The Second American Wave (September 27-October 20, 2001)

A USA Today article published on September 26 indicated that even at this point humor involved strategic risks for Americans trying to engage in it. Highly visible humor websites such as The Onion and Modern Humorist had essentially closed down in the wake of the tragedy, and, the report noted, only now were they beginning to test the waters for acceptable humor. "At the center is this unspeakable tragedy, and there's really not much humor can do relating to it," Michael Colton, editor of Modern Humorist, was quoted as saying. "There are things at the periphery I think are fair game," he added (Kornblum 2001).

Despite this reporter's comment that disaster jokes were only then beginning to "trickle in," humor had been present in the United States almost immediately after the event, and two widespread and successful waves of humor had in fact already emerged, one in the US, one in Great Britain. However, neither wave was as visible as the more general nationwide emergence of humor that occurred, as predicted in "Model," around October 1. In part, this emergence was made up of two phenomena. One was a widening of the First Wave, driven by the nation's move toward active military conflict in Afghanistan, and the other was a distinct and novel Second Wave of jokes that challenged the militarism of the earlier wave.

Military action in Afghanistan began with allied air attacks on October 7 and widened into ground combat on October 19. Both events were orchestrated in the media by optimistic statements by Bush administration and military supporters, both in this country and abroad. These repeatedly made parallels with the earlier Desert Storm conflict, which, while it did not lead to the death or even removal of Saddam Hussein from power, was successful in achieving its aims with a minimum of American casualties. The widening of the First Wave jokes thus represented a support for military action in reprisal for the World Trade Center strikes and seemingly represented a move away from jokes dealing directly with the disaster. True, many of the most successful jokes, as before, included horrific images of planes creating fireballs of death that might implicitly reference the "gross" aspects of the terrorist attacks. I had expected the larger cycle, like that seen in the Challenger cycle, to focus specifically on such "gross" elements. However, the development of the Afghani conflict during October continued to create tensions in the United States long after the impact of the media disaster had been brought to closure in this country and in Great Britain.

These prolonged tensions brought into being a distinct Second Wave whose theme was finding a more inclusive and pacifist vocabulary to try to signal closure to the crisis to closure and return to normal. Continued official attention to the threat of additional terrorist attacks quickly saturated the public and by mid-October such fire-drills clearly were provoking resentment. And the allied forces' failure to capture or verify the death of Osama bin Laden by Halloween (or indeed by Christmas) likewise prevented Americans from reaching full closure on these tensions. Thus the development of the cycle also proved more complex and long-lived than expected. The Second Wave of American humor, that is, appealed to a broader faction of the American population, including women and liberals.

Again, individual jokes that were widely spread at this time can be traced to ideas available at a much earlier date, and, conversely, the spread of these jokes still involved social risk. When one person posted a series of by now well-worn topical jokes on alt.rhode island a few days after the USA Today piece--

1M. How do you play taliban bingo? B-52 F-16 B-1 etc.

What is the difference between Christmas and the taliban? Christman [sic] will be there in December.

Why don't the [sic] hold sex ed classes and driving ttaining [sic] class on the same day in afghanistan? It wears out the camel.

alt.rhode island: September 28, 2001 18:51:57 PST

--he received an angry rebuke similar to those seen in the Latent Period, indicating that one still could not assume that this form of joking was socially safe.

2. you should keep to yourself, you redneck fat-ass.

September 29, 2001 15:06:05 PST

3. Wull they were in bad taste but your response was no better.

September 29, 2001 15:19:11 PST

Nevertheless, "Taliban bingo" became one of the leading jokes of a cycle of anti-Osama jokes that took form early in October. By October 5, a List of Osama Jokes³⁴ was both appearing on websites and circulating by private e-mail. When military action in Afghanistan began, these lists grew increasingly more popular as the country moved gradually toward involvement of ground troops. Since the Desert Storm conflict resulted in an overwhelming victory for allied forces, the recycling of these jokes tended to define terrorism in the same terms: as an opportunity to show overwhelming military force. Since these lists achieved their peak popularity after allied bombing and missile attacks on the Taliban regime had begun, they probably did comment ironically over how easily the allies achieved air control of the conflict.

Most of these jokes were, like "Afghani Weather Forecast," obviously recycled from anti-Iraqi items popular during and even before the Desert Storm conflict:

Q: How do you clear a afganistan bingo hall?
A: Yell b-52 as loud as you can.

Q: What does osama bin laden and General Custer have in common?
A: They both want to know where those Tomahawks are coming from!

Q: What is the Taliban's national bird?
A: Duck

However, many of the jokes also reference, by implication, the firestorm and rubble created by the original terrorist attacks. The media had by now saturated Americans with information on the extensive death toll of the WTC collapse, the grimness of the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, where intense heat and the stench of decomposing bodies took a physical and mental toll on workers. Hence jokes like the following inevitably suggest not just the coming revenge on bin Laden and the Taliban, but also the firestorm and catastrophic building collapse that incited the military action:

Q: What do Bin Laden and Hiroshima have in common?
A: Nothing, yet.

