Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 1 :: Page 1:: Page 2 :: Chapter 2 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster1
Bill Ellis
Chapter One: Introduction
On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, a fundamentalist Islamic political movement, hijacked four American jetliners. Two were crashed into the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, causing them to collapse with catastrophic loss of life. A third was crashed into the Pentagon, costing an additional 189 lives, while passengers on a fourth evidently attacked the hijackers, causing the plane to crash in a rural area in western Pennsylvania with the loss of all 44 persons aboard. Much of the drama was played out live on national television, including the crash of the second plane into the South Tower at 9:03 AM and both towers' collapse, at 10:05 and 10:30 AM respectively.
The tragedy sent shock waves through American culture not felt since the equally public tragedy of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. To be sure, the September 11 terrorist attacks were preceded by other anxiety-producing terrorist events: previous acts such as the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland had inspired previous cycles of disaster humor. However, neither the first terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993 nor the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 had the international impact of the new attacks. Tony Fox, a spokesman for the cable network Comedy Central, recalled that the Oklahoma City bombing did cause a brief suspension of humor, but satirists soon turned their attention to other newsworthy events. "This seems so consuming, it's just different" from other national disasters, he told a reporter (Marcus 2001).
Folk culture played a central role in the process of allowing common citizens to react to the anxieties raised by these horrific events. Sylvia Grider (2001) has documented the spontaneous shrines created within hours to commemorate the dead. A series of ceremonies on Friday, September 14, reaffirmed key values, some involving institutional leaders, such as the televised memorial at Washington's National Cathedral led by evangelist Billy Graham and President George W. Bush. Many others were held around the country, on that day and during the days following. Patriotic displays became commonplace and remained in place alongside traditional decorations for Halloween and Christmas.
Other, equally important reactions took the form of verbal and computer- generated art. Statements of solidarity and patriotic resolve, in the form of testimonies, poems, and images circulated widely. On a less formal level, rumors and legends concerning the terrorists and the events were generated and spread quickly. And, in a well-anticipated stage of this process, disaster humor was created, both immediately after the event and regularly over then Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
next six weeks. This body of emergent humor, which I (and others) termed "World Trade Center (WTC) Humor," provides a large and revealing body of folklore to examine how Americans dealt with the psychological challenge that the terrorist acts meant.
This study will look closely at the emergence of WTC humor as a phenomenon, partially documented in previously unobtainable detail, partially facilitated by the Internet's ability to link the nation and indeed the world as one simultaneously present community. This new sense of community challenges our previous assumption that folklore is the property of small, localized groups. When groups regularly communicate across geographical boundaries, what traditional factors of folklore remain the same, and what factors now constitute "contemporary" folklore in every sense of the world?
In my earlier essay, "A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes"(2001) (subsequently referred to as "Model"), I argue that such humor marks an important part of a community's response to tragedy. I argued that disaster jokes do not simply appear singly, but emerge as a cycle out of a phenomenon with a recognizable structure. It follows predictable patterns: for instance, a "latent period" immediately after the disaster during which joking is suppressed, nominally out of respect for those grieving. When jokes appear, they express stages of coping with the aftermath of the event, so the earliest jokes in the Challenger cycle focused on scapegoats, while later jokes moved toward closure by "domesticating" the key images of the disaster. My model predicted that the WTC jokes would follow a similar pattern:
1. This cycle will emerge, in a series of waves, after a period of latency. 2. One or more of the common WTC jokes will reference the dominant visual images of the tragedy. 3. The WTC jokes will recycle elements from previous cycles. 4. The dominant mode of distributing WTC jokes will be e-mail.
Humor, even if it does not directly comment on tragic events, is often perceived as painful for those affected. Even those directly affected by a disaster, such as the emergency rescue workers surveyed by Moran and Massam (1997), find themselves caught in an awkward bind, needing black humor to cope with the horror of events but not being able to justify their actions to others. Thus much of the immediate humor might never be recorded, and indeed participants find it difficult to remember after the shock of the event is over. It is therefore difficult to know exactly what kinds of humor emergency workers at Ground Zero circulated orally among themselves during the days after the event. We do know that it existed: a New York City comedy writer who visited Ground Zero on September 19 recorded this example of black humor:
I was talking to these two firemen. One was about 28. The other was about 40. The younger fireman told me that after the south tower collapsed he and his partner were running toward the north tower to get people out. His buddy got hit by the body of a person who had jumped. He had to get him medical attention; he ended up dying. Thirty seconds later, the north tower collapsed. Had this fireman's buddy not gotten hit, both of them would have died.
There was a pause in the story, and that's when the older fireman turned to him and said, "Is this going to be a long story?" I thought to myself these guys have certainly earned the right to joke (Ferrante 2002: 28).
Clearly such workers needed such black humor to cope with the horrors with which they had to deal. But the larger public affected by the disaster were still expressing violent anger when such forms of joking became public, Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
as we shall see. In the case of a "media disaster" such as the September 11 events, the graphic details of death and destruction are shared with a mass audience, who must then improvise ways of coping with them in a way seen as socially acceptable.
Once the threat of the disaster is no longer imminent, the role of folklore turns to assigning blame, internally and externally, and to "naming" the most threatening elements of past events, and humor inevitably takes a role in these processes. However, a significant number of citizens at large must reach closure before jokes become strategically successful. That is, so long as the primary response to a joke is to see it as socially inappropriate, neither the person telling the joke nor those who hear it will be encouraged to pass it on. As the response becomes more mixed, with more people signaling that they find a joke funny, then the rewards of passing it on begin to outweigh the risks, and more people will be willing to forward on such humor. In the past, this shift has taken place rather suddenly, in which jokes appear in an intense but short-lived cycle that signals Americans' readiness to gain control over the most dissonant images in the disaster and so reach closure in their grieving process.
The role played by the Internet in circulating and indeed creating such cycle jokes, I anticipated, would be important. Although the web of persons directly and indirectly affected by this disaster was unquestionably large, still it was not omnipresent, so joking could take place almost at once with little social risk of hurting someone directly involved in the catastrophe. The distancing effect of the Internet likewise enables persons to propose and circulate jokes anonymously, and with little risk of social retaliation. Thus I reasoned that computer mediation would encourage disaster lore and in fact be its primary mode of circulation.
However, folkloristics has not to date exploited Internet-circulated lore or dealt directly with its potential. Communities who constitute themselves virtually, as Simon Bronner (2002) has said, "form around multiple, overlapping interests that go well beyond the formations of race, ethnicity, class, and gender." Media disasters, I noted in "Model," are instantaneously global, and WTC humor might reflect this "community of the world," just as material circulating immediately after the terrorist strikes reflected worldwide concern and support for Americans. It was therefore essential to observe how the Internet has impacted the folk process, and in so doing recognize its value as a resource for studying phenomena like the emergence and spread of contemporary legends and disaster humor.
I asked fellow folklorists to be ready to receive, gather, and transmit WTC jokes to me as they came to their attention. As a result, I received collections of Internet-collected humor from a number of folklorists.2 Thanks to a tip from Alan E. Mays, I followed these leads using the newly upgraded Google.com Groups metasearch. This feature gives folklorists access to some 700 million archived messages on Usenet message boards, including many posted in the immediate wake of the disaster, allowing us to follow spontaneous conversations among participants of these message boards3 and see both how jokes emerge and what social responses they provide. Also, since the search engine allows one to sort results by date, it was possible to trace the history of many items, giving hints as to the culture and subculture from which they arose and allowing us to determine when they peaked in popularity.
As a result, we can now observe the emergence of WTC jokes in unprecedented detail. We can now more accurately date and plot the various waves, confirming the theory presented in "Model," that media disasters provoke humor of a certain predictable kind, and that participation in it is not deviant but normal and predictable. There were surprises; in particular jokes Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
arising in Great Britain did not spread as readily to American conduits and vice versa. But overall, seeing WTC humor as a phenomenon, not as a miscellaneous collection of texts, produces a much clearer image of how humor functioned to construct a social response to disaster that allowed participants to move toward closure and "business as usual." continue
Page Notes
1.The author thanks Camille Bacon-Smith, Simon Bronner, Christie Davies, and Marilyn Jorgensen for reading and offering valuable suggestions on the several preliminary drafts of this essay.
2.Notably Regina Bendix, Simon Bronner, Christie Davies, Norine Dresser, Joseph P. Goodwin, William Hansen, Sandy Hobbs, Marilyn Jorgensen, and Alan E. Mays.
3. Such material is assumed to be in the public domain; however, out of consideration for the privacy of the persons whose virtual conversations I have observed, I have in all cases omitted e-mail addresses and signatures that would allow them to be identified. (In many cases, these are bogus or unobtainable anyhow.) I have, in all cases, identified the names of the message boards on which the jokes were posted along with the dates of the messages, so that researchers can easily revisit the original postings.
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 1 :: Page 1:: Page 2 :: Chapter 2 :: References Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 1 :: Page 1 :: Page 2 :: Chapter 2 ::References
Making a Big Apple Crumble
Bill Ellis
Chapter One: Introduction Page 2
Folk Humor and the Internet
Folklorists have responded in varying ways to the global culture created in the past decade through the Internet. Linda Dégh, for instance, has minimized the importance of traditional-seeming material circulated by e- mail or through websites, noting that they do not stem from a genuine live, face-to-face folklore communication. In addition, she describes the most active participants in virtual conduits "like lighthouse operators . . . isolated from their human contacts" and doubts that such people will ever "come to the point of leaving the safety of their homes and entering real relationships on the basis of establishing common grounds" (2001: 114-15). This would suggest that Internet-mediated lore would tend to reflect only the subculture devoted to computers, and not accurately represent the much broader range of traditions circulated in face-to-face contact with socially well-adjusted people. Bronner (2002) has observed that such suspicion of the Internet reflects a belief that electronically-mediated socializing is "inauthentic because it is not rooted in place or ethnic background," the usual emphases of folkloristics. Further, because it is based on technology, it represents a social force seen as destructive of folk culture, if we define this concept in terms of "face-to-face interaction, close settlement, orality, and generational ties."
By contrast, John Dorst (1990) and Bruce Lionel Mason (1996) have argued strongly for considering the computer-mediated networks as an "active folkloric space," in which the lack of traditional boundaries gives users the opportunity to create a rich variety of new traditional forms. Mason argues for considering such conduits as a virtual space analogous to the sense of locality that folklorists normally emphasize. In fact, Internet users frequently use such a metaphor, and their interaction is governed by a set of social rules usually called "netiquette." Often such rules are implied rather than stated, just as face-to-face interaction reflects implicit social rules of communication. However, Mason stresses, using the Internet as a resource requires training in a new set of tools and a considerable commitment of time and energy.
Nevertheless, Alan Dundes and Carl A. Pagter argue that the increased use of personal computers has indeed brought "a new generation of folklore" into being. Particularly in the realm of workplace humor, they observed, individuals increasingly have used e-mail and fax to circulate jokes of the sort previously passed on in the form of typed or photocopied texts. This position is supported by Dorst, who notes that the decentralized nature of computer networks allows individuals to appropriate structures originally owned by a dominant culture and to use them to express criticism of these hegemonic forces (1990: 187). The ubiquity of computers that, as Dundes and Pagter note, "have the technical capacity to generate graphic materials Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
which previously could not be composed outside of professional print shops (1996: xiv) has accelerated the "anti-hegemonic impulses" that Dorst says underlie many computer-mediated traditions. With computer communication becoming part of the daily routine for all generations, that is, we can expect such increasingly sophisticated technology to take an increasingly important role in the transmission of folk culture.
But such a development, Dorst admits, demands that the scholar reconsider many of the stereotypes with which one has previously approached the field. In the face of such traditions, he says, we folklorists must face
the possibility that we are in the historical moment that marks, not the end of folk culture or the vernacular mode of production, but the end of that discursive practice which sustains the distinction between the vernacular, the folk, the marginal, and so on, on the one hand, and the dominant, the mainstream, the official, the mass, on the other (1990: 189).
Just as the World Wide Web has made global publication of information immediately within the realm of every individual willing to master its strategy, so computer-mediated communications have made the formal distinctions between official and informal communication more and more difficult to discern. In fact, Dorst suggests, such a blurring of folk and mainstream is central to the development of topical jokes, which as a genre appropriates mass media imagery in order to challenge official definitions of reality. In this way, such a joke cycle "reproduces or mimics the distinctive operations of the reigning hegemony" even as it parodies it (1990:185-86),
Since this was the first international media disaster in which the Internet played a role in generating and circulating humor, it provides us with a chance to see how the increasingly global nature of information conduits has changed the literal form of humor genres. The scope of the data base used in this paper is broad beyond easy description, and it is revealing to see how broadly WTC humor cut across it. A sampling of a hundred postings of the first humorous item to become widely popular ("George W. Bush's Speech," to be discussed below) showed that it did come up, as one would expect, on several message boards focused on humor. Nine of its appearances were on boards such as alt.comedy, alt.tasteless.jokes, and rec.humor.4 But the item appeared just as frequently on boards focusing on serious aspects of the terrorist attacks as well, such as alt.current- events.wtc-explosion, alt.religion.islam, and rec.aviation.military.5
Most surprisingly, the speech appeared even more often on a broad spectrum of forums devoted to virtually the whole range of interests. At least thirty eight of its appearances were on message boards devoted to topics having nothing directly to do with humor or terrorism. Participants' interests ranged from fundamentalist Christianity (alt.christnet), to sports (alt.sports.hockey.nhl.ny-islanders), to American soap operas (alt.tv.days of- our-lives), to coping with chronic diseases (alt.support.mult-sclerosis). This sampling does reference topics typical of a young, computer-focused population (such as alt.games.delta-force [a popular computer game] and rec.music.phish [an alternative rock band]). But it also includes many other interests typical of older, more conservative subcultures (e.g., rec.autos.sport.nascar [American stock car racing], and alt.fairs.renaissance). A significant number of these dealt with international cultures not directly involved in the conflict, including Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Cuba, and Czechoslovakia.6 Thus WTC jokes affected a population much broader than conduits narrowly focused on participants' interest in topical jokes as such. Message board searches genuinely do examine a broad spectrum of English-speaking tradition-bearers, and not simply an inbred, self-selected group of computer enthusiasts. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
This breadth also makes reactions to ethnic stereotypes more complex: when one can be sure that the Other is not listening, there is no check to the extent to which one can marginalize Outsiders. But now, given the increasing ability of non-Americans and ethnic minorities to access the Net, there are no automatic Outsiders. Old "camel-rider" and "rag-head" stereotypes from Desert Storm (and presumably from the Iranian Hostage Crisis of still earlier) arose from high-context, hermetic conduits. Yet such stereotypes still circulate, for new reasons. In some cases the relative anonymity and isolation that the Internet provides may encourage some persons to circulate such material, even though it may offend, because those offended have no easy way to retaliate against the perpetrator. In others, though, as we shall see, the use of such stereotypes may be ironic, a way of adopting an ignorant persona that in itself is intended as the butt of humor.
