The rhetoric of these items combined hyperpatriotic sentiments with the violent obscene language that we have seen used in response to the first attempts at humor. This produced verbal items that were the equivalent of the "Up Yours" visual jokes. The most influential of these was an item attributed to a Mitchell R. Robb (otherwise unknown) and usually titled "If I Were President George W. Bush's Speech Writer" (hereafter referred to as "George W. Bush's Speech"). This item was a burlesque speech, one of a number of popular obscene items claiming to be a public address or official letter but which is actually an opportunity to assail the reader with outrageous sexual and/or scatological language.

Such parody speeches have been documented as far back as the early 16th century, and a notorious example, supposedly inspired by a proposal to change the official pronunciation "Arkansas" to rhyme with "Kansas," was widely circulated in the early 20th century (Randolph 1976: 103-105). More immediately, a burlesque letter, purporting to have been sent by President George Bush Sr. to Saddam Hussein, was popular during the Desert Storm conflict. After a polite opening, the letter assaulted Saddam (and readers) with a series of obscenities, saying "get the fuck out of Kuwait, you rag head son of a camel humping bitch, before I turn loose my Air Force and make a multi-national parking lot out of your piece of camel shit country, and then send in the fuckin' Army and Marines to paint the fuckin' lines on it.".²⁷

Like this item, "George W. Bush's Speech" begins with plausibly polite political statements about the need to put aside differences and assuring the country's safety. Then it turns abruptly to the terrorists and assaults them with obscenity: "Are you fucking kidding me? Are the turbans on your heads wrapped too tight? Have you gone too long without a bath? Do you not know who you are fucking with?" The turban remark, of course, suggests that the author of this piece had seen the opening of Suggs's "Binch" parody, and its continuation also recalls Sinclair's chauvinistic survey of America's achievements, although in a way that is intended to be politically incorrect:

Have you forgotten history? What happened to the last people that started fucking around with us? Remember the little yellow bastards over in Japan? We slapped them all over the Pacific and roasted about 2 million of them in their own back yard. That's what we in America call a big ass barbecue.

As a way of affirming American's patriotism and resolve, the burlesque concludes with a promise to avenge the terrorist attacks through violent military actions:

Trust us, Afghanistan will end up a giant kitty litter box. Go ahead and try to hide, Bin Laden. There's not a hole deep enough or a mountain high enough that's going to keep your camel riding asses safe. We will bomb every inch of the country that harbors him, his camps and any place that looks and even smells like he was there.

This piece first appeared on message boards on September 14, the same day as the Sinclair speech was being posted on hundreds of message boards and also the same day that the "Binch" parody appeared. However, it did not spread until a few days later, peaking in popularity on September 20-21, coinciding with a highly anticipated speech on the nation's response to terrorism that Bush in fact did deliver to Congress on September 20. Thus its peak popularity fell a little after the "Binch" parody's peak circulation. (See Table One for the timing and relative popularity of these three items.)

The ethnic slurs in the piece provoked criticism from some readers, but significantly it also was the first WTC humorous piece to penetrate a wide spectrum of message boards beyond those focused on discussion of topical jokes. It also was the first item to inspire virtual praise and laughter:

Heck... I doubt anyone could have said it better.

talk.politics.mideast; September 14, 2001 19:30:03 PST

LOL [laugh out loud]!!

alt.rush-limbaugh: September 16, 2001 20:01:26 PST

FUCK YEAH!

rec.music.phish; September 17, 2001 10:49:14 PST

When one participant challenged the appropriateness of racist humor, the person who had posted the speech responded, "i am not going to flame you because we all have opinions on the situation. i work in NYC and saw the entire attack unfold. i am not making any humorous jokes on the attacks, just the wrath of the USA against bin Laden and his buddies" (rec.music.phish; September 17, 2001 13:26:48 PST). A few minutes later, another participant on the same list commented, simply, "some people are humourless" (September 17, 2001 13:48:08 PST). Similarly, after the posting of the item on another list caused an exchange of "flaming" or caustic insults, a reader remarked, "<shrugs> Made me laugh" (alt.music.dave-matthews; September 18, 2001 04:45:53 PST).

