Making a Big Apple Crumble:Bill EllisChapter Four: The British Wave Page 7The most commonly found joke was the item we might title "Killing the Afghans," (already seen above in one variant). It first appeared on September 18 and enjoyed a long period of circulation, apparently peaking in popularity on September 28. However, as the texts given below show, it was quite variable in form, and so the figures shown in Table 2 below are probably considerable underestimates. In some versions, the Afghans are not killed, but simply sought or deported, and the joke simply plays on the incongruity of connecting everything relating to Afghanistan to the terrorist strikes:
Ha Ha, [the last joke posted was] Almost as good as the Terrorist Bomb found at Battersea Dogs Home!!! Police are looking for 3 Afgans! Others stressed a political slant to the joke, satirizing the American jingoism discussed in the previous section and implying that the military action then being threatened was random and unproductive.
I think [the previous joke was] a recast of one someone sent me. However, the most common ecotype of this joke reflected traditional Irish stereotypes and turned the scenario into an "incompetent imitation" of the American militaristic response. Such a joke may have been successful because it could be read as implying criticism of the proposed war, but deflected this criticism onto an ethnic Other closer at hand.
News Flash !!! Gerry Adams today announced that he and the IRA were fully behind any military strikes in response to the WTC tragedy. To cement this vow, IRA SAS have today raided Battersee Dogs Home and executed 15 Afghans!! After an intelligence report from MI5, the SAS stormed Battersea Dogs Home, and killed 100 Afghans. This argument is supported by the way in which this item was over time increasingly found combined with another, which we could term "Bed Linen." This joke, whether found separately or together with "Killing the Afghans," nearly always referenced anti-Irish ethnic humor:
Apparently the Irish army has surrounded a department store in Dublin. I hear the middle east .vs. America, battlefront is extending into Europe now. Apparently the Republic of Ireland has agreed to help George Bush. Their crack SAS troops have stormed Battersea Dogs Home and assasinated all the Afgans. The Irish SAS also raided Harrods department store in London after a tip off that Arab millionaire Mohamed Al Fayed was hiding Bed Linen in the second floor manchester department. From Irish TV News Headlines: And here's another report coming in.... Irish Intelligence Services have identified the location of the world's most wanted man. Apparently he's in Selfridges on the third floor, the home of Bed Linen... Heard about the daring raid by the Irish SAS on Battersea Dogs Home? The ethnic slant of these items was found also in a number of other regularly found jokes, one of the most explicit being "Hijacking the Blimp":
hope this doesnt offend but how about this one? In a copycat attack, The IRA has highjacked the Goodyear blimp and bounced off Canary Wharf. Did you hear that the IRA have hijacked the Goodyear Blimp ?So far they have crashed it into Big Ben five times............ The IRA are getting in on the act now. They hijacked a hot air balloon. Nobody was hurt, but it bounced off Big Ben several times. This again implies an "incompetent imitation" motif with a serious undertone most explicitly expressed in the "Canary Wharf" version. On February 09, 1996, the IRA had in fact detonated a huge bomb in a garage near Canary Wharf tower, a 50-story landmark of London's financial district that was Great Britain's closest analogue to the World Trade Center. Over a hundred persons were injured and property damage was extensive. The most commonly found form focused on the image of a strike on Westminster's Big Ben, an even more visible icon of British political power. A real-life terrorist attack on this structure would have been seen as damaging a symbolic attack on England's traditional image of power, and so the joke reduces the threat of such images by reaffirming a colonial power structure. Peace talks with the IRA had by this time reduced the actual danger of terrorist attacks, but the joke attempts to defuse these threats further. Ironically, the two joke complexes together imply that the IRA is, happily, as incompetent at terrorism as and the regular Irish government is in fighting it. In short, these jokes are not really about the World Trade Center disaster, although they make use of it as an icon to initiate humor. Rather, they allude back to the British experiences with terrorism, and while the jokes make use of standard anti-Irish stereotypes, they also imply any follow-up attacks by the present threat to Britons--the Irish Republican Army--will be as incompetent and/or harmless as bouncing a hot-air balloon off British landmarks. More significant are the jokes that by implication criticize the military objectives of the allies. The invasion of Afghanistan, being planned and defended in extreme, jingoistic terms during this same period, is made to seem ridiculous, even as cruel as killing a hundred homeless dogs. Indeed, some versions make Americans an even less competent opponent of terrorism than the Irish:
********** NEWSFLASH ********* The implication of this version is that military action in response to the WTC disaster will accomplish nothing constructive and may in fact be potentially self-destructive. Yet while "Killing the Afghans" appears to have been the most widespread of the British WTC jokes, another, which I term "Big Apple Crumble," most often shows up as a "signature" joke. That is, it was used to initiate the swapping of items in a way similar to the way "NASA Need Another Seven Astronauts" often began a series of Challenger jokes. It also seems to have been the riskiest of the jokes, judging from the way in which those who posted it gave advance warnings of its offensiveness. It circulated in two forms, the first alluding to the irony that in 2000, KFC (originally the American chain Kentucky Fried Chicken) had added the "Tower Burger" and "Apple Crumble" to their menu in Great Britain.