To be sure, message boards are only one part of the complex set of conduits over which WTC jokes sped. E-mail listservs, or arrangements by which individuals can subscribe to receive messages on given topics, are not as easy to search, although they too were important in passing on WTC humor.7 Likewise, web-based forums also played a role in posting and circulating items. And the increasing popularity of online journals, in which ordinary citizens post their reactions to daily events such as the reaction to the strikes, give us yet another window to see how humor was seen by many people.
The message boards, however, give us a convenient sampling of dynamics that doubtless obtained in personal e-mail and other forms of transmission. In my 1991 article on Challenger disaster humor, I decried the lack of detail in most disaster joke analyses, which were often based on single, normalized joke texts accompanied with vague and subjective comments on their relative popularity and dates of emergence. At that time I suggested a methodology involving repeated sampling of a population with survey instruments, to document the multi-wave properties of a joke cycle. The availability of archived message boards makes this cumbersome methodology unnecessary and immediately provides us with verbatim texts in the context of more complicated virtual conversation, which can be reproduced along with the exact dates and times of each posting. In addition, it allows us to pinpoint what we might call the risible moment in the aftermath of a given disaster: that is, the point at which making and passing on jokes provokes laughter and provides social rewards that outweigh the social risks of being thought sick or insensitive. Previous folklore research has been limited to collecting and documenting successful jokes, and only after they had emerged and come to folklorists' attention. Now, an Internet- enhanced collection allows us a time machine, as it were, where we can observe what happens in the period before the risible moment, when attempts at humor are unsuccessful.
Folkloristic observations tend to focus on the most frequently forwarded ecotype of a joke. The availability of contemporary message board conversations allows us, with luck, to trace these jokes back to a period in which they were still being formed in conversation. In many cases, I found, extremely successful items of humor in fact arose well before the risible moment, and in a form visibly different from the ecotype that became familiar during its peak popularity. Thus the purpose of this essay is both to test a series of hypotheses made about disaster humor and also to suggest the possibilities of Internet-enabled research into ephemeral folklore of all kinds.
Indeed, WTC humor emerged in a series of waves, and the availability of material from many English-speaking contexts allows us to see how American-based and foreign-based disaster humor varied. We will look first Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 1
at the material during the "latent period," the time when in the wake of the attacks humor was considered inappropriate. Then we will look closely at three overlapping waves, two American, one British, that illustrate the varying stages of adjustment to the tragedy and the social tensions it caused. Finally we will look at humor that behaved in a less emergent way and remained popular even after the crisis seemed ended in most observers' eyes. This includes the single genuinely international WTC joke, one that arose in the antipodes but proved equally successful in both Great Britain and in America. continue
Page Notes
4.Also alt.comedy.british, alt.comedy.improvisation, alt.comedy.standup, alt.humor, alt.humor.parodies, and no.kultur.humor.
5.Also alt.america, alt.firefighters, alt.politics.bush, alt.war, nyc.general, soc.culture.afghanistan, and talk.politics.mideast.
6. Also alt.autos.4x4.chevy-trucks, alt.conspiracy.jfk [conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy], alt.dss.hack [computer programming], alt.fan.tom-servo [American TV cult show Mystery Science Theatre 3000], alt.music.van-halen, alt.prophecies.nostradamus, alt.strange.days [American cult science-fiction movie], alt.windows98, alt.writing, misc.fitness.weights, misc.survivalism, misc.transport.trucking, news.admin.net-abuse.sightings, rec.games.pinball, rec.boats, rec.motorcycles.dirt, rec.photo.equipment.35mm, rec.sport.pro-wrestling, rec.woodworking, rec.models.scale, and rec.games.pinball. Boards dealing with other cultures included alt.religion.christian.east-orthodox, soc.culture.cuba, soc.culture.czecho-slovak, soc.culture.dominican, soc.culture.indian, soc.culture.irish, soc.culture.polish, and soc.culture.russian.
7.FOLKLORE, NEWFOLK, and PUBLORE, for instance, were three listservs for professional folklorists through which I received material for this paper.
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New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: :: Chapter 1 :: Chapter 2:: Page 3:: Chapter 3 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Two: The Latent Period Page 3
The Latent Period (September 11-17, 2001).
Informants have often commented that jokes about disastrous events sprang up almost immediately after the event, although folklorists have found it difficult to document these until they emerged as a cycle. Internet-mediated message boards therefore prove to be an unexpectedly valuable data base for folklorists, because they record these early attempts at humor in permanent, searchable form, along with the contemporary reactions that they provoke. Further, the reactions to these failed jokes allow us to infer the social factors that temporarily suppress humor, as well as those looking ahead to a time when humor will function therapeutically.
Examination of the attempts made to post jokes during the seven days including and following the terrorist attacks confirms the prediction that public attempts at humor would be severely sanctioned. In virtually every case, the first reaction to the attempted joke was rage, usually expressed in highly aggressive language, always obscene and usually incorporating threats of violence. An interesting and unexpected observation, however, is that such reactions were often countered by others who defended the use of humor, often explicitly citing previous cycles of disaster humor as precedents.
In a report on the therapeutic potentials of humor, Healingwell.com reporter Adam Marcus observed a similar bind during the week immediately following the September 11 attacks. Television humorists such as David Letterman and Jay Leno spontaneously suspended live broadcasts, and while the Comedy Channel remained on the air through this period, the network screened only re-runs, carefully chosen as not to refer openly to disasters or to imply criticism of President Bush. When Leno and his NBC colleague Conan O'Brian resumed live shows on September 18, their comic monologues were replaced with heartfelt, personal narratives of shock and support for the nation's plight.
Marcus also consulted Chicago-area psychologist Ed Dunkelblau, who had just held a series of debriefing sessions to help groups develop ways to cope with the emotions provoked by the attacks. Dunkelblau noted that examples of "public humor" had been very scarce, but among private, among intimate groups of family and friends he had seen more attempts to make jokes. "It's a safer, more trusted laughter," he said. "What we know is that in order for something to be perceived as funny, the audience has to be in play mode. If not, nothing will seem funny" (Marcus 2001). Nevertheless, even among trusted circles, many people found themselves deeply ambivalent about humor. One semi-anonymous New-Yorker who recorded his reactions, like many others, in a daily online journal, commented on this paradox as early as September 13, two days after the attacks: Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
I spent the day going "Oh my God, I hope Jen is okay" and "Oh my God, I hope Dave is okay," and for once in my life my emotions weren't so concerned with the general populous as it was with two of my best friends in the whole world. I can laugh about stupid teenagers in trenchcoats blasting away at chicks with metal fishies on their car without regret,8 or make jokes about Aaliyah not being able to "pick herself up and try again"9 and not feel bad about it, because they have no relevance to my life. I can't go back and edit my mind and say "oh, you're evil for thinking that" because I'm not ... the only way I've ever been able to deal with something on a scale like that has been to make bad jokes about it, and hope that my friends know that they're just bad jokes. I can't remember having malicious intent in my whole life, but I can't keep myself from making stupid jokes and I hate myself for it (Whatever-Dude 2001).
Interestingly, "Whatever-Dude" alludes to two previous media disasters that had inspired black humor, and recognizes that black humor is not evil but a normal way in which he and others have dealt with such tragedies. In the end, he hopes that his friends' familiarity with the genre will help them see that jokes are a way of coming, rather than as a reflection of "malicious intent." Significantly, though, in the end, this observer simply cannot explain why jokes were so necessary at this stage: he only knows that he feels compelled to make them, even though he himself recognizes as "stupid."
This observer does not record the actual "bad jokes" he made, but a number of message boards that specialized in humor, particularly alt.humor and alt.tasteless.jokes, give us a taste of what these semi-improvised "stupid" jokes were like. Such messages boards provided a regular "play space" for participants and so were logical "safe haven" for such jokes to be recorded. In fact, one item was posted on alt.humor barely two hours after the towers collapsed:
What does World Trade Centre Stand for-
Welcome to Canada- World Terrorist Convention- What ? Trade Centre September 11, 2001 09:59:29 PST10
However, so intense was the shock of the attacks that even such message boards proved not to be safe havens after all. The reaction to this post was polarized, with a number of persons responding, within seconds, with angry, violent, and obscene attacks on the contributor:
You sick fuck September 11, 2001 10:00:20 PST
Why dont you shut your ignorant fucking mouth. If thousands of innocent people in your country died, and you cracked jokes, I hope somebody would have the common decency to take a block of solid metal and crack your fucking skull open. Ignorant, callous shithead. September 11, 2001 10:10:06 PST
Gav if you were here I'd knock your ass down. September 11, 2001 20:58:52 PST
After what just happened today & you have the gall to post crap like this you sick bastard. Why don't you go down the street & see if there some puppies or kittens to kick around?! September 11, 2001 21:57:39 PST Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
Predictably, this attitude was challenged by another, more tolerant point of view that defined humor as an acceptable response to disaster.
Oh, as if this kind of stuff doesn't show up immediately after every tragedy that ever was. Not that I'm necessarily condoning it, but it *does* seem to be a "natural" human reaction. Nobody's forcing you to laugh at it. September 11, 2001 10:03:51 PST
I didn't think this was funny but I am not angry for your attempt because the only new jokes ever created usually stem from tragedy eg DIANA =Died In A Nasty Accident NASA= Need Another Seven Astronauts11 funny now but maybe not at the time September 12, 2001 02:08:19 PST
In fact, one of these improvised attempts did later circulate modestly as "What does WTC stand for? --What Trade Center?" However, even though the concept of humor found defenders, the joke being offered did not, and while another person attempted to add improvised items to this thread,12 these provoked no further discussion, nor did the thread lead to a communal sharing and discussion of the jokes themselves. It is clear that even in a space reserved for irreverent joking and tolerant of humor in general, participants simply were not yet in "play mode."
A similar dynamic prevailed in alt.tasteless.jokes the next day, when a British member offered an improvised joke in a thread titled "New New York Joke."
What are New Yorkers least favourite flavour of crisp/chips at the moment? ...... Plain ! September 12, 2001 08:08:18 PST
Like the previous example, this too provoked an angry, obscene response.
New New York Joke !! Ya know...it's the sick fucks like you that piss me off. Now is not a time to be posting jokes like this, this is serious stuff to deal with... Either post a joke that can take lighten [sic] some of us up or just fuck off... Thank you for your time asshole...
> What are New Yorkers least favourite flavour of crisp/chips at the moment? >..... Plain ! September 12, 2001 15:11:30 PST
...And thank *you* for reposting the joke in its entirety. Real bright. September 12, 2001 15:18:42 PST
Whoops...sorry about that...I found the joke tasteless and downright rude, should have taken it out, but was rather pissed at the time... Please forgive me... September 12, 2001 18:13:37 PST
As with the alt.humor thread, two observers defended the right of people to use humor in general:
it's only a joke dude. So freedom was destroyed after all. That's what they want y'know. September 12, 2001 21:54:32 PST Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
Hey, calm down mate. If we're not going to find something funny in everything, then we're all going to go insane. I think its humour which keeps us from that brink. September 13, 2001 05:50:49 PST
The second commentator, however, added significantly, "Although, I must say, I don't actually get it." And in fact, another participant had to come in and explain the pun for Americans:
"Plain" as in Ready Salted, flavour of crisps (chips to our US chums), crisps with just salt on them. Plain/plane. Geddit? September 13, 2001 07:57:01 PST
And later on in the thread, yet another reader had to ask to have the joke explained, a clear sign that even if the participants were by this time willing to consider humor, this item was simply too esoteric to be funny. The joke relied too heavily on British slang and foodways to translate well globally, a factor that we will see affecting even the more successful jokes that emerged later in the United Kingdom.
On September 17, the end of the latency period, a list of proposed WTC jokes was distributed to alt.tasteless.jokes and to other similar lists. This included 45 items plus a "top ten" list of "good things about the WTC Attack."13 The appearance of this list on a message board devoted to "tasteless jokes" was hardly surprising. Indeed, the idea of a "canonical" list of WTC jokes supports John Dorst's idea that such a genre essentially consists of a cycle, not a group of individual jokes that happen to appear close together. He comments that in such a genre, "the seriality (replacement of a unit by an infinite series of equivalents) that is the hallmark of the current commodity structure is staged or modelled" (1990: 185). That is, even if the list is not strictly "infinite," the fact that the viewer is presented with a large number of possibly funny jokes to choose from essentially validates the market economy that the terrorist attacks threatened. What is interesting, then, is that the list provoked so little comment and that so few of the items made the transition from lists to private circulation by e-mail. People expected the jokes to appear in this kind of virtual marketplace; they just weren't buying.
Many of the items were obviously recycled jokes from previous disaster cycles, notably the Challenger jokes:
What was the last thing going through Mr. Jones head sitting in 90th floor of the WTC The 91st floor."14
What color were the pilots eyes? Blue. One blew this way the other blew that way15
Where do Americans go on vacation? All over Manhattan.16
Others attempted to find ironic coincidences in the event:
What's the area code of the World Trade Center? 220 (two to zero)
The FBI has just identified the man who trained the hijackers: Dale Earnhardt.17
The list included a few items that were subsequently found circulating during Internet discussions, though it is not clear whether this list got them into circulation or simply recorded their prior circulation as oral jokes: Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
Who are the fastest readers in the world? New Yorkers. Some of them go through 110 stories in 5 seconds.18
What's the difference between Wembley and New York? Wembley's still got their twin towers.19
"It's a bird!" "It's a plane!" "It's.... Oh fuck, it IS a plane!"20
Still, the list had minimal impact, suggesting two things. First, it appeared during an unusually intense latency period, in which most Americans were not yet prepared to engage in the satire and cleverness of traditional cycle jokes. Second, by recycling older patterns, this list failed to express the most widely held emotions of Americans, and so they did not address the need to find humorous patterns strong enough to encompass this shock. Indeed, some of the jokes openly expressed contempt for these emotions, making it unlikely that they would spread:
How many Americans died in the WTC yesterday [sic]? Who gives a fuck.
