The Internet’s Undying Obsession With 9/11 Memes

Why do we love 9/11 jokes? That’s an oddly legitimate question, isn’t it?

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, four planes were hijacked by terrorists. Two of them crashed into New York City’s Twin Towers, both of which toppled within two hours, while another crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia and the fourth dove straight into the fields in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people died on that day, and thousands more thereafter, as the course of American history was altered forever.

So why is it funny?

In the wake of the tragedy, 9/11 instantly became the new frontier of the so-called edgy humor among comedians, trolls and other provocateurs. And when I say “instantly,” I mean before the clouds of dusts could even settle, quite literally: on September 12th, 2001, the first wave of jokes about the terrorist attacks appeared on the Usenet newsgroup alt.tasteless.jokes. A few weeks later, comic Gilbert Gottfried told a joke about 9/11 during a standup routine, to which an audience member cried, “Too soon!”

More than a decade after, the jokes didn’t stop. One of the most famous Louis C.K. jokes involves him detailing how he masturbated in the time between the first and second towers were hit. It's a huge laugh line.

So instantly prevalent and persistent were 9/11 jokes, that less than a year after the event, Pennsylvania State University’s folklore studies scholar Bill Ellis had written two academic papers, A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes and Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster, both of which analyzed the sociological and media phenomena of 9/11 humor.

In A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes, Ellis pointed to a few phenomena that made 9/11 ripe for jokes. In Ellis’ summation, 9/11 was a “media disaster,” a tragedy shaped and spun by media coverage. And with 9/11, Americans with no direct relationship towards the attacks those affected by it were shown a series of horrifying images underscoring the gravity of the tragedy. As shell-shocked Americans, say, in the midwest took in the images of the burning, collapsing towers and heard news reports of the devastation, they were powerless to affect the proceedings, and were left with a trauma and no positive outlet to express it. As Ellis puts it:

"People are stimulated to action by the images that are constantly replayed by the media, but find no effective way to put this impulse into action. They must fall back on a variety of improvised symbolic actions that at least express solidarity with the people affected by this tragedy. (For instance, blood banks were immediately swamped by people wanting to donate blood, after one of the safety workers said on the air that this was one thing they needed to treat the injured.)"

One of these acts of solidarity was what Ellis dubs the "suppression of humor." While humor is often used as a mental defense in the wake of tragedy (Ellis points to first-responders joking about 9/11 on the very day), sources of humor in the American media, such as late night television programs, were cancelled, and acts like Letterman and Saturday Night Live tread extremely carefully when they returned to the air.

Of course, no one would begrudge the somberness that lingered over America in the week or so after 9/11. But a peculiarity of “media disasters” is that they inadvertently instruct Americans how to grieve. In the wake of 9/11, one could not express grief or achieve closure with humor, as that would be taboo given the emotional climate of the country. The most acceptable way to live was to present a social performance of solemness and grief. This famously led to a sense of unity in the country in the weeks following 9/11 that is still fondly remembered, but the suppression of humor inadvertently created a vacuum, and once the immediate needs presented by 9/11 were addressed, the rescues performed and the clean-up begun, jokes about the tragedy surged, practically as a form of protest. Ellis writes:

Such a wave of humor signals Americans' desire to resolve the key dissonances in the media coverage of disasters, gain control over them, and so reach closure in their grieving process. As Christie Davies argues, "the flourishing of jokes about specific shocking events in the last thirty years or so is a product of the rise of the mass media and in particular of television and of the direct, dogmatic and yet ambiguous and paradoxical way in which accidents and disasters are presented to the public by the media" (1999).

Ellis' paper is overall a fascinating look at how the human mind interprets tragedy with humor and the peculiar state of humor following 9/11. However, Ellis wrote the paper on September 20th, 2001, and forecast that after 9/11 jokes had their surge in a celebratory signal of America healing, they would fade away. They never did.

That's because 9/11 is, in many ways, still a media disaster. One could argue it was the memory stoked to gain support for the Iraq War, and the entirety of the "Never Forget" movement associated with the day is a call to relive the solemnity felt in the wake of the attacks. Every September 11th, sports stadiums and television programs play montages of photos from the day set to inspiring music. Former presidents tweet about it. Put simply, 9/11 became a rallying cry for American patriotism, which is something Americans are socially prescribed to take very seriously at the risk of breaking the social norm. But like children at a distant relative's funeral, a generation of internet users with increasingly distant memories of September 11th, 2001 giggle because they're told they can't.

This realm of supposed "shock value" humor in the wake of media disasters is nothing new--Ellis points to similar habits following the JFK Assassination--but the added element of the internet certainly allows for the proliferation and continued existence of such jokes, something Ellis perhaps did not anticipate. In many ways, 9/11 shaped internet humor for the decades to come. 4chan, /r/dankmemes, places the internet generally hold as trendsetters in internet memes, deal heavily in "shock" and "edgy" humor, and the longest-running meme in shock humor is 9/11, making it something of a holiday in those communities. /r/dankmemes even ran a countdown in the days leading up to September 11th, 2017.

Whenever a tragedy occurs, the knee-jerk response in these is to basically test the waters with this sort of shock humor. Some of this works and some of it doesn't. There wasn't an outpouring of successful memes following the 2017 Manchester Bombing but there was after Harambe. So what's the difference? With Harambe, in addition to the grave media coverage surrounding the event, there was also the performative outcry of people angry that a gorilla had been shot, and such people made easy targets to parody. The Manchester bombing, which occurred at an Ariana Grande concert, hit closer to home. It meant something to a lot of the internet, and jokes about the tragedy were quickly policed away. Perhaps more importantly, though, is how quickly it was gone from the media cycle. Soon there were other things going on, more drama, more Donald Trump, and news cycles left the bombing behind, as they do with almost every tragedy. Except 9/11.

So long as the subject of 9/11 is a fixture in the public eye, 9/11 jokes will be its shadow. It isn’t the tragedy itself that’s being meme’d; in fact, many of these memers were probably too young to recollect the event on that day. Rather, it is the less solemn Americans who invoke 9/11 with a cheap brand of ‘Murican patriotism, the rationale that 9/11 will always be the turning point of our time that must shape our present.

Like the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor or JFK Assassination in the times before ours, we now have a generation of memers who cannot remember the day of the tragedy. Nevertheless, they must never forget, as they're told. And they do, just in their own way.