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Dace · 11 Sep 2003, 02:14

Disaster-joke cycles have long been studied by folklorists, and are notable for their stable structural features and for their relatively short circulation run. In other words, while you'll often see structural similarities between jokes that refer to different events (almost the exact same joke, re-tooled for a different context), once the surprise or shock about an event has passed, you'll almost never hear the jokes about that specific event told again. As a recent example, when both Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr., died in tragic accidents, there were a number of jokes about both events that, structurally, were nearly identical, with only a few changes in personnel needed to adapt the joke to a specific event.

The advent of e-lore has both enhanced and altered the circulation of these jokes and their context. Whereas they were once told almost exclusively in face-to-face settings, now they circulate almost exclusively by e-mail. Disaster-joke cycles as e-lore represent the perfect marriage of form and function: e-mail allows people to "tell" such tasteless jokes to others without having to assume ownership of them. In the era of post-political-correctness, e-lore gives people an opportunity to simply "pass along" electronically jokes they might never tell in person for fear of offending others. This odd combination of convenience and distance often results in the jokes circulating even more widely than they would through face-to-face channels, since people can offer more explicit disclaimers when they transmit the jokes.

It wasn't a surprise, then, that soon after 9/11, folklorists began speculating about when the jokes would start (see Bill Ellis' essay in the NEWFOLK journal). However, a disaster-joke cycle of the traditional kind never emerged--or if it did, it did not emerge as e-lore. To be sure, there were plenty of tasteless jokes but these differed significantly from traditional disaster jokes in that their content focused on issues other than those directly related to the tragedies in New York and Washington.

While it will be awhile before we can draw any firm conclusions about what made this event "off limits" for traditional disaster-joke telling, a couple of obvious differences between it and earlier disasters (such as the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger) are clear: first, the scale of the events of 9/11 was much larger than any other disaster that had been fodder for joke cycles before. Second, the issue of the attacks being planned also distinguishes them from earlier joke-cycle events, most of which were accidents; this also partially explains the fact that most of the jokes that did emerge focused on the figure of the "enemy," Osama bin Laden (and Afghanistan in general).

Finally, my own theory about why we didn't see widespread jokes about the attacks themselves has to do with the issue of the "imaginary." Most disasters that spawn joke cycles are things that are well within the scope of our imagination: we believe, even if we don't want to, that beautiful young people can die tragically in car and plane crashes (Di and JFK, Jr.), that space travel is still experimental and dangerous (the Challenger explosion), and so forth.

However, nothing in our national experience prepared us for the shock of watching the World Trade Centers crumble into dust. We may have been willing to "imagine" such a sight in the context of an action movie, but not in the context of reality; the very distance between what we were willing to imagine and what we believed possible was what enabled us to enjoy special effects of similar disasters on-screen: we never imagined it was possible in real life. When the towers fell, the imaginary became the real, and there's no joke that can speak to that dissolution of boundaries.

So the examples in this section aren't true "disaster jokes" in that they do not make light of the actual events of 9/11, but instead, deal with more manageable and peripheral issues surrounding those events.

Nodrog · 11 Sep 2003, 02:15

like i'm going to read all that.

Dace · 11 Sep 2003, 02:19

It's only when we laugh at adversity that we truely overcome it.

Also ... if you dont laugh at these jokes the terrorists will have won.

AND YOU WOULDN'T WANT THAT!!!

Dace · 11 Sep 2003, 02:27

Q: Who are the fastest readers in the world?
A:

Q: Why do tourists flock to New York?
A:

Q: What is world most efficient airline?
A:

Q: What was the last thing going through Mr. Jones head sitting in 90th floor of the WTC ?
A:

America's new math:
Q: Now how many sides to a Pentagon?
A:

Q: Why are police and firemen New York's finest?
A:

Q: What's the number one drink served on United Airlines?
A:

Q: What's the difference between Wembley and New York?
A:

Q: What's the difference between the attack on New York and the Oklahoma City Bombing?
A:

Q: What does WTC stand for?
A:

Gayle29uk · 11 Sep 2003, 02:31

My personal favourite...

New York 2032.....
A man and his son are walking through a highly built-up Manhattan when they come across an empty space and the father stops to reflect for a while.

"Imagine son," the father says, "exactly 31 years ago the great twin towers stood proudly in this area".

Intrigued by the comment the son then asks, "what were the twin towers dad?"

To which the father replies, "they were two of the largest buildings in the world and they housed many thousands of offices.... but in 2001 they were destroyed by Arabs".

The son pauses for a while and then asks, "what were Arabs dad?"

meaple · 11 Sep 2003, 02:33

I like to watch.
The planes going in.
The flames shooting out.

Weeks · 11 Sep 2003, 02:34

Christ all-mightly man.
Can you like, condense all that into about 30 -or-so words.
Thanks, Weeks.

Intrepid00 · 11 Sep 2003, 02:34

Quote:

Originally posted by Gayle29uk
My personal favourite...

New York 2032.....
A man and his son are walking through a highly built-up Manhattan when they come across an empty space and the father stops to reflect for a while.

"Imagine son," the father says, "exactly 31 years ago the great twin towers stood proudly in this area".

Intrigued by the comment the son then asks, "what were the twin towers dad?"