What's the difference between the attack on New York and the Oklahoma City Bombing?-- Again foreigners prove they can do it better and more efficiently.
The discussions during the September 11-17 period made it clear that while many participants found any effort at humor distasteful, many others agreed that it was an inevitable, healthy response to disaster. This dynamic is hardly surprising: "Trying to laugh too close to the tragedy feels disrespectful," commented psychologist Ed Dunkelblau, adding, "but people need an opportunity to release" (Marcus 2001). But the necessary release did not come until a week had passed, and, as we shall see, did not become truly national until several weeks later. Indeed, many found nothing intrinsically wrong with the attempt to construct jokes during this period. There is no reason to believe that these people were callous, indifferent, un- American, or inured to mass destruction; in fact, there is considerable evidence, as I argued in "Model," that "it is the absence of humor that is socially deviant" (2001).
This is not to say that the latent period produced no viable verbal humor. A second advantage of searchable message board files is that one can see how jokes that proved successful during the second week after the attacks actually appeared a few days before the risible moment. In some cases, their first appearances came on the high-context message boards discussed above that were devoted to topical humor. But increasingly other message boards, not specifically humor-related, played a role in discussing and circulating these items, as did private e-mail. Still, in the week following the attacks, the most popular items circulating on the Internet were other forms of narrative that affirmed patriotism or commented on the event with no humorous intent. Among these were statements of sympathy, particularly from non-Americans, personal narratives about involvement in the attacks, and a persistent level of rumors attempting to assign guilt for the events. All of these narrative responses functioned to express shock and find meaning in the event. The nascent forms of humor too served this function, but they were not as widely accepted or appreciated. One observer's comment makes this clear.
Someone made a joke today, and I didn't laugh (What's the difference between Christmas and Afganistan... Christmas will be there next year) nor found it remotely funny. Some people have very Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
short memories. pgh.opinion: September 14, 2001 20:28:54 PST
In fact, as we will see, this item became one the standards in the most widely circulated list of "Osama jokes," but these did not break into circulation until early October and did not become widespread in circulation until nearly a month after this observation. But most of the jokes told during the latent period were seen (like this one) as simply not funny. A vocabulary and a grammar had yet to emerge that would create a "play mode" that would allow such jokes to spread. For this reason, experimental joking during the latent period largely remained in the high-context, self-aware humor conduits such as alt.tasteless.jokes.
At the end of this period, however, Bill Maher, star of ABC's comic show "Politically Incorrect," made a telling prediction to a National Public Radio reporter. "It will not be that long before people are laughing," he said, "because we're going to want to ridicule our government for being so inept at protecting us -- which is their job, after all. We're mad at the terrorists, we're mad at the airlines. There's a lot of places where exaggeration, sarcasm, belittlement, all the tools of humor are going to come into play as a weapon in our arsenal to recover from this, and that is appropriate" (Marcus 2001).
Maher's willingness to engage in humor, however, was premature in many people's minds. On the September 17 edition of "Politically Incorrect," he engaged in some banter with a panelist who questioned President Bush's characterization of the al-Qaida terrorists as "cowards." "These are warriors," the panelist said, noting that, like it or not, many factions dislike the American political agenda and lifestyle. "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly," Maher responded, adding sardonically, "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." A firestorm of hostile editorials followed, claiming that such comments had expressed admiration for America's enemies and insulted our armed forces as "cowards." Two of the show's sponsors promptly cancelled their advertising for the show, citing nationwide complaints from consumers. ABC responded with a statement supporting Maher's freedom of speech rights, though it admitted that exercising them "can oftentimes arouse intense emotions, especially during such a sensitive time" (Limbacher et al. 2001). The show was cancelled at the end of the spring season, however, and many observers credited this fracas with reducing ABC's support for the controversial show.
Nevertheless, my early drafts of Model, circulating among colleagues at the same time, already were stressing that a first wave of jokes would certainly emerge, founded "on denial, displaced anger, and desire to find and assign blame" (2001). Such an intense rage and urge to lash out on many fronts made the first attempts at humor strategically dangerous, since it was easy (as in Maher's case) to equate humor with disloyalty. Nevertheless, this groundswell of anger provided the grammar necessary for humor to emerge explosively during the second week after the attacks. continue
Page Notes
8.A reference to the mass murder at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999, in which two students wearing trenchcoats, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed thirteen people including Cassie Bernal, who allegedly expressed her faith in God just before being shot. Bernal's testimony became a staple of evangelical Christian responses to this tragedy. Interestingly, the Columbine tragedy seems not to have generated a cycle of jokes, though one item, a parody of the "MasterCard" advertisement, did circulate widely. See n. 31. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
9. The allusion is to one of the recently deceased singer Aaliyah Haughton's most popular songs, "Try Again," from the Romeo Must Die Soundtrack. Aaliyah was killed in a plane crash on August 26, 2001. Among the jokes that circulated after her death was this one: Pilot: The engine won't restart. Aaliyah: "Try Again." (For a time available on a page titled "Aaliyah Haughton Jokes" at www.deathsucks.com, a website devoted to topical jokes about recently deceased celebrities.)
10. Pacific Standard Time is three hours earlier than Eastern Standard Time, so this item was posted at 12:59:29 PM EST, about an hour and a half after the collapse of the second Tower.
11.For variants, see Smyth 1986: 244, Simons 1986: 266-67, Oring 1987: 280, Ellis 1991: 112.
12. 1) New york, New york.. so good they hit it twice.... 2) See American buildings, up REAL close with America Airlines... 3) "Dear Mr President, I work in a big multi-storey building, I am unhappy coz the air conditioning smells like aviation fuel. Your disgruntled Bobby Joe." 4) Is it a leap year? If you work on the 59th floor of the world trade building it is!! (All 11 September 2001 10:31:07 PST)
13. Another version of this list, shortened to 20 items plus the "top ten" list, was spammed (sent anonymously and without solicitation) to a large number of lists on September 23 under headings like "Heartwarming story from Ground Zero WTC." This list too had minimal impact on the tradition.
14. Cf. "What was the last thing that went through Christa McAuliffe's mind? The control panel" (Smyth 1986: 245, Simons 1986: 273, Oring 1987: 280, Ellis 1991: 114).
15.Cf. "Did you hear Christa McAuliffe had blue eyes. One blew right, one blew left" (Smyth 1986: 244, Oring 1987: 280, Bronner 1988: 130, Ellis 1991: 113).
16. Cf. "Where does the crew of the Challenger take their vacation? All over Florida" (Smyth 1986: 244, Oring 1987: 280, Bronner 1988: 130, Ellis 1991: 113-14).
17. A famous American stock car racer who died on February 18, 2001, when he accidentally crashed his car into a wall during the Daytona 500 race.
18. Cf. "The taliban's are now officially THE FASTEST READERS in the world! 200 stories in 3 minutes...." (uk.music.rave: October 18, 2001 14:43:43 PST).
19. Wembley Stadium, built in 1923 as Great Britain's national football stadium, was dominated by a Roman-inspired colonnade dominated by two massive Twin Towers. The stadium, declared obsolete, was closed in 2000 and marked for demolition, but a sentimental crusade by British architecture- lovers and football fans led to several delays of the Twin Towers' destruction. As of June 1, 2002, the towers were still erect, though surrounded by heavy demolition equipment. On September 30, Christie Davies heard an oral variant of this from a Liverpool informant: "Radio instruction to hijacker 'No, you fool, I said Wembley ' " (e-mail, 01 October 2001 20:30:24).
20. [Subject heading: It's A Bird, It's A Plane...] "...no, you Afghan fuck, it's a Tomahawk Cruise Missle." (alt.usa-sucks: October 09, 2001 11:53:13 PST). [Next message in thread]: "Oh fuck, it is a plane"(October 09, 2001 15:35:07 PST ). At some later date, this became: "Famous Afghan Last Words... 'It's Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 2
a bird!' 'It's a plane!' 'It's.... Oh fuck, it IS a plane!'" ("Asylum Dedication").
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: :: Chapter 1 :: Chapter 2:: Page 3:: Chapter 3 :: References Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 2 :: Chapter 3 :: Page 4:: Page 5 :: Chapter 4 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Three: The First American Wave Page 4
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).
Click thumbnails for larger image and detail on thumbnails
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3 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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3 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 22 September 15 (interestingly on a message board hosted in Denmark, 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. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3 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 "September 13," 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. Sinclair's editorial commented at one point, "When 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." Suggs's 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 Seuss's original line closely, substituting only "turban" and "screwed" for "shoes" and "tied." (He also saw the comic possibilities of "turban" 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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3 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 .)
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 2 :: Chapter 3 :: Page 4:: Page 5 :: Chapter 4 :: References Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 2 :: Chapter 3 :: Page 4 :: Page 5 :: Chapter 4 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Three: The First American Wave Page 5
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
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.)
Table One: Popular "First American Wave"Items.28
America,the The Binch George W. Month/ Day 2001 Good Who Stole Bush's Neighbour Airplanes Speech September 11 September 12 September 13 8 September 14 207 2 3 September 15 105 5 September 16 69 5 4 September 17 37 7 9 September 18 27 28 6 September 19 24 48 8 September 20 13 44 15
Note: on the evening of 9/20, Bush addressed Congress on his reaction to the terrorist attacks September 21 10 20 23 September 22 5 11 3 September 23 5 7 3 September 24 6 9 4 September 25 1 6 6 September 26 2 September 27 2 5 September 28 1 1 September 29 1 1 September 30 1 2 October 1 1 October 2 1
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
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, "
The virtual
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.
alt.humor: September 14, 2001
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
degrees and cloudy"
eunet.jokes: January 25, 1991
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.
rec.humor: September 18, 2001
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:
Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 3
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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Making a Big Apple Crumble:
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Chapter Four: The British Wave Page 6
The 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? Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
A wonderbra can hold two jumbos. Still, I've a feeling the *REAL* WTC jokes will be coming along soon... September 19, 2001 [time not noted]
2M. Try this one on for size
Q. Why is the USA the country where miracles come true? A. Because it's the only country with a four-sided Pentagon.
Any more? September 19, 2001 06:49:02 PST
3M. daily telegraph to lead patriotic crusade against battersea dogs home... announces intention to bomb the hell out of those afghans... September 19, 2001 10:08:13 PST
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. The one that made me giggle without being able to help it would probably make no sense to anyone who hasn't lived in South Africa. Anyway:
"Newsflash! The AWB have just flown into the Union building33 with hanggliders !"
September 19, 2001 09:19:48 PST
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... How about this one?
"Irish Air Disaster: A Cessna has crashed into a graveyard in Dublin. Irish rescue workers have found 827 bodies so far; digging continues." September 19, 2001 12:34:25 PST
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. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
I won't post them, I'm sure most people wouldn't want to hear them, but I just wonder what sort of mind makes these things up ? (1) Jokes are be [sic] the wrong word, but it's the closest word that'll have to do.... September 20, 2001 11:49:15 PST
This ambivalent opening did not deter the next poster from contributing an example:
2. The IRA have hijacked the goodyear blimp ...... apparently, they've hit Big Ben 5 times already -- Yes, that's it; the Shoei leather race jacket, thanks ... September 20, 2001 13:10:21 PST
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. [attached to next message: date not noted]
4M. I'm afraid I laughed too. Couldn't help it! September 20, 2001 17:41:02 PST
5. We shouldn't be afraid to laugh - it is supposedly the best medicine.-- September 21, 2001 02:58:12 PST
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
Date Killing the Big Apple Afghans Crumble September 18 1 1 September 19 2 September 20 2 September 21 3 8 September 22 2 3 September 23 1 1 September 24 2 2 September 25 1 2 September 26 1 2 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
September 27 3 2 September 28 8 1 September 29 1 1 September 30 2 October 1 2 October 2 1 4 October 3 October 4 1 October 5 2 October 6 1 1 October 7 1 October 8 1 October 9 October 10 October 11 1 October 12 October 13 October 14 1 October 15 1 1 October 16 October 17 1 2 October 18 2 October 19 1
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! October 16, 2001 02:14:30 PST
2M. Most excellent :-) !!! October 16, 2001 14:15:11 PST
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! October 16, 2001 14:38:49 PST
3. Fucking superb!! October 16, 2001 15:07:06 PST
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 Notes
33. 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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
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).
