This essay has been largely descriptive in focus and methodology, but these were shaped by the theory of joking and predictions that I published last fall as "Model." Thus it is now possible to sum up this survey in terms of how the data has confirmed or problematized these theoretical predictions.

1. This cycle will emerge, in a series of waves, after a period of latency.

• A latent period of 17-22 days would follow the tragedy. A latent period certain did exist, during which joking was strongly and angrily repressed, even on message boards devoted to "tasteless" joking. However, this latent period lasted at best 7 days, and some jokes that later proved successful appeared on message boards within hours of the Towers' collapse. A risible moment, in which joking was accepted and appreciated, emerged about September 17-18 in both the United States and Great Britain.


• The first joke cycles would reach public attention 17-22 days after the tragedy, or in early October 2001. This prediction was, however, confirmed. Up until October 1, most jokes circulated quietly, but after this point they increasingly spread outside their original conduits and were more frequently picked up by the professional media.


• The jokes would emerge in more than one wave. Also confirmed, though I did not anticipate that there would be distinct American and British Waves of humor. However, the multi-wave phenomenon was clearly marked in the development of American humor, where a hyperpatriotic cycle was followed and surpassed by a subsequent cycle expressing doubts about the military response and longing for a return to normalcy.


• The first would express denial, displaced anger, and desire to find and assign blame. This was certainly true of the First American Wave, whose material was characterized by militaristic sentiments and a focus on Osama bin Laden as scapegoat. Its language, at first violently obscene and politically incorrect, gradually moderated, but it always relied on ethnic stereotyping of Middle Easterners and displacing the most threatening images of the WTC attacks onto Others. This was also arguably true of the British Wave, where the most common jokes used the occasion of the American disaster to stereotype the Irish, a traditional colonial Other of the British and, until recently, a similar terrorist threat.


• The second wave would focus more specifically on "gross" elements referencing clever ways to allude to violent death. Oddly, true only of a few British jokes like "Big Apple Crumble." In fact, both the British Wave and the Second American Wave were characterized by a critique of militarism as an overreaction, along with a desire to put the event into the past and turn to local problems. This anomaly might result from the US Government's conspicuous appropriation of the normal psychological responses to grief to justify military operations in Afghanistan. This further development complicated Americans' response to the disaster and perhaps even delayed the process of healing. Hence many of the later jokes implicitly targeted militarism, rather than terrorism, as the problem needing to be resolved.


• Joking will be most prevalent during the first two weeks of October 2001 and be essentially finished by the end of the month. The first part of this prediction was confirmed, since the most popular jokes peaked during the first and second weeks of October, with a decline in popularity from October 15 to the end of the month. This was particularly noted of jokes in the British Wave, which were rarely reported after October 20.
  
  However "Alligators in the Potty" and "Bin Workin" both displayed considerable popularity during the third week, indicating that once the risible moment had been created, new jokes entering the scene also spread rapidly through existing conduits. And charting jokes like "Knitting an Afghan," past the October 20 point showed that a number of Third Wave WTC jokes and joke lists remained in circulation, though at a less active pace, until the end of the year.⁶¹ In fact, a number of items were still being generated, circulated on e-mail, and posted on message boards even in the first months of 2002. So joking certainly was not "essentially finished by the end of the month." As noted in the item above, this suggests that the American military operation complicated and delayed the process of reaching closure.

2. One or more of the common WTC jokes will reference the dominant visual images of the tragedy

• WTC jokes would focus on the media-broadcast images of explosions and the ultimate collapses of the towers. This prediction proved partially true, though in ways that I did not anticipate. Jokes of the First American Wave focused on another chilling image: the head-on approach of an airplane being used as a weapon of war. Thus many of the cybercartoons and militaristic "anti-Arab" jokes in fact were means of domesticating media-broadcast images from the disaster: the ominous approach of the second plane to the South Tower, its impact in a fireball, and the reduction of the two towers to rubble. However, rather than directly referencing the World Trade Center, these jokes used fantasy revenge to visit the dominant images of the attacks on the scapegoat Osama bin Laden and ethnic Outsiders.


• Since no dominant media image depicted the other attacks, few jokes would emerge for either the Pentagon or Flight 94 crashes. Confirmed: no jokes were recorded concerning Flight 94, and only a scattered few (mostly British) dealing with the Pentagon. In fact, the emic term for anti-terrorist humor in fact was "WTC jokes."

3. The WTC jokes will recycle elements from previous cycles.

• Many of the same plays on words in previous disaster jokes would reemerge. True, but not to the extent predicted. Most of the obvious recyclings from disaster humor were unsuccessful, while borrowings from Desert Storm humor did circulate widely. Again, the motion toward military actions in response may have led Americans to see the 9/11 events less as disaster and more as acts of war; hence the appropriate models for joking were found in cycles of military jokes rather than disaster jokes.


• The WTC jokes will recycle ethnic stereotypes such as emerged in cycle jokes during the Persian Gulf conflict. Certainly true of the First American Wave and jokes that developed in its wake in October. "Osama jokes," both as one-liners and cybercartoons, proved to be one of the most important subtypes of WTC humor in America. Anti-Arab stereotypes also underlie "Osama's Sex Change," the single most popular item in the Second American Wave. This prediction was also certainly true of the British Wave, where traditional numbskull humor directed against the Irish proved to be the basis of many of the jokes circulated. In addition, "Bin Workin," the most widely distributed joke of this period, was popular precisely because it could be adapted to a wide variety of ethnic humor stereotypes.
  
  Interestingly, though, the Second American Wave seems to have turned away from ethnic stereotypes toward the end, and even jokes that originated as slurs of outsiders ("Bin Workin") developed in ways that made them acceptable to a broader public that did not share the prejudices present in the first forms.


