This article contains some content of a graphic and disturbing nature and is intended for mature readers. Scholars of high school age or younger are invited to read the article A Model for Collecting and Interpreting: World Trade Center Disaster Jokes by the same author.

The First American Wave (September 18-25, 2001).

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As Maher and I predicted, this first wave of humor was angry, expressing itself in an obscenity laced vocabulary of sexual aggressiveness. This vocabulary, appearing so soon after the destruction of the buildings, suggests that one of the reasons that the terrorist attacks produced anxiety was that it was seen by many as a symbolic attack on the nation's genitals. Alan Dundes (1997) has noted important similarities between the folk speech used as part of male-specific games such as football and similar images used to describe the objectives of war, i.e., to penetrate enemy territory and commit acts intended to effeminize one's opponents.

The September 11 event had already provoked rhetoric that was angry, hyperpatriotic, and obscene. The common verbal response to the experimental humor of the latent period was often sexually obscene as well as angry: "You sick fuck," "shut your ignorant fucking mouth. ... I hope somebody would ... crack your fucking skull open," "just fuck off..." etc. Even a supporter of humor participated in this same grammar of response, saying, "Folks, it's a fucking tragedy, but humour will prevail, deal with it what ever way you need to" (Alt.humor: September 11, 2001 10:08:16 PST). So it makes sense that the "play mode" necessary to create a social context for humor would be one founded on the obscene symbolism of male specific games. Such a vocabulary would allow Americans, particularly American males, to affirm their sexual identity and project the shame of the symbolic castration of New York City onto those considered responsible.

The first level of jokes to break the latency barrier were primarily visual in nature. While clearly related in content and style to folk cartoons documented by Dundes and Pagter (1992), they represent a new level of sophistication, using graphic programs like Microsoft Photo Editor to manipulate images and save them in a jpg or gif format suitable for posting on websites or attaching to e-mail messages. In dealing with the earliest generation of folk cartoons, Dundes and Pagter comment that the use of office photocopy machines ought to have stifled the creative incentive of the individuals who distributed, "and that a given cartoon would be copied again and again with little or no change" (145). As they found in the 1970s, though, we find that this is simply not true, and that the most popular items in fact circulated in several variant forms. For want of a common term, I will call these new forms of folk art "cybercartoons."

The very first of these WTC cybercartoons was posted on a personal website within twenty-four hours of the event and publicized, interestingly, by a message board having nothing to do with self-aware interest in topical humor:

This image of bin Laden, with the subtitle "I'm about to get my ass nuked off the face of the planet," was represented in the form of a missing child on the side of a milk carton. To add to the parody, a phone number was given below, but instead of it being a link to one of the many organizations dealing with missing and exploited children, it reads "1-HEI-SSO-DEAD." This idea soon provokes a variant cybercartoon that used the "milk carton" even more explicitly:

This graphic shows an entire milk carton, one side of which is prominently labeled "GOAT MILK" while the other side bears bin Laden's image with the caption, "Have you seen this ugly-ass, no-good, piss-poor excuse for a human being? If so, don't call anybody. Just shoot the motherfucker."

Both items clearly reference the enormous media publicity given the missing child problem in the last decade, a concern documented by Conrad (1998) and Preston (1999). The humor of these cartoons relies on the dissonance between the tug of sympathy created by the child's picture on the milk carton and the emerging thirst for revenge against the presumed mastermind of the attacks. Hence while the child, if found, would be removed from peril and restored to his or her family, while bin Laden, if found, can expect sudden death. Certainly this cybercartoon spoke to such emotions of anger, and it circulated through conduits far removed from young, irreverent computer-ready groups. A participant in the alt.military.retired message board, for instance, reported on September 17, "Outside my office cubicle at work I have a big American Flag hanging on the wall. I put on the next wall, at a respectful distance from the flag, [this] picture of Osama Bin Laden [i.e., "Have you seen me?"]."

Another quickly emerging cybercartoon was being actively circulated and discussed by the second evening after the disaster:

The graphic, a modified image of Manhattan Island,²¹shows a rebuilt WTC complex made up of four towers staggered to form the familiar obscene gesture usually interpreted as "Up Yours," an offer to pedicate the offending person. Below this, a caption read "Rebuilding New York's Skyline. New Trade Center design incorporates a gesture and spirit familiar to all New Yorkers." A smaller caption added, "To those who believe they can hold us down ­ you know where to go."