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Bill Ellis
Chapter Four: The British Wave Page 7
The 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! uk.current-events.us-bombing September 21, 2001 09:40:40 PST
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. Certainly have no problems about posting it here:
Newsflash: This just in. American forces earlier today mounted a raid against the Battersea Dogs Home, completely destroying it in the process. When asked for justification for the raid a spokesman said "well, we heard they were harbouring some Afghans... " uk.current-events.us-bombing: September 20, 2001 14:45:53 PST
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 !!! 12.05 19.09.2001 London It has just been reported on Reuters that the Irish SAS have stormed Battersea dogs home and killed all the Afghans. alt.politics.british: September 19, 2001 09:27:25 PST
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!! Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
alt.tasteless.jokes September 20, 2001 14:58:13 PST
After an intelligence report from MI5, the SAS stormed Battersea Dogs Home, and killed 100 Afghans. alt.humor September 21, 2001 11:56:09 PST
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. They are acting on a tip-off that Bed Linen is on the second floor alt.society.nottingham September 26, 2001 09:30:09 PST
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. comp.lang.clarion September 26, 2001 17:34:04 PST
From Irish TV News Headlines: The Irish SAS stormed the Dublin branch of Debenhams this morning after finding out that Bed Linen was on the second floor . rec.arts.drwho September 28, 2001 14:26:36 PST
And here's another report coming in.... Having successfully raided Battersea Dogs Home and killed all the Afghans they could find, The Irish SAS today announced an unsuccessful search at the Dublin branch of John Lewis, following a tip-off that Bed Linen could be found there. uk.rec.sheds September 29, 2001 01:30:03 PST
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... alt.music.jungle: October 02, 2001 14:37:34 PST
Heard about the daring raid by the Irish SAS on Battersea Dogs Home? They arrested a group of Terriers and deported all the Afgans... Later that day they swooped on a well known department store when they received a tip off that Bed Linen was on the second floor... Groaningly uk.local.cumbria: October 05, 2001 02:36:28 PST
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? *************************************** The I.R.A have hijacked the Good-Year Airship, Early reports say it has bounced off Big Ben twice. :-) uk.current-events.us-bombing September 20, 2001 15:08:32 PST
In a copycat attack, The IRA has highjacked the Goodyear blimp and bounced off Canary Wharf. Whaddyamean you've heard it? uk.misc: September 21, 2001 11:24:21 PST Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
Did you hear that the IRA have hijacked the Goodyear Blimp ?So far they have crashed it into Big Ben five times...... alt.tasteless.jokes: September 21, 2001 11:53:41 PST
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. alt.babylon5.uk: October 01, 2001 10:32:40 PST
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 ********* US Delta force have stormed Battersea Dogs home and have killed all the Afghans. 15 of the 20 man team where [sic] also killed in friendly fire durring this action uk.current-events.us-bombing: September 20, 2001 12:53:51 PST
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 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!!] Two Flaming Towers and a Big Apple Crumble! alt.tasteless.jokes September 18, 2001 05:37:58 PST Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
KFC Have a new meal deal...... 2 Flaming Towers 4 Hot Wings and A Big Apple Crumble alt.terrorism.world-trade-center September 21, 2001 09:28:22 PST
KFC have released a commemorative meal - 2 Towering Infernos and a Big Apple Crumble. alt.babylon5.uk October 02, 2001 08:33:03 PST
. . 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:
Osama Bin Laden walks into a KFC and orders two flaming towers and a big apple crumble. George Dubya Bush walks into a KFC and says, "I don't know what I want, but I'm gonna murder the bastard". Glass 2001 (October 18, 2001)
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 ? He made A big apple crumble. alt.tasteless.jokes September 21, 2001 11:14:26 PST
This joke may offend. Bin Laden is on "Can't Cook, Won't Cook" next week. He's making a big apple crumble. uk.local.london September 21, 2001 15:07:57 PST
Heard this one today- Osama Bin Laden is appearing on today's episode of Ready, Steady Cook and doing his speciality - he's making a big apple crumble. uk.current-events.us-bombing September 21, 2001 17:30:17 PST
Osama Bin Laden Biography shocker! Favourite dessert is Big Apple Crumble! And with that, I'll get me coat...... rec.arts.drwho September 28, 2001 14:26:36 PST
I've just heard my first World Trade Centre joke. Osama bin Laden announced today that he will give up terrorism to become a TV chef. For his first programme he'll be showing us how to make a Big Apple Crumble. alt.babylon5.uk September 30, 2001 11:56:42 PST
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 4
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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Chapter Five: The Second American Wave Page 8
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
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.
Table 3: Popularity of "Osama Jokes"
month/day 2001 Taliban Bingo October 5 2 October 6 October 7 Allied air attacks on Afghanistan began October 7 October 8 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
October 9 2 October 10 3 October 11 8 October 12 13 October 13 2 October 14 6 October 15 7 October 16 5 October 17 3 October 18 8 Allied ground action began in Afghanistan on October 19 October 19 4 October 20 5
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
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-- Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
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 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
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.
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 4 :: Chapter 5 :: Page 8:: Page 9 :: Page 10 ::Chapter 6 :: References Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 4 :: Chapter 5 :: Page 8 :: Page 9 :: Page 10 ::Chapter 6 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Five: The Second American Wave Page 9
Lists of Osama jokes had a long, if moderate, period of peak popularity, beginning about a week after their emergence and extending from October 11 to October 20,35 although such lists continued to be posted on message boards at the rate of about once every three days through the end of the year. The popularity of cybercartoons is harder to gauge due to the difficulty of dating their circulation, but both Joseph Goodwin and I received the bulk of our examples during the period between October 9 and October 24, suggesting that these forms of humor also peaked at this time. Thus this cycle, unlike the earlier disaster-focused one, did meet with some success, circulating by e-mail and being posted on websites as well. This is a predictable result, since as we have seen, John Dorst has argued that the cyclical dissemination of jokes is modeled on the prevailing economic and political order. Since the jokes are founded on politically dominant images of the military as all-powerful and the Other as primitive, dirty, and ignorant, we could expect such joke cycles to appear and mark a resurgent confidence in the dominant structures of this country.
Yet even though jokes in this vein elicited laughter during this period, they did not appeal to all audiences and in fact made some witnesses profoundly uncomfortable, not because they were seen as inappropriate, but because their implicit political message was not accepted by all. Of the "new" one- liner jokes, the cleverest and most successful was this one: "You know what Osama Bin Laden is going to be for Halloween?....A DEAD GUY!!!!" This joke circulated orally as early as the first week of October, attributed to television humorist Jay Leno (Hider 2001: October 3, 2001 10:51 PM). It gained even more popularity when it was told by the pro-military Republican Senator John McCain on the nationally broadcast Letterman Show on the evening of October 18. It plays on the traditional use of Halloween to impersonate common fears, and a common costume would be that of a corpse. The joke combines the ominous nature of this festival of death with the key idea of the earlier joke, "What's the difference between Osama and Christmas," in addition playing cleverly on the double meaning of "going to be." Thus the threat of the terrorist leader appearing (like Poe's masquer of the Red Death) in the guise of what everyone fears most is immediately defused with the secondary meaning: "by Halloween, Osama will be dead."
Female audiences were particularly uncomfortable with these kinds of jokes, as illustrated by one thoughtful reaction to this joke documented in a Canadian woman's online journal:
Signs of a restless mind: I'm dithering between what I'd call "intolerant propaganda" and mean-but-harmless amusement. Case in point: the Letterman show last night. Senator John McCain was the marquee guest. His first words were "What's Osama Bin Laden going to be for Halloween? Dead!" Huge laffs from audience. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
Throughout McCain's interview, Afghanis were referred to as camel- sellers and camel-herders. "Get back to your camel sheds," etc., again to huge guffaws from the audience each time.
I know the US has focused on the Taliban government and militia as the enemy, with very good reason. I personally feel the Taliban's combination of fundamentalism and hatred is evil in our time. But would I have quietly sat through an interview where someone said about, say, hostile African forces, "get back to your banana trees" or "get back to your cannibal pots"? I doubt it. I don't know exactly why, but it made me feel very uncomfortable, the way I get when someone's being bigoted or otherwise intolerant in a mixed group of people of which I'm part. . . .
I guess maybe I do know why the Letterman show bothered me. A comic depiction of an unfamiliar culture (Afghanis as camel-loving madmen) is just another way of objectifying them. And objectifying them muddies the definition of them as human beings -- granted, human beings capable of terrible things. Yet once they're seen as less than human, it's easier to visit atrocities on them under the justification of "revenge." Which, if you've been paying attention, is exactly what the terrorists did to our society on September 11th. . . . I hope, oh, I hope, we don't sink to that level. We have to be better than the terrorists, and treat them better than we expect in return, or what's it all for? How can we say we're better? (Farries: October 19, 2001 3:33 PM)
Thus it is revealing that, as popular as the "Osama Jokes" were, they were not as popular as the Second Wave jokes that implied quite a different reaction to the 9/11 tragedy. An early example of such a joke originated in a political cartoon by John Deering of the [Little Rock] Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
The cartoon36 originally appeared September 20, but as with many items it began circulating actively a week later in a wide range of settings: photocopy and electronic form, as well as paraphrased oral form. Message boards record the widening use of this cartoon during the start of the Second Wave. At Lincoln Center in New York City, another observer saw two items posted on a bulletin board near the principal artists' dressing room. One was an inspirational quote by the late conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the other was Deering's cartoon (Schubin 2001: September 29). And on the same day the Washington Post reprinted this piece, possibly in response to its growing popularity in Internet conduits. One observer called it "a truly lovely editorial cartoon. . . . Oddly enough, this may be the truest thing I've seen in print in weeks" (alt.gothic: September 29, 2001 08:43:46 PST). More interestingly, on September 27, a participant in alt.support.stop smoking observed a home-made sign posted on an office door:
TO THE TALIBAN-- HAND OVER BIN LADEN, OR WE'LL SEND YOUR WOMEN TO COLLEGE! September 27, 2001 09:44:09 PST
The sign paraphrases Deering's original caption rather than quoting it, indicating that the joke had already passed into oral circulation. In oral form, the punch line took a variety of forms: Simon Bronner, for instance, collected it as, "To the Taliban from the American people: / Give us Bin Laden, or we will take all of your women and send them to college" (e-mail, Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
September 30, 2001).
While not strictly traditional in origin, the emergence of "Ultimatum to the Taliban" as a frequently-forwarded cartoon signaled a shift in American WTC humor. The target and strategy of its humor contrasts sharply with the abortive "gross" cycle and with hyperpatriotic items like "George W. Bush's Speech" and "Osama at Halloween." Most notably, it does not promise a firestorm to equal the Trade Center's demise, but instead shifts the focus to the Afghani government's policy of depriving women civil rights. The joke could be taken two ways. One could see, ironically, a visit by a group of college-educated woman as a social threat comparable to that of a nuclear attack, so the joke threatens to visit on the Taliban what American males have had to endure for years.37 But the messages commenting on this cartoon clearly show a more humane interpretation: that the freedom of women in this country represents a strength comparable to traditional male- focused military weaponry.
Certainly this implication was highlighted in a traditional joke that appeared and circulated at exactly the same time. It was, like some other items, a parody of a previous frequently-forwarded message, often called "Light-a- Candle Friday," which encouraged Americans to show solidarity by lighting a candle outside at some set time. Such a message had circulated in the immediate wake of the attacks:.
Friday Night at 7:00 p.m. EST step out your door, stop your car, or step out of your establishment and light a candle. We will show the world that Americans are strong and united together against terrorism. Please pass this to everyone on your e-mail list. We need to reach everyone across the United States quickly. e-mail, Thu, 13 Sep 2001 09:44:07 -0400
In fact, a nationwide vigil was held at 7 PM on Friday, September 14, and one element involved communal lighting of candles. But because this specific date was not included in messages like the above, it continued to circulate during the following weeks, often with the added information that NASA planned to photograph the light of the candles from outer space.38
In due time, "Light-a-Candle Friday" was adapted as a parody, which I'll call "Naked Women Friday," in which American females were encouraged to shed their clothes and run around outside, supposedly to deter terrorism. One might think that this, like previous jokes, would circulate in male- dominated conduits, but in fact the item appears to have appealed to women as well as to men. One of the first message boards on which this appeared was rec.arts.marching.drumcorps, under the heading "Re: American Women Unite!" This was posted by a participant named Catherine, forwarded to her on e-mail by her friend Nancy, who in turn credited her sister Shirley. She prefaced the piece by saying, " If you got the E-mail about everyone going out and lighting a candle at the same time, you ought to find this kind of funny. Just a little humor...thought you might enjoy this one!"
American Women Unite-it's for a good cause.
The President has asked that we unite for a common cause. Since the hard line Islamic people can not stand nudity, and consider it a sin to see a naked woman that is not their wife, tonight at 7:00, all women should run out of their house naked to help weed out the terrorists. The United States appreciates your efforts, and applaudes you. God bless America.
[several lines left blank here] Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
(you may use Hawaii time)39 rec.arts.marching.drumcorps: September 27, 2001 18:53:00 PST
Catherine, the forwarder, added to the message, "Good Grrrl!40 KEEP ON TRUCKIN' !! " This item soon became a popular item on the Internet and soon after appeared in a number of slightly altered forms, one of which added a version of Deering's "Ultimatum to the Taliban" to the message:
Demand to the Taliban: Stop the nonsense immediately, or we'll send all your women to college!!
The President has asked that we unite for a common cause. Since the hard line Muslim Terrorists41 cannot stand nudity, and consider it a sin to see a naked woman that is not their wife, tonight at 7:00 PM and thereafter everyday at noon, all women should run out of their houses and places of work NAKED to help weed out the terrorists. The United States appreciates your efforts, and applauds you. Pass on to all your girlfriends! It's an order. alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk: September 28, 2001 14:10:19 PST
The emergence of this parody at the end of September and the beginning of October, clearly marks the beginning of a more general Second Wave of American humor that did not build on the militaristic, revenge-oriented humor of the first wave. Rather, it seems to have marked the first stages in a return to normalcy, indicating that the mere presence of liberated women, sans clothing, sans weapons, would be enough to deter further acts of terrorism. It was relatively short-lived, possibly mimicking the intense but short-lived emergence of the contemporary legends it parodies ("Alligators in the Potty," another legend parody to be discussed later, also had a relatively brief lifespan.) Still, its popularity suggests (as one of my students commented of this joke) that the emotional armor worn by Americans in the immediate wake of the attacks was increasingly unnecessary and even ridiculous, and that both males and female could begin casting it off, both at work and at home.42
Table 4: Popularity of "Naked Women Friday"
Month/Day 2001 Naked women Friday September 27 7 September 28 20 September 29 9 September 30 10 October 1 10 October 2 11 October 3 7 October 4 3 October 5 4 Allied air attacks on Afghanistan began October 7 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
Certainly this move away from a militaristic atmosphere affected the progress of the joke that was perhaps the most widely circulated during this second wave, which I will call "Osama's Sex Change." The core idea emerged, like "Ultimatum to the Taliban," during the First American Wave and likewise did not become popular until some weeks later. In fact, the first form appeared in a hyperpatriotic atmosphere similar to "George W. Bush's Speech," as part of a lengthy, politically incorrect message cross-posted on alt.politics.nationalism.white, and alt.niggers. It began:
Once Osama bin Laden has been captured and tried, some judge or jury will eventually have to decide on an appropriate form of punishment for the cowardly supercrimes which he has committed. It should be obvious that all existing forms of capital punishment are far too lame and humane to ever possibly fit the crime. . . . Here are a few appropriate methods of slow punishment which I have thought of that might be more appropriate than modern day methods of execution. See how many more you can add to this list.
Some of the suggestions involved literal forms of torture, such as "Feed[ing] his body slowly into a jet engine.43... or a wood chipper," while others, like "Paint[ing] him white and put[ting] him in a cage full of niggers" patently appealed to the racist sentiments of this narrow conduit. Demonizing bin Laden, from this point of view, was no less wrong than demonizing Others in this country, as the Canadian online journal quoted earlier suggests. However, it was the following suggestion that seems to have entered a shadowy oral/virtual tradition to emerge later:
Give him a sex change operation (without anesthesia) then put his body on public display in the streets of Kabul... it is said that over there, women have no status at all and that the Taliban has been rounding up all the widows and dumping them alive into mass graves. Perhaps the Taliban would oblige everyone and do the same to Osama bin Laden turned into a female. September 17, 2001 21:21:07 PST
This suggestion thus combined the two elements seen in visual humor of this First Wave: pedicating bin Laden (and so effeminizing him) and seeing him dead. Alan Dundes, commenting on rituals in which the loser in a feud is emasculated, then killed, comments, "it is evidently not enough, symbolically speaking, merely to kill an enemy . . . [and] the defeated individual is not just emasculated he is specifically feminized" (1997: 35; italics are his). Thus this suggestion fits into a broad range of masculine aggressive behavior documented by Dundes, in which the ultimate revenge involves (literally or symbolically), castrating one's enemy, turning him into a woman, and then killing him/her.
