Making a Big Apple Crumble:Bill EllisChapter Five: The Second American Wave Page 10The last response given above nicely identifies one of the reasons for this joke's relative popularity: it was visibly different in content and approach from the other jokes. The effeminism motif allowed it to appeal to masculine groups that had circulated materials (like "New WTC Design") offering to pedicate bin Laden, but the reference to the Taliban's sexist policies allowed it to appeal to liberal and female audiences as well, even as they recognized the castratory elements of it. Significantly, this early version, even though it circulated on a male-dominated message board, included a link to www.rawa.org, the website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, an activist organization advocating for the return of gender equity in that country. In an editorial titled, "We're All Afghans Now," Dr. Susan Block appealed to American leaders and the general public to support the goals of RAWA in negotiating a final government to replace the Taliban. However, even she found room to comment on this joke, which she called "a marvelous idea":
It's a joke, of course, but it rings with a delicious sense of sexual justice. Plus, it helps heal that awful castrated feeling so many of us Americans have felt since our biggest phallic buildings were so painfully cut down. In that sense, it's a sort of sick but somewhat therapeutic anti-terror vengeance fantasy. (Block 2001). Dr. Block's comments show how "Osama's Sex Change" more than any other joke managed to elicit a genuinely national response to the threat posed by the terrorist attacks. It acknowledges the way in which the strike was seen, symbolically, as a thrust against the nation's masculinity and concedes that the proper response is to do the same to the nation's assailants. At the same time, it holds out the possibility that a limited revenge on Osama could avoid the consequences of the firestorm promised in much of the other WTC humor. Thus the solution is both "creative," and a fresh way of achieving the desired revenge, and "peaceful," in sparing lives on both sides. It fulfills masculine fantasies, but also speaks to feminine outrage at the sexual repression that the Taliban represent. While earlier versions spoke to the political concerns specific to their message boards, the streamlined ecotype could be seen as humorous by a wide range of conduits and so was designed to spread rapidly, which it did, peaking in popularity only two days after this version first appeared and remaining popular from October 4 to October 10 but continuing to show up regularly through December. Indeed, this joke proceeded to become the single most popular WTC verbal humor item on the message boards surveyed, eventually showing up on 629 sites, over five times as many appearances as the "Osama Joke Lists."
Table 5: Popularity of "Osama Sex Change"
The last really popular WTC joke in the Second Wave appeared just as the popularity of "Osama jokes" was beginning to wane. Like "Naked Women Friday," it took its origins from an contemporary legend, dubbed "Mall-o ween" by the virtual observer Barbara Mikkelson,45 which emerged explosively on the Internet on October 9-10. This legend warned that Afghani terrorists had planned two strikes, one targeting airplanes on September 11, the other striking at shopping malls on Halloween. For folklorists, the most interesting part was the contextual envelope in which the legend was enclosed, which was a virtual catalogue of "contemporary legend" markers:
I think you all know that I don't send out hoaxes and don't do the reactionary thing and send out anything that crosses my path. This one, however, is a friend of a friend and I've given it enough credibility in my mind that I'm writing it up and sending it out to all of you. My friend's friend was dating a guy from Afghanistan . . . [text of legend follows] As I noted in my work on camp folklore in the early 1980s, the assertion "this is not a hoax" is widely interpreted as a signal that what follows is precisely that, an invitation to play with traditional motifs in a way that resembles a real panic but is in fact a script with a foregone conclusion. Ostensive ordeals, in other words, take factors that would inspire genuine fear in an unstructured setting and impose a narrative logic on them. In the camp setting, the telling of stories about local monsters prepared campers to expect that someone impersonating this boogieman would appear during one of the hikes, and allowed them to experience the event as an intense, realistic drama, rather than a life-threatening attack on them by a manic (2001: 175). In the case of the "Mall-o-ween" legend, real cases of anthrax transmitted by bioweapons concealed in mailed enveloped peaked just at this time, and it seems likely that the contemporary legend circulated as a creative means of bringing such fears to a term. That is, localizing the next terrorist attack on Halloween and at a mall took a situation widely seen as out of Americans' control and reduced it to the status of an urban legend that focused the threat and so communicated the idea that it would be relegated to the past within a very few days. In fact, little real panic occurred over Halloween, and the holiday passed with no terrorist incident. Certainly this seems to be the theme developed in Alligators in the Potty, the final widespread joke in the Second Wave. Like "Mall-o-ween," it predicts a terrorist attack on a fast-approaching date. Indeed, it opens with added urgency, since the earlier legend, emerging on October 10, gave its audience a full three weeks to decide if the warning was credible. The new parody legend, emerging October 16, gave its readers less than two weeks to decide if the CIA was correct in saying that alligators would rise out of toilet bowls on October 28 and bite unsuspecting Americans on the ass. Again, however, the verbal text gave far more space to the contextual envelope of the warning, clearly carrying the "friend-of-a-friend" envelope of "Mall-o-ween" into the realm of burlesque:
