“Where Was King Kong When We Needed Him?” Public Discourse, Digital Disaster Jokes, and the Functions of Laughter after 9/11

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: cutand-paste Internet jokes that were shared and spread around the world through e-mail, newsgroups, 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 unsenous themes may cause outrage and amusement: disaster jokes, like other sick jokes, derive much of their appeal from their inappropriateness (Oring 276). …