But as the suggestion developed on other message boards, people began to see that there were more fitting forms of revenge than simply killing him in increasingly technologized ways. A week later, a message on alt.security.terrorism said, "We should not kill bin Laden, he should be taken alive-- take him into custody and give him a forced sex change operation, with hormone shots, and force him to live his life out in prison as a woman" (September 24, 2001 14:44:08 PST). Hence, effeminizing Osama could be considered revenge enough, without resorting to military technology such as nuclear warfare. This idea immediately produced a series of enthusiastic responses from others who found it positively diabolical:
1. wow....very creative !! :) September 24, 2001 15:12:08 PST
2. There's a lot of hate in you boys. Keep up the good work. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
September 24, 2001 17:06:00 PST
3M. Satan feels like he died and went to heaven. September 24, 2001 17:43:01 PST
Gestated further in private conduits over yet another week, "Osama's Sex Change" emerged again at the beginning of October, now in a new context that presents it as the "perfect" revenge:
I have pondered long, over just what would be the best "Ultimate Revenge",...the most perfect punishment for Osama Bin Laden, once he has been found and captured alive? Should we kill him??? Nay, for then he merely becomes a martyr and a hero to the extremists. What we should do is to capture him alive, and then folks, after he has been convicted of all of his crimes, he should be sentence [sic] to this most perfect punishment. And what punishment is that, you ask? Why give that 'expletive deleted' a full blown sex change of course! Then send him back to Afghanistan, and force him to live out the rest of his sorry-aced [sic] life as a woman under the Taliban government, ... Whadda-y'all think about my idea, huh??? miami.general: October 01, 2001 14:16:06 PST
This version of the "sex change" idea for the first time argues that the hypermilitary response is self-defeating, since it simply answers one act of cruelty with another and invites yet another terrorist attack in a widening circle of violence. The appeal of this suggestion is that it turns bin Laden's own anti-democratic sentiments against him, both effeminizing him and making him live under the rules that Islamic extremists have themselves formulated. This form of the joke was further streamlined and emerged the following day in an explosively popular ecotype that began by challenging even more explicitly the militarism of existing "Osama jokes":
A creative solution. And it's peaceful! Re: Osama. Killing him will only create a martyr. Holding him prisoner will inspire his comrades to take hostages to demand his release. Offering a huge reward for his capture will only encourage him to give himself up so his cohorts can get the money.
And this version streamlines the suggestion, making the text more suitable for quick reading and forwarding in e-mail form:
The solution? Let the SAS, Seals or whatever covertly capture him, fly him to an undisclosed hospital and have surgeons quickly perform a complete sex change operation. Then we return 'her' to Afghanistan to live as a woman under the Taliban. rec.crafts.metalworking: October 03, 2001 12:46:27 PST
This version immediately provoked a series of accolades on the message boards where it appeared:
1M. I like it! Nooooo, I mean I REALLY LIKE IT!!!! This is the very best suggestion I've heard of, bar none, far and away the best on sooooo many levels. Just how do you to get him to continue the estrogen after he get's back? Ooooops, won't be needed, he won't be allowed to show his face in public, that is if he's not killed just for being a woman. Yep, I like it..... definately. October 03, 2001 13:12:11 PST
2M. Best one yet! Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
Loved it! Forwarded it to many friends. October 03, 2001 20:33:28 PST
3M. ROFLMAO [Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off].44 havn't laughed so much at one of these `getting boring now` Osama things for a long while October 04, 2001 02:45:07 PST
continue
Page Notes
35.As rated by the appearance of "Taliban bingo," a regular inclusion in these lists and the easiest joke to search for because of its relative textual stability.
36."Copyright 2001. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the artist."
37.Similarly, a recording circulated as an e-mail attachment later in October threatens to give the Taliban's phone number to a group of telemarketers, plaguing them with a host of nuisance phone calls.
38. This motif was already circulating orally on September 14; in fact, I helped spread it by mentioning it during a noon commemoration rally at my campus at Penn State Hazleton. See "Candle Power" http://www.snopes.com/rumors/candle.htm and "Candlelight Vigil to Be Photographed from Space" http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/blvigil.htm for other texts and discussion of this rumor.
39.Hawaii time is five hours earlier than East Coast time and two hours earlier than California time. Thus the joke apparently intended to encourage women to emerge several hours earlier than 7 PM proper when, at this season, deep twilight would have fallen and so a collective display of female anatomy would less effectively deter terrorism than it would during broad daylight hours. However, when it is 7 PM Hawaii time, on the East Coast it is actually five hours later (i.e., midnight). This line was omitted from later variants.
40.A common typographical designation for a liberated woman.
41.Italics are mine and indicate additions unique to this version.
42. A variation of this item re-emerged in November and circulated modestly through Jan.-Mar. 2002: "Consider this simple solution for the prevention of hijackings, which also would get the industry back on it's feet. Since men of Muslim religion are not allowed to look at naked women, we should replace all of our female flight attendants with strippers. Male Muslims would be afraid to get on planes for fear of seeing a naked lady and of course every business man in this country would start flying again in hope of seeing a naked lady. We 'd have no more hijackings and the airline industry would have record sales" (Best NEW Jokes of Nov 26, 2001. Today's New Jokes. Available: )http://www.top-greetings.com/A.py?R=20011126).
43. Cf. the addition in the "bin Laden" version of "George W. Bush's Letter," n. 17 above.
44. The highest accolade that experienced Internet users give to jokes.
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 4 :: Chapter 5 :: Page 8 :: Page 9 :: Page 10 ::Chapter 6 :: References Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 4 :: Chapter 5 :: Page 8 :: Page 9 :: Page 10 ::Chapter 6 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Five: The Second American Wave Page 10
The last response given above nicely identifies one of the reasons for this joke's relative popularity: it was visibly different in content and approach from the other jokes. The effeminism motif allowed it to appeal to masculine groups that had circulated materials (like "New WTC Design") offering to pedicate bin Laden, but the reference to the Taliban's sexist policies allowed it to appeal to liberal and female audiences as well, even as they recognized the castratory elements of it. Significantly, this early version, even though it circulated on a male-dominated message board, included a link to www.rawa.org, the website of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, an activist organization advocating for the return of gender equity in that country.
In an editorial titled, "We're All Afghans Now," Dr. Susan Block appealed to American leaders and the general public to support the goals of RAWA in negotiating a final government to replace the Taliban. However, even she found room to comment on this joke, which she called "a marvelous idea":
It's a joke, of course, but it rings with a delicious sense of sexual justice. Plus, it helps heal that awful castrated feeling so many of us Americans have felt since our biggest phallic buildings were so painfully cut down. In that sense, it's a sort of sick but somewhat therapeutic anti-terror vengeance fantasy. (Block 2001).
Dr. Block's comments show how "Osama's Sex Change" more than any other joke managed to elicit a genuinely national response to the threat posed by the terrorist attacks. It acknowledges the way in which the strike was seen, symbolically, as a thrust against the nation's masculinity and concedes that the proper response is to do the same to the nation's assailants. At the same time, it holds out the possibility that a limited revenge on Osama could avoid the consequences of the firestorm promised in much of the other WTC humor. Thus the solution is both "creative," and a fresh way of achieving the desired revenge, and "peaceful," in sparing lives on both sides. It fulfills masculine fantasies, but also speaks to feminine outrage at the sexual repression that the Taliban represent. While earlier versions spoke to the political concerns specific to their message boards, the streamlined ecotype could be seen as humorous by a wide range of conduits and so was designed to spread rapidly, which it did, peaking in popularity only two days after this version first appeared and remaining popular from October 4 to October 10 but continuing to show up regularly through December. Indeed, this joke proceeded to become the single most popular WTC verbal humor item on the message boards surveyed, eventually showing up on 629 sites, over five times as many appearances as the "Osama Joke Lists."
Table 5: Popularity of "Osama Sex Change" Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
Month/Day 2001 Osama's Sex Change September 17 1 September 18 1 September 19 September 20 September 21 September 22 September 23 1 September 24 1 September 25 September 26 September 27 September 28 September 29 September 30 October 1 1 October 2 4 October 3 11 October 4 21 October 5 36 October 6 35 Allied air attacks on Afghanistan began October 7 October 7 19 October 8 24 October 9 19 October 10 21 October 11 14 October 12 4 October 13 2 October 14 6 October 15 5 October 16 6 October 17 3 October 18 6 Allied ground action began in Afghanistan on October 19 October 19 3 October 20 2
The last really popular WTC joke in the Second Wave appeared just as the popularity of "Osama jokes" was beginning to wane. Like "Naked Women Friday," it took its origins from an contemporary legend, dubbed "Mall-o ween" by the virtual observer Barbara Mikkelson,45 which emerged explosively on the Internet on October 9-10. This legend warned that Afghani terrorists had planned two strikes, one targeting airplanes on Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
September 11, the other striking at shopping malls on Halloween. For folklorists, the most interesting part was the contextual envelope in which the legend was enclosed, which was a virtual catalogue of "contemporary legend" markers:
I think you all know that I don't send out hoaxes and don't do the reactionary thing and send out anything that crosses my path. This one, however, is a friend of a friend and I've given it enough credibility in my mind that I'm writing it up and sending it out to all of you. My friend's friend was dating a guy from Afghanistan . . . [text of legend follows]
This is not an email that I've received and decided to pass on. This came from a phone conversation with a long-time friend of mine last night. alt.folklore.urban: October 09, 2001 21:23:18 PST
As I noted in my work on camp folklore in the early 1980s, the assertion "this is not a hoax" is widely interpreted as a signal that what follows is precisely that, an invitation to play with traditional motifs in a way that resembles a real panic but is in fact a script with a foregone conclusion. Ostensive ordeals, in other words, take factors that would inspire genuine fear in an unstructured setting and impose a narrative logic on them. In the camp setting, the telling of stories about local monsters prepared campers to expect that someone impersonating this boogieman would appear during one of the hikes, and allowed them to experience the event as an intense, realistic drama, rather than a life-threatening attack on them by a manic (2001: 175). In the case of the "Mall-o-ween" legend, real cases of anthrax transmitted by bioweapons concealed in mailed enveloped peaked just at this time, and it seems likely that the contemporary legend circulated as a creative means of bringing such fears to a term. That is, localizing the next terrorist attack on Halloween and at a mall took a situation widely seen as out of Americans' control and reduced it to the status of an urban legend that focused the threat and so communicated the idea that it would be relegated to the past within a very few days. In fact, little real panic occurred over Halloween, and the holiday passed with no terrorist incident.
Certainly this seems to be the theme developed in Alligators in the Potty, the final widespread joke in the Second Wave. Like "Mall-o-ween," it predicts a terrorist attack on a fast-approaching date. Indeed, it opens with added urgency, since the earlier legend, emerging on October 10, gave its audience a full three weeks to decide if the warning was credible. The new parody legend, emerging October 16, gave its readers less than two weeks to decide if the CIA was correct in saying that alligators would rise out of toilet bowls on October 28 and bite unsuspecting Americans on the ass. Again, however, the verbal text gave far more space to the contextual envelope of the warning, clearly carrying the "friend-of-a-friend" envelope of "Mall-o-ween" into the realm of burlesque:
I usually don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom worker who has a friend who's drug dealer sells drugs to another mailroom worker who works in the CIA building. He apparently overheard two guys talking in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked. So it must be true.
A further satirical twist appears in some early texts, which add a tag clearly cut-and-pasted from an authentic governmental or corporate transmission: Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. alt.wisdom October 16, 2001 16:54:21 PST
Needless to say, the parody envelope and the authentic warning not to distribute the warning combined to make this joke one of the most popular WTC items during the latter part of the month, peaking in popularity only two days after its first appearance and remaining popular for a week. Interestingly, as "Alligators in the Potty" premiered on message boards, responses showed that it appealed strongly to female readers. On alt.wisdom, one of the first boards on which it appeared, Cher, the woman who contributed it, was showered with a series of virtual praise from other women for finding and sharing the item:
1F. OMG [Oh, my God] I am so stealing this and passing it on. LOL thanks Cher. --Carol October 16, 2001 16:57:52 PST
2F. Tee hee, Cher!!! :) October 16, 2001 17:16:58 PST
3F. LOL --Patti October 16, 2001 17:18:18 PST
4F. :-) --Karen October 16, 2001 17:25:49 PST
5F. LOL --Sharon October 16, 2001 17:57:17 PST
6F. thats funny. Got to send this to some others --nancy October 16, 2001 19:07:53 PST
7F. I can't find this at http://www.snopes.com.46 This MUST BE TRUE! Thanks Cher!
8F. :) ~Teresa :) October 17, 2001 06:12:54 PST
9F. WHEW !!! Thanks Cher...NO POOPING for me, guess I'll be trotting outside... October 17, 2001 06:35:53 PST
Interestingly, all the respondents signed themselves as fellow females, and their messages are a virtual lexicon of Internet icons of praise: LOL [laugh out loud], the "smiley" [ :-) ], the sign for "grin"
A similar reaction came when Nancy, a participant on alt.support.crohns- colitis, posted the joke on the same day. Her message began (somewhat defensively), "I live close enough to have seen the WTC's fall....and am well aware of all the scares out there as my husband is a police officer," but she continued tellingly, "so I welcomed this mail. So for all us CDer's and UC'ers.....enjoy!" (October 16, 2001 18:50:58 PST). Again, the contributor was rewarded with thanks and appreciative praise, this time from both male Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
and female participants:
1F. Nancy, thanks for the laugh!! Take Care, : ) --Sherry October 17, 2001 03:05:37 PST
2M. Nancy-- Must be a true story. The source is impeccable. Maybe it's a crock (adile)
After this response, Nancy returned to the board to comment, "You know....at this point an alligator on my ass would be the least of problems! LOL" (October 17, 2001 06:42:15 PST) and quickly received the reply, "Ain't that the truth Nancy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Seems so "trivial" doesn't it?? ;) --Hugs, Linda" (October 17, 2001 07:37:48 PST). On a message board dealing with the challenge of living with Crohn's Disease (CD) and Ulcerative Colitis (UC), of course, an alligator attached to one's backside is a good metaphor for the effects of these chronic intestinal disorders.