This cybercartoon was successful enough that it was mentioned in a September 17 news account that lamented the lack of any other humorous responses to the event (Marcus 2001). And it appears to have inspired one of the first attempts at humor on the David Letterman show. One of his writers recalled:

New York was in crisis and at that point [September 18] still needed healing and reassurance, rather than edgy comedy. So Dave would do a joke like this: "There's a guy who stands in front of the Ed Sullivan Theater [where the Letterman Show is taped], and every morning on my way to work, he gives me the finger. Well, today, he gave me the finger and a hug" (Ferrante 2002: 28).

The image is doubly significant: most obviously it is a traditional male aggressive response which, as Alan Dundes has noted, is central to American institutions such as football. Secondarily, it shows that the actual attack was associated in many American minds with an attempt to castrate the United States symbolically by destroying buildings that represented an architectural phallus. Thus using "the finger" as a joke simultaneously turns the aggressive threat back against the terrorists and reassures their victims by promising that the "gesture and spirit familiar to all New Yorkers" will live on. Such items offer the viewer, in Letterman's terms, "the finger and a hug." As the link to this item began to circulate more widely in the second week past the attacks, it inspired a number of imitations:

Both these emphasized the "Up yours" gesture by showing the new skyline in a closer view. In addition, the second of these added a caption, reading "The New World Trade Center 2005 / Fuck you, Bin Laden." And further adaptations of this idea made the phallic implications of the New York skyline even more explicit:

This replaced the skyline image with an artist's drawing of a hand making the "Up yours" gesture, but the middle finger has been replaced with a phallic image of the Empire State Building. And this idea was carried to its logical extremity by this (Warning!) frankly pornographic cybercartoon. In this, the face of bin Laden has been superimposed on the figure of a naked male, bending over, while the Empire State Building in the form of a giant phallus is about to pedicate him.

Meanwhile, the tie-in with male sports imagery had inspired a verbal item that verged on humor was beginning to circulate. It first appeared on September 15 (interestingly on a message board hosted in Denmark,²² but clearly the work of an American), and on the following day a participant named "Rufus" posted it on alt.med.ems. As with the cybercartoon "Have You Seen Me," this forum was again a message board whose main focus had nothing to do with humor, though other postings during this week memorialized fellow emergency rescue workers serving at the site of the Trade Center. The item clearly defined the terrorist strike, and the planned response, as a male-oriented competitive game:

Dear Osama Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, and Sadam Hussein, ect.

We are pleased to announce that we unequivocally accept your challenge to an old-fashioned game of whoop-ass.²³ Now that we understand the rule that there are no rules, we look forward to playing by them for the first time.
Since this game is a winner-take-all, we unfortunately are unable to invite you to join us at the victory celebration. But rest assured that we will toast you -- LITERALLY.
While we will admit that you are off to an impressive lead, it is however now our turn at the plate.
By the way, we will be playing on your court now.
Batter up.

Sincerely,
Most of the 270,000,000 citizens of the United States of America

(ok so I didn't write it but I thought I'd share it here)

alt.med.ems: September 16, 200110:32:48 PST

The response, unlike others during the latent period, was one-sidedly positive, with two other members of the board responding with other sports-oriented terms.

1. Play Ball!
Thats ok Rufus, its a good one :)

September 16, 2001 17:28:05 PST

2. I love it

September 16, 2001 20:23:12 PST

3.(M).²⁴ Arafat isn't even in the same ballpark as bin Laden and Hussein.

September 17, 2001 10:16:28 PST

This item did not become as popular as others discussed during this period, appearing on only nine message boards during its first week in circulation. It was also passed on through e-mail (appearing on the NEWFOLK listserv on September 20, for instance) and it was later expanded into a much fuller piece, presenting the coming war with bin Laden in terms of an all-star baseball match. The complete Old Fashioned Game of Whoop-Ass was a virtual encyclopedia of patriotic symbols, listing the American military branches as the major players, giving "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" as team owners, and providing no less than four patriotic anthems to begin the "game."

Although the comparison of war to baseball verged on humor, "Whoop-Ass" seems to have been interpreted as patriotic rather than funny. As Dundes has shown, many sports such as football replace male aggressiveness with symbolic acts of violence. This piece, like the following cybercartoon that appeared soon after-- --simply reinsert the literal act of violence into the sports milieu. Hence such items were part of a broader outpouring of non-humorous but extreme patriotism, which in turn created yet another rhetoric for burlesque humor.

