Posted on: Sunday, September 8, 2002
Humor often rises from ashes of catastrophe
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• Book chronicles Hawai'i reaction to 9/11
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer
In the days and weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, many Americans found themselves struggling to reconcile the powerful emotions the attacks evoked with the impulse to engage in that most familiar of American coping processes: humor.
It has long been recognized that profound tragedy is often accompanied by a sort of black humor that, discreetly practiced, serves as a temporary psychological and emotional release. More recently, folklore experts and other cultural observers have identified patterns in joke-making that reflect the collective recovery of traumatized communities.
According to folklorists, a tragic event the scale of the Sept. 11 — one that virtually suspends both direct and remote witnesses in a vacuum of grief and helplessness — is often followed by a suspension or suppression of humor. That reflects a collective sympathy and desire to reinforce the seriousness of the event and protect those most affected.
"I think immediately after 9/11, people just didn't have the stomach for the kind of sick jokes that went around after the Oklahoma bombing or after Princess Diana died," said Ryan Meade, a free-lance writer and cultural anthropologist.
"The trauma of that event was so great, the loss of life was so staggering, that people wanted to take it as an opportunity to move beyond some of the behaviors that we'd come to accept as inevitable," Meade said. "We didn't want to be that ignorant, vicious nation the rest of the world despises anymore."
Late-night hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno both suspended broadcasts for a brief time, then returned with serious discussions of Sept. 11.
In an incident telling of the national mood, satirist Bill Maher found his show "Politically Incorrect" canceled shortly after he remarked, sardonically, that it was U.S. soldiers who fired missiles from remote locations, and not suicide terrorists, who were cowards.
Yet with each passing week, Americans found ways to joke — sometimes angrily, sometimes fatalistically — by directing their humor toward the Taliban, the war on terrorism and national security measures. And in recent months, Europeans and others outside the United States have found a way to express growing dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy by mocking both the attacks and the United States' response.
Hawai'i comedian Andy Bumatai said the recent boom in comedy clubs and stand-up opportunities speaks to the value of humor in difficult times.
"In general, I think there's an incredible need for comedy," Bumatai said. "Historically, tragedy sends people to comedy clubs. There's a mourning period that lasts about a month after an event, and then, depending where you are, months later people start wanting to laugh again."
Bumatai's routines have poked fun at Osama bin Laden and at the absurdity of some airport security measures.
In one joke, Bumatai derides the bin Laden video tapes.
"He's trying to intimidate the U.S. with these video tapes, but the guy's in a cave," Bumatai said. "What's his priority? Defeat the West, then get indoor plumbing?"
Some people still don't want to hear anything about Sept. 11, Bumatai said. Some "just eat up the bin Laden jokes."
In certain cases, Bumatai's jokes have taken on a new dimension post-Sept. 11.
One of the comedian's classics plays off the fact that Don Ho used to be a pilot in the Air Force. The joke imagines the laid-back Ho as a commercial airline pilot, welcoming his passengers with his trademark slow and low delivery as the plane plummets to the ground.
"When I tell the joke now, there's more sensitivity to the idea of the plane going down," Bumatai said. "You mention 'wings on fire' and you can feel the audience reacting."
Bumatai said jokes about bin Laden and al-Qaida terrorists continue to get positive responses.
Transition of jokes
Bill Ellis, a professor of English and American studies at Penn State-Hazleton and a noted folklore expert, has studied and written two substantial papers about what he and others call "World Trade Center Humor."
Ellis predicted that jokes would emerge after a quiet period, and that some of the jokes would refer to images of the tragedy or recycle elements from previous disaster humor. He also predicted that the main means of distributing the jokes would be e-mail.
Ellis compiled a list of jokes he anticipated, based on jokes from previous tragedies such as the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
"Such humor marks an important part of a community's response to tragedy," he wrote.
Much of what he predicted did indeed come about, Ellis found, based on his research on jokes circulated through e-mail or posted through Internet chat rooms and message boards.
A few jokes were posted the day of the attack and immediately after. They circulated quietly until early October, when they began to be sent outside their original circles.
This first wave of humor in the United States was marked with militaristic statements, ethnic stereotyping and obscene language. The "rising moment," as Ellis calls it, might have come early because of the identification of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as "enemies" or "others."
An early cartoon that made the e-mail rounds showed bin Laden's picture on a carton of goat milk, and a fake phone number, "1-HEI-SSO-DEAD."
The second wave cometh
A second wave of American jokes emerged in mid-October as military action in Afghanistan escalated.
Ellis said the tenor of the jokes changed during this second wave. He spotted a theme: "finding a more inclusive and pacifist vocabulary to try to signal closure to the crisis and return to normal."
A political cartoon by John Deering of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette was passed around, sometimes in altered form, during this period. The original showed a group of Taliban leaders reading an ultimatum from the United States: "To the Taliban, Hand over Bin Laden or we'll send your women to college!"
However, with bin Laden proving elusive, closure was difficult and the wave of jokes became more complex and long-lasting than Ellis had predicted. Throughout October, jokes based on revenge scenarios became increasingly popular.
The most popular of the revenge scenarios — what Ellis termed "the Osama Sex Change" — first appeared on message boards a week after the attacks, but wasn't widely transmitted until the second American wave of jokes. The joke acknowledges that killing bin Laden would make him a martyr and suggests that bin Laden instead be given a sex change operation so he could live out the rest of his life as a woman under the repressive Taliban regime.
"The appeal of this suggestion is that it turns bin Laden's own anti-democratic sentiments against him," Ellis wrote.
While bin Laden and Taliban jokes continue to circulate, Ellis said he thinks Sept. 11 jokes have mostly run their course.
"I think 9/11 humor, as such, has served its purpose," Ellis said. "It functions as part of the psychological grieving process, as a way of utilizing language to gain imaginative control over tragic events."
Insight into public opinion
As a side benefit of his research, Ellis said he thinks tracking trends in humor is a good way of divining public opinion.
He pointed out that after Sept. 11, jokes eventually moved away from a "jingoistic 'Die, bin Laden, Die' theme," and were replaced by humor that questioned the value of military strategy.
"This turn of opinion occurred in humor well before opinion polls showed it," he said.
Jokes emanating from Europe and Asia — and American response to them — might also hint at the state of relations between the United States and the rest of the world.
Families of Sept. 11 victims protested this summer's Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, where comedians repeatedly made light of the attacks.
Americans also chafed when Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji quipped to an audience of Asian business leaders, "Japan bought many huge buildings in New York, but luckily they didn't buy the World Trade Center. If they had bought them, now the Japanese would be sadder than the Americans."
Of course, even President Bush has been accused of insensitivity for a joke he's repeated at GOP rallies.
"You know, when I said I was running for president, in Chicago, somebody said, 'Would you ever have deficit spending?' " Bush is quoted as saying in an article by MSNBC stringer David Neiwert. "I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."
Andy Bumatai