More importantly, the joke minimizes the importance of rumors about terrorist attacks, and so by extension the danger of further terrorist attacks themselves. A reader on another message board commented sardonically that this warning "Seems to be as reliable as a lot of the other 'facts' reported in 'mainstream' media in the past month" (alabama.sports.alabama: October 16, 2001 18:00:31 PST).
Table 6: Popularity of "Alligators in the Potty"
Month/Day 2001 Alligators in the potty October 16 10 October 17 18 October 18 25 Allied ground action began in Afghanistan on October 19 October 19 17 October 20 6
In a month when state and national officials had repeatedly announced the need to guard against an imminent repeat of the 9/11 strike, such comments indicate that many Americans found the need for continued vigilance counterproductive. Ironically, during the same period the American government moved in a directly opposite path, beginning air bombardment on October 7 and ground fighting on October 19. In addition, the sharp peak of this item's popularity at the precise moment when the allied attack shifted to ground action also suggests an implicit resistance to military solutions. This joke and others in the Second American Wave document the increasing rate at which Americans shifted away from militarism as their primary response to the terrorist attacks.
This is not to say that the "Osama jokes" ceased to circulate: indeed, they still exert their influence from a multitude of well visited websites. But as October wore on, the Second Wave suggested that the primary problem was not Osama bin Laden but the protracted war of jitters that the government's policies was doing little to calm. Thus the jokes moved away from celebrating military might, combined with male-specific obscenity and ethnic slurring and toward a recognition that there were other important problems in society besides the threat of renewed terrorism. The primary creative impetus of American folk humor, that is, was channeled into jokes Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 5
that implied that warfare abroad and constant alertness at home were increasingly irrelevant. The path humor took suggests an increasing split between official policy and Americans' sentiments, even as public polls continued to suggest near unanimous approval of war policies. continue
Page Notes
45. See http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/mallrisk.htm for a sample text and history.
46.See n. 45. Mikkelson, the webmaster of this well-known website debunking urban legends, did later post a tongue-in-cheek reference to this parody.
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New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 5 :: Chapter 6 :: Page 11 :: Page 12 :: Chapter 7 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Six: The Move to Closure Page 11
5. The Move to Closure (October 10-30, 2001).
One prediction I had made was that joking would be especially popular early in October (a prediction that we have seen fulfilled) and that it would disappear by the end of the month. Interestingly, the last half of this prediction proved wrong: in fact joking continued throughout the month and to some extent into November, though with less of the emergent flare of some of the jokes surveyed. It remains to look at two examples of these late-appearing jokes. The first, which I'll title "Bin Workin," was the single piece of humor that represented an international response to the WTC attacks. Growing out of an ethnic quip that circulated in Australia as early as October 6, the joke proved extraordinarily successful. An ecotype appearing on October 7 reached virtually all English-speaking countries within the week following and remains in circulation at the time of this article.
In origin it grew out of a tradition of anti-ethnic humor, in this case directed at Australian Aboriginals, in much the same way as the British Wave used details from the American terrorist strike to perpetuate colonial stereotypes of the Irish. Unlike jokes such as "Killing the Afghans" and "Hijacking the Blimp," however, this joke proved flexible enough to adapt to ethnic Outsiders in many English-speaking countries. Thus on some level it was not about the World Trade Center tragedy at all, but rather about a multitude of local conflicts that involved power struggles with Others. In essence, it argued that the known Outsider (whose identity shifted as the joke was relocalized) was a more immediate threat than the unknown Islamic terrorist. More interestingly, the joke tended to lose its anti-ethnic edge as it spread, with the role of the potential (if incompetent) terrorist shifting from ethnic Other to members of the group among whom the joke was distributed. Like the Second American Wave, the joke's popularity implied an attitude that minimized the danger of terrorists and suggested that we should rather stop focusing on the aftermath of the WTC tragedy and return to work on less dramatic but more important problems in one's home community.
The earliest form of this joke appeared on Australian-based message boards debating local politics. The immediate context was a dispute over the current government's policy of providing welfare and public support to Aboriginals, whose traditional lifestyle is under pressure from modernizing influences. In a paper surveying these contemporary pressures, Alison Fettell and Linda Pfeiffer (2002) noted that the Palm Island colony, on the northeastern coast of North Queensland, had recorded an unusually high number of crimes of violence and disorderly conduct, nearly all of which were alcohol related. In addition, domestic violence was also commonly associated with drunkenness, and, overall, they found, official records "highlight an extraordinary rate of violence occurring under the influence of alcohol." Other news releases on the problem note the problematic incidence of Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
tobacco, petrol sniffing, and other forms of drug abuse among young people in this colony ("Sexual Abuse" 2002).
While the official governmental policy is to support public service efforts in such colonies, a growing number of white nationalists have attacked such efforts in much the same terms as conservatives have assailed welfare policies for ethnic minorities in the United States. The most notorious of these groups, One Nation, is an extreme white nationalist party led for a time by Pauline Hanson, an outspokenly nativistic member of the Australian Parliament.47From this white nationalist point of view, Aboriginals are "dole bludgers," habitual loafers who avoid work in order to live off of unemployment benefits.48 Hence, the following set of quips, posted on alt.ozdebate, under the heading "Terrorist attack on Australia," made perfect sense to many Australians.
1. Did any of you guys hear about the terrorist attack in central Australia ??? 6 Aboriginals hijacked a tour bus and drove it into Ares Rock.49;) October 06, 2001 15:48:53 PST
2. Police have since released the names of two of the terrorists - bin Smokin and bin Drinkin. An accomplice, bin Workin, could not be found. October 06, 2001 16:45:16 PST
3M. He was later found with bin Asleepallday. But the kicker was, they were aiming for the Alice Springs pub!! October 06, 2001 17:14:59 PST
Smoking and drinking are commonly mentioned together as besetting sins of Aboriginals, and the improbability of finding them working, or earning a living, is a commonplace among Australian white nationalist propaganda. In addition, the "bin" + verb or noun is a commonly reported feature of Aboriginal dialect,50 and in subsequent days several other Australians played on the similarity between the "bin" (= Arabic "son of") and the common substitution of "bin" for "have/has been" in Aboriginal dialect:
They're here, all right. bin Laden's cousins have infiltrated aboriginal communities. ASIO51 operatives, on the lookout for these 'cousins', have been putting these questions
anyone here bin Drinkin anyone here bin Stealin anyone here bin Jailed
whole communities have stepped forward. aus.politics: October 12, 2001 02:57:07 PST
and
Did u hear the FBI surrounded an Australian Hotel, they had identified 3 aboriginal associates of Bin Laden. They arrested Bin Sniffin' and Bin Drinkin'. They are still searching for Bin Workin'. ("Guestbook": October 13, 2001).
However what became the most frequently forwarded ecotype of this joke first appeared on October 7 in a thread titled "Terrorists" posted on a Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
Australia & New Zealand forum of the Travel & Immigration Discussion & Answers message board sponsored by BritishExpats.com:
TERRORISTS FOUND ON PALM ISLAND Latest news reports advise that a cell of 4 terrorists has been operating on Palm Island in North Queensland. Police advised earlier today that 3 of the 4 have been detained. The Northern Regional Police Commissioner stated that the terrorists Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin and Bin Fightin have been arrested on immigration issues. The Police advise further that they can find no one fitting the description of the fourth cell member, Bin Workin, on the island. Police are confident that anyone who looks like Workin will be very easy to spot in the community.52 October 07, 2001 19:13
Interestingly, the joke was challenged by another contributor, who found it unfunny and argued that "there has to be a clear line of respect for the ones who have lost somebody in these attacks" (October 18, 2001 11:58). This led the person who originally posted the joke to explain its intentions in some detail:
There is absolutely no reference in the attached joke, to any attack. The only reference to recent world events is to the name of a well- known terrorist. The humour is derived not from the attacks of September 11, but from the bludgers in various coastal communities in Australia. I suppose you also oppose jokes that have references to cars, cigarettes, heart attacks and soldiers in general, all of which kill *far* more people worldwide *each year* than terrorism? If not, then I suggest you should be consistent. If yes, then *please* lighten up!! October 19, 2001 02:16
This response makes it clear that, in the eyes of this forwarder, the joke's objective was not intended to make a specific comment on the American terrorist attacks, but to appropriate details from it to demonize a local non- European population. In essence, the joke suggests that it is time to stop paying attention to the American tragedy and reorient oneself to pressing issues close to home. The poster's reference to "soldiers in general" picks up the anti-militarism that we have seen in the British Wave, but the other causes of death--"cars, cigarettes, heart attack--are the kinds of "trivial" domestic problems on which the Second American Wave ultimately refocused attention.
These two elements--the desire to turn back to "business as usual" and the joke's applicability to other populations of ethnic Outsiders--made the joke funny in an international sense. Thus the joke could be easily adapted to a new situation and rerouted through many conduits, which explains the explosive speed with which the joke spread to other parts of the British empire and hence to North America. By October 9, the joke had circulated in both New Zealand and in the United Kingdom, where "Nowhere Man" posted to rec.music.beatles a version localized in Liverpool but virtually identical to the Australian text:
Latest news reports claim that a cell of 4 terrorists has been operating in Merseyside, Liverpool. Police advised earlier today that 3 of the 4 have been detained. The Merseyside Regional Police Chief stated that the terrorists Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin and Bin Fightin have been arrested on immigration issues. The Police advise further that they can find no one fitting the Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
description of the fourth cell member, Bin Workin, in the area. Police are confident that anyone who looks like Workin will be very easy to spot in the community. The weak link apparently was Bin Wankin53 who spouted his guts out when in custody. October 09, 2001 11:22:44 PS
The early appearance of a British version of "Bin Workin" raises the question of whether it was in fact Australian in origin, or if it had originated independently in both countries. To be sure, punning on "bin" + verb is possible in many English dialects, and a number of not-very-successful American quips had already attempted to play with Osama bin Laden's name. He had already been called, for instance, "Osama bin Hidin'"54 or, particularly in captions to cybercartoons, as "Osama bin Lovinit" (a pornographic image showing him committing oral sex on a camel) or "Osama bin Partyin" (smoking a joint). As we have noted, one item on the "Osama Jokes" referred to his corpse as "Osama bin Rottin." However, the many verbatim correspondences in the two texts quoted above make it clear that the most frequently circulated ecotype could only have originated once. And the joke continued to appear on Australian message boards in variant forms; for instance, a week later this text was posted in an online journal kept by a resident of Perth:
TERRORISM IN AUSTRALIA The media haven't got the details yet, but I have it on good authority that an early morning raid by the Federal Police has caught three aboriginal terrorists. Bin Smokin and Bin Drinkin were taken into custody along with Bin Stealin. A fourth terrorist, Bin Workin, could not be found anywhere and is believed now to possibly not exist.55
The presence of such independent Aussie versions (and the apparent absence of recomposed versions from other countries) shows that the joke initially circulated in oral context, like the items in the British Wave that appeared in many textually variant forms. By contrast, all the "Bin Workin" variants localized outside of Australia contain language found in the October 7 "Palm Island" text. This makes it almost certain that this Aussie version of the joke was the model for all the subsequently circulated international versions.56
Within the next day, versions were posted adapting the Australian text to settings in Glasgow and in Newfoundland, Canada, and on October 11 the first United States version appeared. The joke proved easy to adapt to American situations, simply replacing the image of the ignorant Aussie aborigine with an equally stereotypical Black image:
This was just on CNN NEWS at 2:11PM: Latest news reports advise that a cell of five terrorists has been operating in the Harlem area. Police advised earlier today that four of the five have already been detained. The [...] Regional Police Commissioner stated that the terrorists: Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin, Bin Fightin and Bin Pimpin have already been arrested on immigration issues. The police advise further [etc.] e-mail, October 24, 2001 but dated "10/17/01" in the header.
While such versions are localized in non-Australian settings, it is significant that such phrases as "Regional Police Commissioner" and "immigration issues" are retained, even though no such position exists in American police forces and "immigration" refers to quite a different issue and ethnic conflict in this country. However, the notion that Others have "bin" doing improper things allowed those who passed it on to connect it with a large variety of local conflicts, as in a variant received in Columbus, Ohio: Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
Latest news reports advise that a cell of 5 terrorists has been operating in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Police advised earlier today that 4 of the 5 have been detained. Cincinnati Police Officials stated that the terrorists, Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin, Bin Lootin and Bin Fightin have been arrested on civil unrest issues. The Police advise further [etc.] e-mail: October 18, 2001 9:57 AM57
In this case we see the joke gradually being modified to fit American terminology: "police officials" sounds more authentic than "regional police commissioner," and "civil unrest" is a well-used term for Black/White conflicts. Localizing the joke in Cincinnati alludes to the bad reputation the city has gained over the past few years for Black/White racial riots over alleged police brutality. In particular, over Easter weekend 2001, several days of rioting and looting followed an incident when a white police officer (unnecessarily) shot and killed an unarmed African American resident of the predominantly Black neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine.58 continue
Page Notes
47. While many anti-aboriginal jokes exist in Australia, it is significant that both Hanson and One Nation have also provoked many political jokes. One such noted that "Pauline Hanson, Member of Parliament" was an anagram for "Alien bushmen fear rampant loonie MP." See http://www.zip.com.au/~rocket/hanson/index.htm
48. See "Australian Words." Available: http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/bludger
49. More properly, the Australian landmark Ayers Rock; Alice Springs is the nearby tourist hub.
50. Compare this typical line from the "Aboriginal musical" Bran Nue Dae by Jimmy Chi and Kuckles: "I bin away for 20 years now. I bin drovin' I bin drinkin' I bin Christian. I bin everything but now its time I gotta go home before I die." [Available: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/bran.htm.]
51. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Australia's governmental national security service.
52. An identical text was also posted the same day on rec.travel.australia+nz: October 07, 2001 11:13:57 PST.
53. Here, and in all subsequent texts of this joke, I have italicized additions unique to each version. In both British and Australian slang, "wanking" means "masturbating," although "wanker" is more broadly used as a pejorative term for a person, parallel to "jerk" (more fully, "jerk-off," or "masturbator.") It is therefore impossible to tell if his unique line came from an Australian version or was added to the British version.
54. "There's a large sign here next to a flag (which are everywhere) that says 'Osama bin-hidin'!' heh. It just sorta made me giggle" (alt.hi.are.you.cute: September 16, 2001 05:10:01 PST).