To which the father replies, "they were two of the largest buildings in the world and they housed many thousands of offices.... but in 2001 they were destroyed by Arabs".

The son pauses for a while and then asks, "what were Arabs dad?"

I guess that answers why we never saw an Arab in Star Trek.

Dace · 11 Sep 2003, 02:35

Quote:

Originally posted by Weeks
Christ all-mightly man.
Can you like, condense all that into about 30 -or-so words.
Thanks, Weeks.

See my second post in this thread.

Weeks · 11 Sep 2003, 03:14

Quote:

Originally posted by Dace
It's only when we laugh at adversity that we truely overcome it.

Also ... if you dont laugh at these jokes the terrorists will have won.

AND YOU WOULDN'T WANT THAT!!!

I mean not to pick but,
couldn't you just have posted a thread full of 9-11 jokes or something?
k, bye.

HAL-9000 · 11 Sep 2003, 11:08

I recall something about the owner of a car suing a deceased mans relavtives because the bloke, when jumping out of the WTC, didn't curl up into a ball in order to minimise damage to the car on which he 'landed'....

Zar · 11 Sep 2003, 11:13

Quote:

Originally posted by HAL-9000
I recall something about the owner of a car suing a deceased mans relavtives because the bloke, when jumping out of the WTC, didn't curl up into a ball in order to minimise damage to the car on which he 'landed'....

well why should he have to pay extra for the damages and the increase in insurance premiums???

Zar

Structural Integrity · 11 Sep 2003, 11:20

Question... is this photoshop over the top or is it "acceptable" now?
http://members.home.nl/jacobs-sonnem.../PPPremake.jpg

Note, I didn't make it, but I found it funny (with my classmates expression and stuff) and I find it perfectly acceptable.

Zar · 11 Sep 2003, 11:28

Quote:

Originally posted by Structural Integrity
Question... is this photoshop over the top or is it "acceptable" now?
http://members.home.nl/jacobs-sonnem.../PPPremake.jpg

Note, I didn't make it, but I found it funny (with my classmates expression and stuff) and I find it perfectly acceptable.

it was never over the top. It would have been funny 2 years ago also.

stop letting these nutase yanks and christians make you feel guilty.

Zar

endokuken · 11 Sep 2003, 11:58

For the last fking time...

IT'S 11/9!!!!

DIE INFIDELS!!!!!

acropolis · 11 Sep 2003, 12:43

The majority of these jokes focus on the figure of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. I make no claims as to whether these jokes are "funny" or not, but they all appear to have been sent as jokes, as their subject lines or messages indicate. Notably, the one about "the Canadian, Osama bin Ladin [sic] and Uncle Sam" is a retooling of a much older joke. After receiving this very time-specific, e-mail variant, I heard a UNC colleague tell the same joke--with different characters--at an English Department function.

In the colleague's version, the disputed territory was Texas, and the character asking to "fill it with water" was Mexican. As he told me in an e-mail exchange in which I asked him about the joke, "You got the Texan. He's the wall guy. Then you got the guy who asks for the water. He can be Coloradan, New Mexican, whatever. Then you got the extra guy, who can be anyone, but usually it's someone from Nebraska or some boring place so he won't matter, and he won't take the listener's attention away from the wall and water guys. I heard the joke long ago as a Texas joke. Really doesn't matter who else is asks for water, although New Mexican or Coloradan works well around here. Plus, the wall need only be ten feet tall. Texans are too dumb to climb trees." [Personal e-mails from February 25, 2002]

This nicely illustrates the ways in which traditional jokes maintain their essential structure while adapting their content to fit a more specific context. In this case, though, the version below--where Afghanistan is the disputed territory--seems much more pointed and racist. It's disturbing, to say the least.

The "Taliban Answering Machine" MP3 file, which I received from John Zimmerman, is one that Tama Dean-Greenhagen also collected as part of her 9/11 e-lore project. She commented that of the many jokes she received, this one was one of the least offensive, since it makes as much fun of U. S. telemarketers as it does of the Taliban. She felt it almost rendered the Taliban member sympathetic. That may be a generous interpretation, since there are, of course, the factors of the speaker's "foreign" accent and his "third world" lack of technology. It could, of course, also work as a parody of bad American TV shows.

Taken together, these jokes, and the ones on the following pages, represent some of the ways in which people were using electronic jokes to sort out their understandings of current events.

Weeks · 11 Sep 2003, 14:30

Quote:

Originally posted by endokuken
For the last fking time...

IT'S 11/9!!!!

DIE INFIDELS!!!!!

As it happened to the North American's i'll let them choose what way around the date goes.
It's only fair.

Cynical Oracle · 11 Sep 2003, 18:47

Quote:

Originally posted by Gayle29uk
My personal favourite...

New York 2032.....
A man and his son are walking through a highly built-up Manhattan when they come across an empty space and the father stops to reflect for a while.

"Imagine son," the father says, "exactly 31 years ago the great twin towers stood proudly in this area".

Intrigued by the comment the son then asks, "what were the twin towers dad?"

To which the father replies, "they were two of the largest buildings in the world and they housed many thousands of offices.... but in 2001 they were destroyed by Arabs".

The son pauses for a while and then asks, "what were Arabs dad?"

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