Q: How is Bin Laden like Fred Flintstone?
A: Both may look out their windows and see Rubble.

Q : What do you call Osama's stinkin' corpse in the desert?
A: Osama been Rottin'.

By this time, too, the media had played and replayed footage and photographs showing the spectacular pyrotechnic display created by the hijacked planes' impacts on the WTC Towers. Thus the one-line joke--"What do you get when you cross a B-52 bomber and osama bin ladin? --an expensive fire work show"--literally refers to the military act of bombing the terrorist and his followers out of existence. But crossing an airplane with a terrorist organization was the act that brought down the Twin Towers in the first place, causing a Hiroshima-like fireball, creating a smoldering rubble pile visible from much of the New York area, and permeating the atmosphere with a distinctive smell made of shattered concrete and decomposing bodies. Thus the joke works by calling into consciousness the key images of the media disaster, then immediately projecting them onto the scapegoat bin Laden.

This trend toward "revenge" scenarios that in fact replay key details from the Towers' collapse is also seen in the visual jokes that became most popular at this time. We have noted that some of the visual jokes showed aircraft, the weapon used by the terrorists, ominously redirected against stereotypical Middle Eastern scapegoats. These two new examples emerged during this period.

But while most of the jokes in the first wave simply expressed the threat of airplanes, the cybercartoons that first appeared during the Second made this humorous motif cut still closer to the quick by drawing an even more explicit link between the airliners used to attack the WTC and the bombers to be used to revenge the act:

This cybercartoon, showing an aerial shot of military planes releasing hundreds of bombs, is captioned "United and American Airlines Announce New, Non-Stop Service to Afghanistan," and when one looks closely at the image, we see that the logos of United and American Airlines have been superimposed on their tails. Literally, this cartoon implies that passenger aircraft might be redesigned to deliver bombs, not travelers. But it also acknowledges the key insight that made the terrorist attacks possible: that passenger aircraft might themselves become instruments of warfare.

A second cybercartoon that builds on this idea represents itself as a friendly note to bin Laden, saying,

We appreciate you taking such a strong interest in the American Airline industry. Now that you are familiar with Boeing's line of commercial aircraft, we would like to get you acquainted with Boeing's other fine products. We look forward to demonstrating their capabilities to you in person in the very near future.

Sincerely, America

The invitation is accompanied by a collage of photographs, the most prominent of which is that of a Boeing 767, one of the types of plane used to destroy the WTC. Below it, however, is a collage of military aircraft, including bombers, helicopters, and guided missiles. The same idea was developed more dramatically in this semi-animated itemattached to e-mail messages as a PowerPoint file: when opened, a page automatically loads, reading::

To: Mr. Osama Bin Ladin (And Friends)
We at Boeing have noted your recent interest in some of our products--

We now feel compelled to introduce you to the rest of the line--

A second page now loads in which similar images of missiles and bombers appear, not all at once as in the previous cybercartoon but individually, eerily "flying in" to the viewer's screen. When the screen is full of threatening aircraft, a closing caption appears: Don't Wait for an Appointment.

The same idea was further developed in yet a third variation on this theme, which like the previous one was semi-animated. Again, a PowerPoint file automatically loads a page with another variation on this opening:

Mr. Bin Laden,
Now that you have taken the time to get to know Boeing's fine line of Commercial Aircraft.

[A full screen image of a Boeing 767 jumbo jet appears; then is replaced by the next page, which reads:]

We would like to get you personally acquainted with Boeing's other fine products.

[A full screen image of two fighter planes firing missiles into a Middle Eastern landscape loads.]

This more fully elaborated version follows this with eleven additional images of military planes and rockets, They are accompanied by wry comments such as, "Kinda sneaks right up on ya," or "Kinda looks like the sky is fallin' eh, Chicken Little?"

The animation makes the variants of this item perhaps the most explicit of the cybercartoons in capturing the key image of watching a plane fly into one's office, perhaps made the more effective since the item required one to own and know how to use Microsoft PowerPoint, a program used most intensively in corporate settings. Thus the animated re-enactment of the WTC attack (again humorously redirected at Osama bin Laden) would naturally be viewed on the window of a computer screen in a work environment. In the second version, most of the aircraft are photographed head on as if they were about to crash through the "window" of the computer screen into the viewer.

One especially compelling image is one showing nothing but a fireball, captioned:"Damn, this was a CALCM AGM-86C missile. Bad timing on my part. Sorry." Inevitably, both images--the plane about to impact the viewer and the fireball‹capture the dominant images of the terrorist attacks on the Trade Center, particularly the repeatedly screened image of the second jet approaching and then impacting the South Tower in a horrific fireball.continue

Page Notes

34. A table giving one inclusive list of "bin Laden jokes," is given as an appendix along with the earlier analogues of these jokes.

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