55. Sunday, 14 October 2001 - 7:29 PM. Available: http://mark.figjamland.com/main.html.
56. Of course a well documented text from before October 7 would demolish this argument. I would be pleased to hear from anyone who can attest to an Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
earlier version of this joke that circulated outside of Australia.
57. The original forwarder quipped, "Well, you can be sure you won't find Bin Hidden."
58. For background, see http://www.emergency.com/2001/cincyriots2001.htm, and Singer 2002.
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New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 5 :: Chapter 6 :: Page 11 :: Page 12 :: Chapter 7 :: References
Making a Big Apple Crumble:
Bill Ellis
Chapter Six: The Move to Closure Page 12
Similarly, when the joke was posed on rec.sport.pro-wrestling it was adapted to another American community in crisis. It began with this unique adaptation of the Australian text:
[AP] Pueblo, Colorado. Latest news reports advise that a cell of 4 terrorists have been employed for the last year (since returning to the facility from a prolonged work stoppage, that must now be investigated as possibly having terrorist connections) as union steelworkers in a eastern Pueblo's Steel Plant. Police advised earlier today that 3 of the 4 have been detained... [etc.] October 12, 2001 15:28:25 PST
This addition alludes to a long-standing dispute between the United Steelworkers of America and the management of the Rocky Mountain Steel Mills of Pueblo, Colorado. On October 3, 1997, the workers had called a strike, and the company immediately hired some 600 non-union employees to replace them, an illegal move. During the 3-month strike that followed, violent clashes frequently took place between the picketing union strikers and the "scab" employees who crossed their lines. When the strike was called off, the union filed a complaint asking the National Labor Relations Board to order the displaced workers reinstated and given full back pay. At the time of this joke, the suit was still pending, so the steelworkers had, in fact, not "been working" for some time but, to many observers' disgust, were nonetheless hoping to receive full pay for their idleness. The joke variant shows a clear anti-union slant, in fact calling for an investigation their picket line activities as being a form of terrorism.
However, as the joke spread, it began to lose this anti-ethnic edge. The first American version began:
From Boeing security: Latest news reports advise that a cell of 4 terrorists have been operating at the Boeing Renton site. Police advised earlier today that 3 of the 4 have been detained. Boeing security stated that suspected terrorists Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin, and Bin Loafin have been arrested on immigration issues. The police advise further . . . [etc.] misc.survivalism Oct. 11, 2001 21:02:21 PST
This too referred to labor problems, in this case Boeing's announced plans to lay off 30,000 of its employees, beginning at the start of October, an event that caused widespread concern at its main commercial manufacturing plant at Renton. One notes, particularly, that "Bin Fightin," one of the usual suspects in most variants of the joke, has been replaced with "Bin Loafin," which softens the negative image of the alleged "terrorists." Hence the joke Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
implicitly referred to employees who had received their pink slips, and so would have no alternative but to change from Bin Workin to Bin Sleepin, Bin Loafin, etc. And as we see the item appearing in joke-swapping sessions on message boards, we see that those who adapted it and responded to it were not necessarily in league with white nationalist groups, even in the joke's homeplace of Australia. When it was posted on aus.sport.rugby-league, details had already been altered to make members of the message board the potential terrorists, not the Others:
Ocker59 police have confirmed a group of 4 terrorists have been located in New South Wales. . . . The terrorists, masquerading as Australian rugby league professionals -- Bin Sleepin, Bin Drinkin and Bin Fightin -- have been arrested on keeping the peace issues.... October 10, 2001 02:45:16 PST
And the response that this joke, even on an Aussie-based message board, showed that the "Ocker" (i.e., extreme nationalist) factions, not demonized ethnic Others, were the butt of the humor in this version, and that the sleepin', drinkin' and fightin' ruggers were implicitly the heroes.
1M. In other news a group of One Nation members have broken into the Lost Dogs Home and killed all the Afghans. October 10, 2001 03:36:25 PST
2M. I also hear they took over the Sydney Hilton & executed the Bed linen. October 11, 2001 00:17:42 PST
As a final development in the joke's progress, as its initial popularity was beginning to wind down, a further recomposition of it made the identification of the "terrorists" and the readers of the joke even more explicit. Evidently done by a British humorist (as "Safety Council" is a term more familiar in the UK than in the US) the warning now targets "our office" as the place where bin Sleepin and his associates are at large:
From Safety Council. We've been notified by Building Security that there have been 4 suspected terrorists working at our office. Three of the four have been apprehended. Bin Sleepin, Bin Loafin, and Bin Drinkin have been taken into custody. Security advised us that they could find noone fitting the description of the fourth cell member, Bin Workin, in the office. Police are confident that anyone who looks like he's Bin Workin will be very easy to spot. alt.support.depression.manic: October 20, 2001 00:58:36 PST
This in turn became the dominant ecotype, replacing the "Palm Island" version within days. It too was easily adapted to local office concerns, as seen in this version that appeared (like "Alligators in the Potty") on alt.wisdom:
We've been notified by Building Security that there have been 11 suspected terrorists working at our office. Ten of the eleven have been apprehended. Bin Sleepin, Bin Loafin, Bin Chattin, Bin Gossipin, Bin Leanin, Bin Surfin, Bin Gripin, Bin Smokin, Bin Eatin, and Bin Drinkin have been taken into custody. Security advised us that they could find no one fitting the description of the eleventh cell member, Bin Workin, in the office. Security Guards are confident that anyone who looks like Bin Workin will be very easy to spot.
AJ 60 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
October 23, 2001 17:38:25 PST
Like "Alligators in the Potty," this too produced a roar of virtual laughter, expressed in a variety of traditional ways.
1F. ROFL [rolling on the floor laughing] AJ! Joanne October 23, 2001 18:03:06 PST
2M. AJ, Now that is funny!!! LOL! Cy :) October 23, 2001 21:43:07 PST
3F. AJ, ya scared me! :) October 23, 2001 18:04:12 PST
4. LOL Sounds like where I work. PJ October 23, 2001 19:38:40 PST
5F. Crap I'm busted! Tori October 23, 2001 20:39:24 PST
6F. ROFL !!! October 24, 2001 05:31:35 PST
7F. LOL :) ~Teresa :) October 24, 2001 07:14:20 PST
8. That's a good one! October 24, 2001 09:52:22 PST
Most interesting is "Tori's" comment, "Crap I'm busted," which implies that he is willing to admit that he is one of the alleged terrorists rather than the elusive "bin Workin." In this form the joke now seems to have entered a new realm of officelore, the original allusions to lazy, crime-prone Aboriginals now fully domesticated into the traditional stereotypes of the workplace.
This development paralleled (and in part reinforced) other items in the Second American Wave of jokes, which marked most Americans' willingness to reach closure to their shock over the attacks and return to "business as usual." None did so more clearly than the item I'll label "Knitting an Afghan." Like other WTC jokes, it seems to have circulated quietly as a quasi- improvised quip several weeks before it circulated widely. On the very active American message board alt.current-events.wtc-explosion, for instance, one participant complained about the way in which airport security officials were scrupulously frisking passengers, looking for anything that could be construed as a weapon. "I talked to my mother today who has a friend going overseas," he continued, "who is trying to find knitting needles to use on the plane that won't be considered a weapon. What a strange thing for an old lady to have to worry about!" (September 27, 2001 21:22:39 PST ) . "They are probably afraid she will knit an Afghan," a respondent commented, provoking a series of appreciative and supportive remarks (September 28, 2001 09:20:06 PST). Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
This pun, like the one in "Killing the Afghans," implicitly defines the response to terrorism as more of a problem than the risk of hijacking itself. And like other jokes it seems to have spread quietly and orally, coming up periodically in virtual conversations complaining about airlines security measures. A week later, during a similar thread on triangle.general, one person remarked, "I wonder how my wife's going to be able to knit on the plane now. My current thought is wondering how much trouble we would have been in had a security guard tried to confiscate my wife's knitting needles. (her knitting bag probably holds 10 to 20 pairs (not including circular and double pointed)" (October 05, 2001 13:40:38 GMT). As before, the first reply featured the pun: "There is a clear and present danger that she would knit an afghan while on the plane" (October 08, 2001 08:37:31 PST). And it did not take long before people began creating their own reasons for introducing the pun into conversations, thus turning this conversational quip into a self-contained joke. The first context in which I saw this happen was, appropriately enough, the list rec.crafts.textiles.needlework:
A friend mentioned to me today that she'd heard from someone who'd had her knitting needles confiscated before boarding an airplane. Apparently officials were afraid she'd knit an Afghan. :)) October 11, 2001 10:46:34 PST
As with other Second Wave jokes, this inspired a series of virtual LOL's and other signs of praise, including the following unique quip:
Perhaps needling a taliban would be better??? Hm... would that a new style of needle lace -- with a lot of holes and vacant spaces??? Oh dear, I just couldn't resist (gasp! groan!)! :/ [wry "smiley"]. October 12, 2001 19:29:41 PST
Even with its self-critical and apologetic coda, this quip demonstrates the extent to which Americans now felt at liberty to comment on the catastrophic aftermath of the terrorist attacks. A joke that surely would have drawn angry and obscene responses a month before now was accepted as a normal part of the banter over this joke.
This form of "Knitting the Afghan" circulated modestly on private e-mail, but the most successful ecotype of this joke appeared a few days later in the form of an alleged news release:
This just in (from my sister-in-law): CHICAGO - The war on terrorism took a strange and sad turn Friday as airline officials at Ohare International Airport refused to let a 73 year old grandmother board her plane as she had in her possesion two, six inch knitting needles. Apparently authorities were worried that she may knit an Afghan. alt.shoe.lesbians.moderated: October 14, 2001 18:33:22 PST
From this point on, the joke in this form appeared regularly on message boards, and like "Bin Workin" it displayed not so much a brief cycle-like popularity but a slow, steady spread. By the end of the month, "Knitting an Afghan" was continuing to spread and find acceptance, and in fact during the next month it appeared on an additional 42 message boards. This "slow and steady" joke circulation was somewhat unexpected, given the way in which previous disaster humor had emerged, spread quickly, then disappeared from the scene. Perhaps this persistence of the risible moment indicates how deeply the event affected people, particularly Americans. More specifically, it signaled a growing dissatisfaction with official definitions of the crisis, particularly impatience with the extended security alerts and the way in which they targeted ordinary citizens as no better than associates of bin Laden. Increasingly, the popularity of such humor suggests, Americans Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
wanted to return to a state of being where traveling grandmothers and lazy office workers could be seen as ordinary people, not as potential terrorists.
Table 4: Popularity of "Bin Workin" and "Knit an Afghan"
Month/Day 2001 Bin Knit an Workin Afghan September 28 1 September 29 September 30 October 1 October 2 October 3 October 4 October 5 October 6 1 Allied air attacks on Afghanistan began October 7 October 7 2 October 8 1 October 9 5 October 10 7 October 11 9 1 October 12 12 1 October 13 4 October 14 6 2 October 15 2 2 October 16 5 4 October 17 5 6 October 18 3 6 Allied ground action began in Afghanistan on October 19 October 19 7 October 20 1 4 October 21 2 2 October 22 2 9 October 23 1 10 October 24 3 9 October 25 2 16 October 26 2 7 October 27 10 October 28 1 3 October 29 2 3 October 30 1 6 October 31 4
continue
Page Notes Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
59. Ocker: " a rough and uncultivated Australian male, often aggressively Australian in speech and manner." See "Australian Words." Available: http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/ocker.html.
60. I have again italicized additions unique to this version.
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Bill Ellis
Chapter Seven: Conclusion Page 13
This essay has been largely descriptive in focus and methodology, but these were shaped by the theory of joking and predictions that I published last fall as "Model." Thus it is now possible to sum up this survey in terms of how the data has confirmed or problematized these theoretical predictions.
1. This cycle will emerge, in a series of waves, after a period of latency.
A latent period of 17-22 days would follow the tragedy. A latent period certain did exist, during which joking was strongly and angrily repressed, even on message boards devoted to "tasteless" joking. However, this latent period lasted at best 7 days, and some jokes that later proved successful appeared on message boards within hours of the Towers' collapse. A risible moment, in which joking was accepted and appreciated, emerged about September 17-18 in both the United States and Great Britain.
The first joke cycles would reach public attention 17-22 days after the tragedy, or in early October 2001. This prediction was, however, confirmed. Up until October 1, most jokes circulated quietly, but after this point they increasingly spread outside their original conduits and were more frequently picked up by the professional media.
The jokes would emerge in more than one wave. Also confirmed, though I did not anticipate that there would be distinct American and British Waves of humor. However, the multi-wave phenomenon was clearly marked in the development of American humor, where a hyperpatriotic cycle was followed and surpassed by a subsequent cycle expressing doubts about the military response and longing for a return to normalcy.
The first would express denial, displaced anger, and desire to find and assign blame. This was certainly true of the First American Wave, whose material was characterized by militaristic sentiments and a focus on Osama bin Laden as scapegoat. Its language, at first violently obscene and politically incorrect, gradually moderated, but it always relied on ethnic stereotyping of Middle Easterners and displacing the most threatening images of the WTC attacks onto Others. This was also arguably true of the British Wave, where the most common jokes used the occasion of the American disaster to stereotype the Irish, a traditional colonial Other of the British and, until recently, a similar terrorist threat.
The second wave would focus more specifically on "gross" elements referencing clever ways to allude to violent death. Oddly, true only of Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
a few British jokes like "Big Apple Crumble." In fact, both the British Wave and the Second American Wave were characterized by a critique of militarism as an overreaction, along with a desire to put the event into the past and turn to local problems. This anomaly might result from the US Government's conspicuous appropriation of the normal psychological responses to grief to justify military operations in Afghanistan. This further development complicated Americans' response to the disaster and perhaps even delayed the process of healing. Hence many of the later jokes implicitly targeted militarism, rather than terrorism, as the problem needing to be resolved.
Joking will be most prevalent during the first two weeks of October 2001 and be essentially finished by the end of the month. The first part of this prediction was confirmed, since the most popular jokes peaked during the first and second weeks of October, with a decline in popularity from October 15 to the end of the month. This was particularly noted of jokes in the British Wave, which were rarely reported after October 20.
However "Alligators in the Potty" and "Bin Workin" both displayed considerable popularity during the third week, indicating that once the risible moment had been created, new jokes entering the scene also spread rapidly through existing conduits. And charting jokes like "Knitting an Afghan," past the October 20 point showed that a number of Third Wave WTC jokes and joke lists remained in circulation, though at a less active pace, until the end of the year.61 In fact, a number of items were still being generated, circulated on e- mail, and posted on message boards even in the first months of 2002. So joking certainly was not "essentially finished by the end of the month." As noted in the item above, this suggests that the American military operation complicated and delayed the process of reaching closure.