[Subject header: KFC Offer!!] KFC Have a new meal deal........... KFC have released a commemorative meal - 2 Towering Infernos and a Big Apple Crumble. . . at a gig in Ely, an American squaddie got up on stage to make a speech about the "glory" of the war, which he concluded with the words "and we will not stop until we've killed all the ragheads". At which point, I threw a pint glass full of beer at him, which was hardly very eloquent, but ragheads?? The whole reaction (so skilfully whipped up by President Bush) of the American people to the tragedy is almost like something out of a movie - Independence Day or Armageddon or Dr Strangelove - and reminiscent of a sick yet horribly appropriate joke someone told me down the pub: However, this version was largely replaced by the one in which Osama bin Laden appears on a cookery show:
Yes but did you know that Bin laden was once on ready steady cook ? This joke may offend. Heard this one today-
Osama Bin Laden Biography shocker! Favourite dessert is Big Apple Crumble!
I've just heard my first World Trade Centre joke. Certainly it is a brief but complex joke, holding in tension two images. One is that of the notorious terrorist appearing on a popular but trivial TV how-to-cook show. The other, more powerful image, is a reminder of one of the tragedy's most replayed images, in which the towers, representing the status and achievement of New York City, the Big Apple, crumble to debris before the TV viewer's horrified eyes. At the same time, the joke grudgingly implies admiration for Osama bin Laden, who like the expert chefs who appear on cookery shows, are successful both at their trade and their ability to use the media to "show us how to make a Big Apple Crumble." Perhaps this made "Big Apple Crumble" the most truthful and the most daring of the British disaster jokes, and also the least likely to spread to the United States. In fact, of the British Wave, none became popular in America. The reliance on British colloquialisms was one barrier of course: "Bed linen" would more likely be called "sheets," and the media/consumer icons mentioned in these jokes--such as Debenham's, John Lewis, Selfridges, "Can't Cook, Won't Cook," and Tower Burgers--are not part of the American cultural vocabulary. Even the dessert called "apple crumble" in the UK would be more likely called "apple crisp" or "Brown Betty" in the States. Less obvious are the reasons for not accepting "Killing the Afghans" but the implied anti-militarism in the first was not in line with the jingoistic hyperbole that constituted the dominant rhetoric of the First American Wave. "Hijacking the blimp," while understandable to Americans, was essentially a put-down of group that was an ethnic Other to Britons but just another nationality to Americans, so it did not enough real content to make it fly for Americans. In any case, no risible atmosphere developed in the US that would make it possible to circulate these kinds of disaster jokes, and instead a rather different set of American jokes, short and long, developed instead. Further, we note that all recorded jokes showed considerable variation both in style and content. What this feature (too often leveled in discussions that give only single, "normalized" joke texts) signifies is not clear from the data available here; perhaps British Internet users for some reason are more apt to recompose joke texts before sending them on to others. More likely, in Great Britain WTC jokes were shared orally before they were recorded on message boards, indicating that in Great Britain the primary conduit of these jokes was oral transmission. By contrast, American joke sessions rely on lengthy texts (like "George W. Bush's Speech") or lists of jokes that vary relatively little in style and content, indicating that, for Americans the Internet was the primary means of sharing humor. Thus the American and British Waves were essentially distinct, even though each was presumably equally available to both cultures through the Internet. No "global humor," during this period, actually emerged. This unexpected finding is one that deserves more careful study to see if it remains valid with other bodies of humorous material, and, if so, what it signifies about the difference between the role of the Internet in the two cultures.continue
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