In providing models for this rhetoric of hyperpatriotism, two items were especially influential: one was a transcription of "America, the Good Neighbor," a staunchly pro-American radio editorial originally delivered on June 5, 1973, by Canadian radio commentator Gordon Sinclair.²⁵ As early as September 13, this editorial was being posted on hundreds of message boards, although a few days later a critique also circulated giving its original context in the Vietnam conflict and noting that its history was not always accurate. Another was a parody of Dr. Seuss's well-known children's poem "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (1957). Often titled "The Binch Who Stole Airplanes," this piece, portraying Osama bin Laden in terms of Dr. Seuss's Grinch, was written by Christian humorist and artist Rob Suggs (best known for The Prayer of Jabez for Kids).²⁶ It was often accompanied by a statement that Suggs had written the poem for sick children at an Atlanta hospital to try to explain the disaster in terms that they could understand. In fact, Suggs (2002) explained, he had not intended the poem for children but had adapted the poem for a very small handful of friends on a message board, who then introduced the item to a larger audience through e-mail. Dated ³September 13,² it first appeared on a Usenet message board on September 14, then circulated explosively on September 19-20.

Both of these responded to anti-American sentiments. Sinclair¹s editorial commented at one point, ³When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.² Suggs¹s poem pointedly avoided this kind of extreme language, as well as the more extreme xenophobia seen in many messages at this time. But his poem too included what many readers took to be an implicit ethnic slur on Arabic peoples:

The Binch hated U.S! The whole U.S. way!
Now don't ask me why, for nobody can say,
It could be his turban was screwed on too tight.
Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright.

Suggs explained that no slur had been intended: he had simply adapted Seuss¹s original line closely, substituting only ³turban² and ³screwed² for ³shoes² and ³tied.² (He also saw the comic possibilities of ³turban² as a rhyme word.) Still, given the rhetoric of the time, it is not surprising that the poem was read as having a harsher anti-Muslim slant than Suggs originally intended. Likewise, both Sinclair and Suggs concluded with ringing affirmations of the American Way. Sinclair ended, in words seen as prophetic for the post-9/11 era,

"[Americans] will come out of this thing with: their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles."

And Suggs ended with equal optimism:

He HADN'T stopped U-Ville from singing! It sung!
For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride,
And you can't smash the towers we hold deep inside. . . .


For America means a bit more than tall towers,
It means more than wealth or political powers,
It's more than our enemies ever could guess,
So may God bless America! Bless us! God bless!

Neither text was humorous in nature, and while Dr. Seuss's poems had previously been used for humorous parodies, this poem was entirely serious in nature. However, both texts created a context for the emergence of the first widely circulating verbal items that followed, which were seen as genuinely humorous. continue

Page Notes

21. The first response to this item read "haha.. see..?? humour prevails" (alt.tasteless.jokes: September 13, 2001 01:05:01 PST). This indicates that it was indeed perceived as a joke and not simply a patriotic gesture parallel to the well-known "flag raising" photograph that was simultaneously circulating. When I showed this to a group of students on October 3, 2001, they unanimously rated it as "funny" or "very funny."

22. dk.snak.vittighede: September 15, 2001. The early texts are dated "September 12, 2001," which may in fact be correct.

23. "Game of whoop-ass" is a somewhat mysterious term; I've been unable to find any other use of this phrase on the Internet. I suspect it is not a reference to a game but an invented term derived from the more common slang phrase "open a can of whoop ass" (v): To fight; to beat someone up. See California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, College Slang Around the World. The College Slang Research Project (May 18, 1999). Available: http://www.csupomona.edu/~jasanders/slang/vocab-srch.html

24. Numbers in the left margin indicate the speakers (whose names have been omitted to preserve confidentiality). When the alleged sex of the person posting is given, I mark the number M or F; however, many of the "handles" given by message board participants are unisex and so cannot be determined.

25. For a history and sample texts, see http://www.snopes2.com/quotes/sinclair.htm.

26. Suggs, Rob. 2002. Personal e-mail communications. June 11 and June 23, 2002. See http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/binch.htm#add and Olsen 2001. Suggs (2002) remarked that the poem might have been reached an even wider audience on radio, as he was aware of many stations who broadcast readings of it, often adding music and sound effects. WCBS-TV in New York, in fact, created a video version of children reading it out loud. The poem was posted on many websites (about 900 remain in place as of 6/02), and one site offered a short animated film version that could be downloaded as a Real Media file and viewed on a computer screen. As of February 2002, the page notes, it had been downloaded 328,000 times. (See http://www.karcreat.com/Binch.html .)

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