongruity or "script incompatibility" (Attardo and Raskin 293). This incongruity can be between real and unreal (absurd humor), between taboo and nontaboo (sexual humor, toilet humor, aggressive humor), or between the gruesome and the innocent, the banal, or even the cheerful (sick humor). Although this incongruity can be exclusively linguistic, the easiest way of achieving such an incongruity is by some sort of transgression. Thus, inappropriate references to sexuality, hostility, and degradation are common ingredients of humor (Zillman 39-40).
Disaster jokes are usually sick jokes, based on an incongruity between the gruesome and the innocuous. The basis mechanism of these jokes is a "humorous clash" (Kuipers 456): in the joke, the disaster is linked in a humorous way with a topic that is felt to be incompatible with such a serious event. This incompatibility can go two ways. In some cases, the joke combines the disaster with a reference to something shocking or taboo. In these cases, the humorous clash results from confronting the disaster with "forbidden" references popular in many jokes, such as sex, religion, aggression, or ethnicity. However, in most cases, disaster jokes focus on topics rather less common in jokes: innocent or innocuous themes like advertising, children's games, or fairy-tales. The effect of this mixture of an extremely serious topic with such unserious themes may cause outrage and amusement: disaster jokes, like other sick jokes, derive much of their appeal from their inappropriateness (Oring 276). That many people don't like them only adds to their attraction.
The most common explanation holds that disaster jokes are a means of coping with unpleasant experiences. P. Morrow describes the jokes about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 as part of a process similar to coping with a crippling disease: "... the M.S. patient passes through stages of anger, acceptance, and acceptation, the same stages that many of us who have been hurt by the Challenger catastrophe must pass through" (Morrow 182). Likewise, Alan Dundes states, "The available evidence strongly suggests that sick joke cycles constitute a kind of collective mental hygienic defense mechanism that allows people to cope with the most dire of disasters" (73).
Indeed, humor can be used to cope with trauma by distancing oneself from the unpleasant experience and building community and solidarity with others. An obvious problem with this explanation for disaster jokes is that many people who in no way can be said to suffer personally from the disaster appreciate them. Christie Davies describes how the death of Diana, for instance, gave rise to a worldwide cycle of jokes ("Jokes about the Death" 253). One can wonder whether the jokers around the world really were struggling to accept her death. Similarly, it seems likely that people in the Netherlands weren't as shocked about 9/11 as Americans, or New Yorkers. Even within the United States, emotional responses were quite varied. (2)
The worldwide popularity of 9/11 jokes indicates that coping might not be the prime function of these jokes. Especially for those more distant from the event, such jokes might provide very different pleasures. In the literature on disaster jokes, as often happens in the study of humor, humor is reduced to one specific psychological function that all humor is supposed to have: if humor can used to cope with trauma, vent aggression, or express superiority, that is all humor does. In my view, different types of humor often fulfill different functions, ranging from coping to expressing hostility. Moreover, the same joke might fulfill different functions for different people.
Another problem with the coping explanation is that it tries to explain the existence of the jokes without looking at the jokes themselves. Sick jokes about Teletubbies jumping off the World Trade Center (Figure 1) may add to people's suffering rather than relieve it. In my view, a close look at the content of the jokes is needed before one can explain their existence. A final objection to this approach is that it cannot account for historical change. Although it is hard to trace the history of jokes, disaster jokes are probably a fairly recent genre (Davies, "Jokes and their Relation" 142-49), but suffering and disaster are as old as humanity.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
A very different approach to the meaning of disaster jokes is the analysis of the Challenger jokes by Elliott Oring, who suggests that the rise of these jokes is connected with the coverage of disasters...
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