• Several of the jokes would make allusions to other, more trivial televised materials, particularly advertising slogans and popular media figures. True only of the British Wave, which repeatedly referenced popular food chains such as KFC, TV programs like Ready Steady Cook and well known department stores such as Debenham's and Harrod's. Interestingly, the First American Wave referenced only President Bush (though in a way critical of his manufactured media image). Jokes in the both American Waves, instead, tended to reference existing Internet materials such as "America, the Good Neighbor" and "Mall-o-Ween." This might reflect the increasing dominance of the Internet in this country in spreading rumors and information about the disaster.


• The Clintons would also appear in one or more of these jokes. A clear miss. The only joke that mentioned a Clinton was a single variant of "Naked Women Friday," in which the executive order was signed "William Jefferson Clinton."⁶²

4. The dominant mode of distributing WTC jokes will be e-mail.

• We can expect that they will circulate in lists of 3-8 brief texts, with little comment added by either the compiler or the forwarder. True only of the unsuccessful "WTC Jokes" of the Latent Period and the list of "Osama Jokes" generated late in the First American Wave. Neither the British Wave jokes nor the Second American Wave jokes generated lists.
  
  In both Great Britain and in Australia, oral communication appeared to be the dominant means of generating and circulating jokes, with most of the jokes being recorded rather than spread by the Internet. By contrast, in the United States, complex texts proved the most successful items, but only after they had evolved into a frequently-forwardable ecotype. This indicates that the dominant form of joking in the United States involved the generation and transmission of relatively unchanging Internet texts.


• More males would compile and distribute these WTC joke lists than females. Given the nature of the data, this cannot as yet be quantified, since participants on message boards (particularly during the First American Wave) tended to use anonymizing self-descriptions such as "Sweet Revenge (nuke_the_hell_outta_bin_laden@yahoo.com)." My impression is that most of the participants in the First American Wave and the British Wave were in fact male, but this may reflect my own linguistic stereotypes. Certainly many of the participants in the Second American Wave identified themselves as female. But the data will need to be mined more carefully to draw conclusion in this area.


• The increased internationalism of email conduits will produce topical humor that reflects a "community of the world." True only of "Bin Workin," the one joke that genuinely proved popular in a global sense. Otherwise, it is remarkable that both American Waves and the British Wave remained essentially distinct. Partly this may be because much of the humor relied on knowledge of language and historical events less familiar to residents of the other nation. Or perhaps the anti-militarism of the British Wave was both offensive to those participating in the First American Wave and incomprehensible to those sharing jokes in the Second American Wave. In any case, the failure of this prediction in the light of the virtual omnipresence of all these jokes raises questions about the resilience of cultural boundaries that deserve to be examined further in studies of Internet-mediated lore.


• The Internet will impact the folk process in some significant ways. Amply confirmed. The Internet arguably made the development and spread of jokes more efficient and more dynamic. Particularly the unexpected proliferation of computer-generated cybercartoons was a phenomenon that will need much closer study in future. And the increasing use of Internet-specific acronyms and graphic devices to signal approval or disapproval of jokes creates a performance context analogous to that familiar to traditional fieldworkers documenting joke sessions with audio- or videotape.
  
  It demonstrates that virtual communication is indeed a vehicle for making and maintaining cultural connections, in addition to oral, print, and broadcast media. In general, such a conclusion should not be surprising: Bronner (2002) reports several studies that found that use of e-mail and similar computer-mediated forms of communication in fact stimulated social bonding and allowed participants to maintain more relationships. Thus the suspicion of the Internet as isolating and destructive of "authentic" traditions seems just one more in a long list of nativistic stereotypes that have deterred the discipline from studying the phenomena that is actually most alive and most central to constructing a response to cultural stresses like the Trade Center attacks. Folklorists will hereafter need to take this important dimension of acculturation into consideration in considering any future events in which traditional culture play a major role. We also need to develop and refine methodology best tuned to do this. Further substantial discussion of such traditions, based on "virtual ethnography," is not only warranted but central to the progress of folkloristics.
  
  Above all, the sheer omnipresence of relevant material, recorded in the heat of the moment but retrievable in calm reflection, creates an unparalleled opportunity for the computer-ready folklorist. This study, lengthy as it is, gives only the surface layer of this material and does not deal with the many other traditional responses to the September 11 tragedy. In particular, it deals only with English-language humor, although it is clear that similar joking must have existed in other important languages including Arabic. Much more needs to be written about folk responses to this national disaster, and about the ways in which both the raw, obscene burlesques and the more reflexive humor that followed interacted to help all the world's citizens adjust to a new landscape, revealed in the space opened up when we saw part of the Big Apple crumble.

Page Notes

61. "Taliban Bingo," for instance, a regular inclusion in "Osama joke" lists, was posted to eleven message boards in November and to ten more in December. Likewise, "Osama's Sex Change," the most popular of the Second Wave jokes, showed up on seventeen message boards in November and eleven more in December. As noted, "Knitting an Afghan" appeared on forty-two message boards in November, a rate nearly as strong as its popularity in October.

62. Osama bin Laden Jokes, Pictures and Banners. 2002. Sanfords.Net Pagan News and Information. Available: http://www.sanfords.net/Osama_bin_Laden_jokes/page_3.htm. Appropriately enough, one e-mail variant of the "Naked Flight Attendant" recomposition of this item (see n. 41 above) concluded " Now why didn't Congress think of this? If Clinton was still president it would now be a law" (March 18, 2002 9:01 AM; C: Norine Dresser).

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