The virtual <shrug> is significant, in that it marks a movement out of a latent period, when the appropriateness of humor needed to be defended, and into a risible moment, when humor is self-evidently valued and the lack of humor now is seen as deviant. And even though the person forwarding the item may have intended it quite literally as a statement of loyal American principles, many who read it construed it as humorous. This suggests that its popularity might not necessarily chart the literal popularity of the xenophobic and militaristic sentiments it expresses. Rather, as a number of postings indicate, the piece could be seen as a satire on the emptiness of the prevailing political rhetoric. As Elliot Oring (1987) and Christie Davies (1999) have noted, much disaster humor expresses anger and frustration specifically against the media, where carefully manicured official platitudes contrast dissonantly with the images of death and destruction that inspire them.

By implication, the burlesque says, President Bush should be saying something of the sort, and in so doing he would have tapped into the actual rhetoric being used by many Americans to express their anger at the events. In any case, the item was seen as funny by many readers, and it was influential in creating a vocabulary for Americans' WTC jokes. In particular, the way in which the burlesque alludes to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki creates a "patriotic" image of a fireball that destroys an urban landscape and kills thousands of people, in a dynamic exactly predicted by my model. Previous disaster humor, that is, referenced the dominant visual images of the tragedy, and the fireball caused by the second plane's impact, followed by the towers' ultimate collapse became focal points of media coverage. Therefore, it is predictable that the first popular items would likewise focus on these images.

And in fact the earliest short joke found commonly circulating in the United States (first posted simultaneously with the items described above) referenced exactly the same image:

Subject: Weather forecast for Kabul
Cloudy, windy, 5,000,000 degrees farenheit.

This joke was, as predicted, a recycled item from the Desert Storm cycle of 1991.²⁹:

"And now the long-range weather forecast for Baghdad, 8000 degrees and cloudy"

A few days later, this was making the rounds again, slightly elaborated:

Afghanistan Weather Report
The weather in Afghanistan tomorrow is expected to be sunny in the morning with increasing mushroom clouds in the afternoon.
The temperature looks to be a moderate 2000 degrees with cool winds upwards of around 700 miles per hour.

And by September 23, this joke had been translated into graphic joke form, adapting an actual Weather Channel page reporting conditions in Kabul:

Of similar import was this joke: "The Weather Channel Reports that the five day forecast for Afghanistan is two days" (alt.california: September 25, 2001 18:46:39 PST). This was an adaptation of an even older joke originally associated with the 1979 Three-Mile Island Nuclear Plant mishap near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.³⁰

Such items were part of a more general cycle of visual jokes that began appearing on websites and circulating on e-mail around September 17. Many of these simply castigated bin Laden or predicted his imminent death in revenge for the attacks.³¹ These included:

³²

Like "George W. Bush's Speech," these items express fantasy desires to exterminate the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, but in ways parallel to previous visual jokes circulated during the 1991 Desert Storm military intervention. Somewhat grimmer are the following items:

These, like the "Afghanistan Weather Report," fleetingly reference the gaping hole in New York City's landscape caused by the collapse of the WTC, as well as the use of planes as the agent of destruction. "Osama window" in particular reminds the reader of the central image of the attack: flying aircraft directly into office buildings where people, unconcerned, were going about their business. All four essentially turn elements of the actual horror into similar horrific threats, defused by being projected onto the scapegoat Osama bin Laden. As we will see, such images became more popular in cybercartoons as time went on.

In "Model," I predicted that the WTC cycle would emerge after a latent period of 17-22 days. In actuality, the latent period was much briefer: grom the evidence of e-mail and message boards, we see that it lasted at best 7 days, and some jokes that later proved successful appeared on message boards within hours of the Towers' collapse. In particular, cybercartoons appeared to avoid many of the social factors that inhibit joking, probably because their form and mode of transmission on websites allowed them to be created and displayed anonymously. However, early verbal jokes appeared in limited, high context conduits such as message boards devoted to topical humor, and they did not begin to spread until a broader-based risible moment was attained about a week after the event. This moment was marked both by the penetration of humorous items into message boards not specifically focused on either humor or aspects of the terrorist attacks, as well as by the return of media broadcasts of live humor