I usually don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom worker who has a friend who's drug dealer sells drugs to another mailroom worker who works in the CIA building. He apparently overheard two guys talking in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked. So it must be true. A further satirical twist appears in some early texts, which add a tag clearly cut-and-pasted from an authentic governmental or corporate transmission:
This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. Needless to say, the parody envelope and the authentic warning not to distribute the warning combined to make this joke one of the most popular WTC items during the latter part of the month, peaking in popularity only two days after its first appearance and remaining popular for a week. Interestingly, as "Alligators in the Potty" premiered on message boards, responses showed that it appealed strongly to female readers. On alt.wisdom, one of the first boards on which it appeared, Cher, the woman who contributed it, was showered with a series of virtual praise from other women for finding and sharing the item:
1F. OMG [Oh, my God] I am so stealing this and passing it on. LOL thanks Cher. --Carol 2F. Tee hee, Cher!!! :) 3F. LOL --Patti 4F. :-) --Karen 5F. LOL --Sharon 6F. thats funny. Got to send this to some others --nancy 7F. I can't find this at http://www.snopes.com.46 This MUST BE TRUE! Thanks Cher! <G> **Kate** 8F. :) ~Teresa :) 9F. WHEW !!! Thanks Cher...NO POOPING for me, guess I'll be trotting outside... Interestingly, all the respondents signed themselves as fellow females, and their messages are a virtual lexicon of Internet icons of praise: LOL [laugh out loud], the "smiley" [ :-) ], the sign for "grin" <G>, accompanied with more explicit transcriptions of laughter and thanks. A similar reaction came when Nancy, a participant on alt.support.crohns-colitis, posted the joke on the same day. Her message began (somewhat defensively), "I live close enough to have seen the WTC's fall....and am well aware of all the scares out there as my husband is a police officer," but she continued tellingly, "so I welcomed this mail. So for all us CDer's and UC'ers.....enjoy!" (October 16, 2001 18:50:58 PST). Again, the contributor was rewarded with thanks and appreciative praise, this time from both male and female participants:
1F. Nancy, thanks for the laugh!! Take Care, : ) --Sherry 2M. Nancy-- Must be a true story. The source is impeccable. Maybe it's a crock (adile)<g >--Howard (still chuckling) After this response, Nancy returned to the board to comment, "You know....at this point an alligator on my ass would be the least of problems! LOL" (October 17, 2001 06:42:15 PST) and quickly received the reply, "Ain't that the truth Nancy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seems so "trivial" doesn't it?? ;) --Hugs, Linda" (October 17, 2001 07:37:48 PST). On a message board dealing with the challenge of living with Crohn's Disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), of course, an alligator attached to one's backside is a good metaphor for the effects of these chronic intestinal disorders. More importantly, the joke minimizes the importance of rumors about terrorist attacks, and so by extension the danger of further terrorist attacks themselves. A reader on another message board commented sardonically that this warning "Seems to be as reliable as a lot of the other 'facts' reported in 'mainstream' media in the past month" (alabama.sports.alabama: October 16, 2001 18:00:31 PST).
Table 6: Popularity of "Alligators in the Potty"
In a month when state and national officials had repeatedly announced the need to guard against an imminent repeat of the 9/11 strike, such comments indicate that many Americans found the need for continued vigilance counterproductive. Ironically, during the same period the American government moved in a directly opposite path, beginning air bombardment on October 7 and ground fighting on October 19. In addition, the sharp peak of this item's popularity at the precise moment when the allied attack shifted to ground action also suggests an implicit resistance to military solutions. This joke and others in the Second American Wave document the increasing rate at which Americans shifted away from militarism as their primary response to the terrorist attacks. This is not to say that the "Osama jokes" ceased to circulate: indeed, they still exert their influence from a multitude of well visited websites. But as October wore on, the Second Wave suggested that the primary problem was not Osama bin Laden but the protracted war of jitters that the government's policies was doing little to calm. Thus the jokes moved away from celebrating military might, combined with male-specific obscenity and ethnic slurring and toward a recognition that there were other important problems in society besides the threat of renewed terrorism. The primary creative impetus of American folk humor, that is, was channeled into jokes that implied that warfare abroad and constant alertness at home were increasingly irrelevant. The path humor took suggests an increasing split between official policy and Americans' sentiments, even as public polls continued to suggest near unanimous approval of war policies. continue
Page Notes45. See http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/mallrisk.htm for a sample text and history. 46.See n. 45. Mikkelson, the webmaster of this well-known website debunking urban legends, did later post a tongue-in-cheek reference to this parody.
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