Making a Big Apple Crumble:Bill EllisChapter Four: The British Wave Page 6The British Wave (September 19-30, 2001)Meanwhile, Britons were distanced geographically and culturally from the direct challenge represented by the terrorist attacks, and so they were able to reach the risible moment more quickly than Americans. However, it is also significant that these jokes rarely spread to the United States. There may be several reasons for the separation between the American and British waves. First, viewers in Great Britain were genuinely horrified and concerned by the events transpiring in the United States, which were disseminated there in the form of visual footage of carnage and destruction. However, such images, however gripping in themselves, did not have the same symbolic impact because they did not strike at the image of Great Britain's invulnerability. In fact, having been made the victim of many terrorist acts at the hands of the Irish Republican Army, Britons may have been better prepared to put the September 11 attacks into perspective. Thus they were able to reach psychological closure long while Americans' internal wounds still felt fresh. However, saying that Britons reached closure more quickly does not explain why British jokes did not readily spread to the United States at a later date. There may be two reasons for this. First, British jokes, like topical jokes generally, tended to use iconic references to brand names and television shows that were part of the media scene in the UK. Like the failed "least favourite flavour of crisps" joke discussed above, the cultural references would need to be explained to Americans, and a joke that requires explanation simply does not make its point well enough to spread. Second, British jokes often demonize Others, particularly the Irish, in a way that does not translate well to America. While Irish stereotypical characters do show up in American jokes, there is no cultural rivalry to support applying such humor to the World Trade Center disaster. Likewise, without the shared history of IRA bomb attacks, demonizing the Irish has no obvious point for Americans. Thus while ethnic stereotypes of Muslims appeared quickly in American WTC jokes, the same Outsider role was played in British jokes by the Irish. The first successful British disaster jokes appeared on message boards on September 18, about the same time as the First American Wave. By the following day we see a fairly typical disaster joke cycle developing on British message boards such as uk.misc under the title "Re: Very sick":
1F. What's the difference between the World Trade Center and a wonderbra? 2M. Try this one on for size 3M. daily telegraph to lead patriotic crusade against battersea dogs home... announces intention to bomb the hell out of those afghans... At this point, one reader protested: 4. very sick? why yes indeed you are............. But this protest had neither the vehemence nor the social authority of previous protests against "sick" jokes, and participants simply brushed it aside.
5F. Oh, go on, I can throw a couple into the mix."I understand the hijackers went to flight training school in the States. Nothing fancy, mind you, just a crash course."Not that funny really. At this point members shared reassurances that what they were doing was perhaps not funny but nevertheless beneficial. A male poster said, "They never are [funny], it's the groan factor innit. Mind you, I pissed myself when I heard the jumbos one, but that's just creeping incontinence" (September 19, 2001 11:54:25 PST). The same person added a little later, " No offence, sorry if any is caused but if you don't laugh you'll cry and all that..." The phrase "Šand all that" implies that by now the argument for humor had become a cliché and no longer needed to be supported, a point that the next person posting affirmed.
6M. Sick is good... A similar exchange took place the following day under the title "It had to happen--" on alt.2eggs.sausage.beans.tomatoes.2toast.largetea.cheerslove. The person initiating the thread commented (without giving examples) 1 .....just heard some bad taste 'jokes'(1) regarding the WTC tragedy. This ambivalent opening did not deter the next poster from contributing an example:
2. The IRA have hijacked the goodyear blimp ... The last line is a variation of a formula seen frequently on message boards when one posts a joke that may give offense: the image is of the author asking the coatroom attendant for his or her jacket prior to leaving the establishment. However, in this case the offer to leave proved unnecessary, as the reaction was unequivocally positive:
3F. LOL [laughs out loud]! Oh dear oh dear. 4M. I'm afraid I laughed too. Couldn't help it! 5. We shouldn't be afraid to laugh - it is supposedly the best medicine.-- From this point on through October, WTC jokes appeared freely on British based message boards and circulated privately by e-mail. Table Two (below) charts the two most commonly found items, showing that humor emerged about a week after the disaster and was most popular during the period September 21-28. However, this phenomenon had a long "tail," with jokes continuing to emerge well into October. Unlike the American jokes, there was also no move toward standardizing the jokes or making them into lists, and so they displayed considerable variation in text and form. For this reason, they were less easy to trace electronically, and in fact many variants were located by reviewing the conversations surrounding items other items located, since joke-swapping occurred regularly and eagerly. Thus joking was probably under-recorded on these message boards.
Table Two: The Two Most Popular "British Wave" Jokes
Certainly we find even in mid-October we find message boards such as uk.rec.bodybuilding continuing to swap and improvising jokes with complete abandon, the items punctuated with enthusiastic comments such as these:
1M [the initiator of the thread]. There sick but funny as fuck! 2M. Most excellent :-) !!! 1M. That TV schedule [a list of British programs as they might be adapted by the Taliban] was so funny, i sent it to everyone [sic], keep em coming! 3. Fucking superb!! Occasionally some participants complained about the poor taste of these jokes, but by this point they were clearly in the minority, and their comments were as often simply ignored as answered. continue
Page Notes33. As the person who posted this joke explained later, the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbewging, or Afrikaner Resistance Movement) is a South African terrorist organization opposed to Black rule. It is best known for detonating a bomb in Johannesburg on April 24, 1994, in which ten people were killed and several buildings flattened. The Union building is "Just a big, ugly building which represents something the AWB resent - the government of South Africa. It's in Pretoria. If you cast your mind back to the first elections (1994) over there, the post election party was held in the gardens of the building" (September 20, 2001 09:08:27 PST).
Newfolk :: NDiF
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