However, this first wave of humor did not bring the cycle to closure. Even though it was more broadly based than the first experiments at humor, still it circulated so privately that even at the end of September some humor experts were still claiming a dearth of humor. As late as September 26, for instance, a USA Today reporter observed that, from her perspective, little widespread humor appeared to have generated. She did mention the "bin Laden Milk Carton" cybercartoon, but added, "More significant, perhaps, is what humorists have not been seeing. Gallows humor usually spreads within hours of any large news event involving death. But only now is it starting to trickle in. . . ." There are perhaps two reasons that this wave went unobserved. First, the complex burlesque text of "George W. Bush's Speech" and the cybercartoons are more obviously anonymous than most verbal jokes. They refer back to genres familiar from photocopy-lore, in which the obviously much-reproduced copies that circulate insulate the individual passing them on from the responsibility of having been the first to produce them. Second, in the case of the visual jokes, the need to click onto an attached file or a link to a website makes the viewer implicitly consent to view them, thus protecting the sender from being flamed by someone who would otherwise claim to have been unwillingly forced to see such jokes.

Overall, the success of this first wave of humor relied on its ability to incorporate the violence and obscenity of many American's reactions into traditional structures. The extreme obscenity of "George W. Bush's Speech," however, limited its appeal, and it would be several days before humor item emerged that appealed to a still wider base of Americans. Meanwhile, however, the militaristic content of such items led to further attempts to recycle older Desert Storm material and eventually created a rhetoric for still more successful American WTC jokes that emerged later. continue

Page Notes

27. Dundes and Pagter 1996: 223. This letter too was updated and circulated in the post-9/11 days as a letter from George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, though it did not gain nearly as much popularity as the burlesque speech. The most significant change is the following addition to the older text (given here in italics): "You rag-head son-of-a-camel-humping-bitch, I am going to hunt your chicken-shit ass down and feed you slowly into the engine intake of one of those passenger jets your ass buggering friends like to hijack so much. As for your bootlicking sponsoring country, I'm going to turn loose my Air Force and bomb their camel shit country back to the stone-age, followed by my Army to make what's left into a multi-national parking lot, and then send in my Marines to paint the white fucking lines on it" (alt.tasteless.jokes: 18 Sep 2001 00:54:53 -0400 (EDT)).

28.This table, like the ones that follow, is based only on Usenet message boards archived by Google.com. Since the Internet was a dominant mode of circulating these items, they probably represent the timing and relative popularity of items on other message boards and on private e-mail fairly accurately, although this remains to be tested. It probably is not as accurate with items that circulated orally as well as virtually, since these may have originated earlier than their first date of posting. With extremely popular items like "America, The Good Neighbor," it was not always possible to sort out postings of the item from responses to it; nevertheless, the table accurately reflects when this item was being actively circulated, read, and discussed.

29. Significantly, as late as 1998 veterans' groups were selling t-shirts labeled "Weather Report for BAGHDAD / CLOUDY" decorated with an American bomber and a mushroom cloud. (comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim: 18 Dec.1998).

30. "What's the five-day forecast for Harrisburg Pennsylvania? Two days, with temperatures to reach five thousand degrees" (Goodwin 2002).

31. Dates for these items were more difficult to determine, as it is not as easy to trace their history on the Internet as with verbal humor. In many cases, the date given is the date when the item was forwarded to me or to my source. However, earlier dates were in some cases confirmed with the help of the dated list of visual jokes at "War Gallery" Available: http://www.moviesthatsuck.com/vault/gallery.html. Other online archives of visual humor still active when this paper was written include "Current Events Humor Archive," available: http://wowpage.com/rthumor/; "Asylum Dedication to Americans Dealing with Terrorism," available: http://asylum.subnetcentral.com/davec/terror/aaterror.htm; and "Osama Bin Laden Pictures and Jokes" 2002, available: http://www.osamayomama.com/10/10_archive.htm.

32. Parody of MasterCard ad; recycled Columbine massacre joke. 200 rounds of ammo: $70 / Two ski masks: $24 / Two black trench coats: $260 / Seeing the expression on your classmates' faces right before you blow their heads off -- priceless. (rec.humor.funny: Apr. 27, 1999).

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