2. One or more of the common WTC jokes will reference the dominant visual images of the tragedy
WTC jokes would focus on the media-broadcast images of explosions and the ultimate collapses of the towers. This prediction proved partially true, though in ways that I did not anticipate. Jokes of the First American Wave focused on another chilling image: the head-on approach of an airplane being used as a weapon of war. Thus many of the cybercartoons and militaristic "anti-Arab" jokes in fact were means of domesticating media-broadcast images from the disaster: the ominous approach of the second plane to the South Tower, its impact in a fireball, and the reduction of the two towers to rubble. However, rather than directly referencing the World Trade Center, these jokes used fantasy revenge to visit the dominant images of the attacks on the scapegoat Osama bin Laden and ethnic Outsiders.
Since no dominant media image depicted the other attacks, few jokes would emerge for either the Pentagon or Flight 94 crashes. Confirmed: no jokes were recorded concerning Flight 94, and only a scattered few (mostly British) dealing with the Pentagon. In fact, the emic term for anti-terrorist humor in fact was "WTC jokes."
3. The WTC jokes will recycle elements from previous cycles.
Many of the same plays on words in previous disaster jokes would reemerge. True, but not to the extent predicted. Most of the obvious Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
recyclings from disaster humor were unsuccessful, while borrowings from Desert Storm humor did circulate widely. Again, the motion toward military actions in response may have led Americans to see the 9/11 events less as disaster and more as acts of war; hence the appropriate models for joking were found in cycles of military jokes rather than disaster jokes.
The WTC jokes will recycle ethnic stereotypes such as emerged in cycle jokes during the Persian Gulf conflict. Certainly true of the First American Wave and jokes that developed in its wake in October. "Osama jokes," both as one-liners and cybercartoons, proved to be one of the most important subtypes of WTC humor in America. Anti- Arab stereotypes also underlie "Osama's Sex Change," the single most popular item in the Second American Wave. This prediction was also certainly true of the British Wave, where traditional numbskull humor directed against the Irish proved to be the basis of many of the jokes circulated. In addition, "Bin Workin," the most widely distributed joke of this period, was popular precisely because it could be adapted to a wide variety of ethnic humor stereotypes.
Interestingly, though, the Second American Wave seems to have turned away from ethnic stereotypes toward the end, and even jokes that originated as slurs of outsiders ("Bin Workin") developed in ways that made them acceptable to a broader public that did not share the prejudices present in the first forms.
Several of the jokes would make allusions to other, more trivial televised materials, particularly advertising slogans and popular media figures. True only of the British Wave, which repeatedly referenced popular food chains such as KFC, TV programs like Ready Steady Cook and well known department stores such as Debenham's and Harrod's. Interestingly, the First American Wave referenced only President Bush (though in a way critical of his manufactured media image). Jokes in the both American Waves, instead, tended to reference existing Internet materials such as "America, the Good Neighbor" and "Mall-o-Ween." This might reflect the increasing dominance of the Internet in this country in spreading rumors and information about the disaster.
The Clintons would also appear in one or more of these jokes. A clear miss. The only joke that mentioned a Clinton was a single variant of "Naked Women Friday," in which the executive order was signed "William Jefferson Clinton."62
4. The dominant mode of distributing WTC jokes will be e- mail.
We can expect that they will circulate in lists of 3-8 brief texts, with little comment added by either the compiler or the forwarder. True only of the unsuccessful "WTC Jokes" of the Latent Period and the list of "Osama Jokes" generated late in the First American Wave. Neither the British Wave jokes nor the Second American Wave jokes generated lists.
In both Great Britain and in Australia, oral communication appeared to be the dominant means of generating and circulating jokes, with most of the jokes being recorded rather than spread by the Internet. By contrast, in the United States, complex texts proved the most successful items, but only after they had evolved into a frequently- forwardable ecotype. This indicates that the dominant form of joking Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
in the United States involved the generation and transmission of relatively unchanging Internet texts.
More males would compile and distribute these WTC joke lists than females. Given the nature of the data, this cannot as yet be quantified, since participants on message boards (particularly during the First American Wave) tended to use anonymizing self-descriptions such as "Sweet Revenge ([email protected])." My impression is that most of the participants in the First American Wave and the British Wave were in fact male, but this may reflect my own linguistic stereotypes. Certainly many of the participants in the Second American Wave identified themselves as female. But the data will need to be mined more carefully to draw conclusion in this area.
The increased internationalism of email conduits will produce topical humor that reflects a "community of the world." True only of "Bin Workin," the one joke that genuinely proved popular in a global sense. Otherwise, it is remarkable that both American Waves and the British Wave remained essentially distinct. Partly this may be because much of the humor relied on knowledge of language and historical events less familiar to residents of the other nation. Or perhaps the anti-militarism of the British Wave was both offensive to those participating in the First American Wave and incomprehensible to those sharing jokes in the Second American Wave. In any case, the failure of this prediction in the light of the virtual omnipresence of all these jokes raises questions about the resilience of cultural boundaries that deserve to be examined further in studies of Internet- mediated lore.
The Internet will impact the folk process in some significant ways. Amply confirmed. The Internet arguably made the development and spread of jokes more efficient and more dynamic. Particularly the unexpected proliferation of computer-generated cybercartoons was a phenomenon that will need much closer study in future. And the increasing use of Internet-specific acronyms and graphic devices to signal approval or disapproval of jokes creates a performance context analogous to that familiar to traditional fieldworkers documenting joke sessions with audio- or videotape.
It demonstrates that virtual communication is indeed a vehicle for making and maintaining cultural connections, in addition to oral, print, and broadcast media. In general, such a conclusion should not be surprising: Bronner (2002) reports several studies that found that use of e-mail and similar computer-mediated forms of communication in fact stimulated social bonding and allowed participants to maintain more relationships. Thus the suspicion of the Internet as isolating and destructive of "authentic" traditions seems just one more in a long list of nativistic stereotypes that have deterred the discipline from studying the phenomena that is actually most alive and most central to constructing a response to cultural stresses like the Trade Center attacks. Folklorists will hereafter need to take this important dimension of acculturation into consideration in considering any future events in which traditional culture play a major role. We also need to develop and refine methodology best tuned to do this. Further substantial discussion of such traditions, based on "virtual ethnography," is not only warranted but central to the progress of folkloristics.
Above all, the sheer omnipresence of relevant material, recorded in Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...Chapter 6
the heat of the moment but retrievable in calm reflection, creates an unparalleled opportunity for the computer-ready folklorist. This study, lengthy as it is, gives only the surface layer of this material and does not deal with the many other traditional responses to the September 11 tragedy. In particular, it deals only with English-language humor, although it is clear that similar joking must have existed in other important languages including Arabic. Much more needs to be written about folk responses to this national disaster, and about the ways in which both the raw, obscene burlesques and the more reflexive humor that followed interacted to help all the world's citizens adjust to a new landscape, revealed in the space opened up when we saw part of the Big Apple crumble.
Return to table of contents
Page Notes
61. "Taliban Bingo," for instance, a regular inclusion in "Osama joke" lists, was posted to eleven message boards in November and to ten more in December. Likewise, "Osama's Sex Change," the most popular of the Second Wave jokes, showed up on seventeen message boards in November and eleven more in December. As noted, "Knitting an Afghan" appeared on forty-two message boards in November, a rate nearly as strong as its popularity in October.
62. Osama bin Laden Jokes, Pictures and Banners. 2002. Sanfords.Net Pagan News and Information. Available: http://www.sanfords.net/Osama_bin_Laden_jokes/page_3.htm. Appropriately enough, one e-mail variant of the "Naked Flight Attendant" recomposition of this item (see n. 41 above) concluded " Now why didn't Congress think of this? If Clinton was still president it would now be a law" (March 18, 2002 9:01 AM; C: Norine Dresser).
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Appendix A: List of Proposed WTC Jokes
What does WTC stand for? - "What Trade Center?"
Q: Who are the fastest readers in the world? A: New Yorkers. Some of them go through 110 stories in 5 seconds
Q: Why do tourists flock to New York? A: It's a blast
The FBI has just identified the man who trained the hijackers: Dale Earnhardt.
At the World Trade Center restaurant, they offered three seating areas: smoking, non-smoking and burned beyond recognition.
They dont need any more volunteers to help at the WTC: they have found 5000 extra pairs of hands...
New York, New York, so good they hit it twice
American Airlines is now offering sight seeing tours of Manhattan!
Q: What is world most efficient airline? A: American Airlines, leave Boston 8:15...be in your office in New York 8:48!
What was the last thing going through Mr. Jones head sitting in 90th floor of the WTC ? - The 91st floor.....
What was the last thing going through Mr. Smiths head sitting in 110th floor of the WTC? - The radio mast...
America's new math: Q: Now how many sides to a Pentagon? A: 4
If one side of the Pentagon has collapsed, will it now be renamed "The Square"?
It should be renamed "The Penta-gone"
It should be renamed "Manflatten"
Famous last words: "Amal, was this tower here yesterday?"
American Airline's pilot announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, we'll be landing on New York in about 10 minutes....."
Well, this proves one thing.... New Yorkers really come together in a crunch Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
Today FBI concluded that New York had been hit by a U.F.M (unidentified flying muslim)
Q: What did one terrorist say to the other terrorist before boarding their respective airplanes? A: I slam, you slam, we all slam for Islam!
NEWSFLASH.... The WTC has been destroyed.... thousands of New York executives feared dead.... Hookers all across the city are in mourning.....
"25,000 sq. ft. Office space for rent. Recently renovated. New Air Conditioning unit. Needs TLC. Contact me at One World Trade Centre. 85th Floor, Room 18."
"It's a bird!" "It's a plane!" "It's.... Oh fuck, it IS a plane!"
Q: Why didn't Superman stop the planes from hitting the Trade Towers? A: Because he's a quadriplegic!
Q: What do you call a dust storm? A: Trade winds.
Q: What's the area code of the World Trade Center? A: 220 (two to zero).
Q: What should have tipped off the ticket sellers? A: When the terrorists asked if there was anything cheaper than one-way.
Q: What was the quickest escape time from the World Trade Center? A: Ten seconds flat.
Q: How long does it take to reach the ground from 107 stories up? A: The rest of your life
Q: Why are police and firemen New York's finest? A: Because now you can run them through a sieve.
Optimism, as you fall past the 20th floor you shout "I'm not hurt yet"
How many New Yorkers does it take to change a light bulb? God knows, they keep jumping out the window when it gets too hot
What's the number one drink served on United Airlines? Flaming Manhattan
What music do they play in the elevator in the WTC? Jump and It's Raining Men
Floor 106...... you ARE the weakest link.... goodbye....
What color were the pilots eyes? Blue. One blew this way the other blew that way
What team does a United Airlines pilot support? The New York Jets
Where do Americans go on vacation? All over Manhattan
How many Americans died in the WTC yesterday? Who gives a fuck Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
What's the difference between Wembley and New York? Wembley's still got their twin towers.
What's the difference between the attack on New York and the Oklahoma City Bombing? - Again foreigners prove they can do it better and more efficiently......
Then there's the retarded terrorist who tried to crash the A-Train into the World Trade Center......
Yassar Arraffat and many other PLO members together with people from other Muslim nations are *Volunteering* to give blood for the victims of the tragedy... I guess they'll have some *Volunteers* to Fly the blood in too!
Last words from Airline pilot "Right a bit, hey the trade centre, my brother works there...lets look just a bit closer...."
The FBI have arrested the head of advertising at the Empire State Building for involvement in the WTC disaster. A spokesman said he was caught with 'Empire State: We're Back!!!' T-shirts in his office...
Top 10 Good Things About The WTC Attack
10. There are now 18 fewer Arab taxi drivers terrorizing the streets. 9. Flight training schools proved that they are expensive but worth it. 8. People are learning how to spell "Afghanistan" correctly. 7. Plenty of parking available at airports now. 6. Jerry Springer Show was off the air for a whole week. 5. Sales for U.S. flags are way up. 4. Several new job openings now at NYPD and NYFD. 3. Much lower electric bills for Manhattan. 2. Home videos of the WTC attack more spectacular than Arnold Schwarzenegger's last 5 movies. And the number one ... 1. Some great new unobstructed views of Manhattan now.
alt.tasteless.jokes: Sept. 17 2001 10:16:53 PST Go back
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Appendix B: Old Fashioned Game of Whoop-Ass
Dear Taliban, Mr. bin Laden, Mr. Arafat, and Mr., Hussein, et al:
We are pleased to announce that we unequivocally accept your challenge to an old fashioned game of Whoop-ass. Now that we understand the rule that there are no rules, we look forward to playing without them for the first time. Since this game is winner- take-all, we unfortunately will be 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 diamond now... Batter up!
Our team line up is as follows:
Co-owners: The FATHER, SON, and HOLY GHOST
Manager - George W. Bush Asst. Manager - Dick Cheney Head Coach - Colin Powell Asst' Coach - Donald Rumsfeld Starting Pitcher - Norman Schwartzkoff 1st Base - U.S. Marine Corps 2nd Base - U.S. Navy 3rd Base - U.S. Air Force Shortstop and Clean up hitter - U.S. Army Outfield - Firemen and Policemen Umpire - None required * * remember - the manager told you there'll be no discussion; no negotiation; and you didn't want rules, anyway! Pinch hitters as needed - U.S. Navy Seals U.S. Army Green Berets U.S. Army Rangers U.S. Air Force PJs Delta Force
And, since there are no rules, we've decided to add: 4th Base - United Kingdom 5th Base - Russia 6th Base - China Other Bases (as desired) - Pakistan, Japan, Germany. France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkistan and lots of other....Stans, and more. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
Opening ceremonies: Vocal 1: Celine Dion - The Star Spangled Banner Vocal 2 : Lee Greenwood - God Bless The U.S.A Vocal 3: Bruce Springsteen - Born In The U.S.A. Vocal 4: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir - Battle Hymn of the Republic
You may choose whoever you want for your team... it won't really matter (even if you all shave), our guys are gonna win!
Sincerely,
On behalf of the 270,000,000 citizens of the United States of America
p.s. May we recommend at this time that you give your soul to Allah; because your butt is OURS!!!!! Goodbye literally.
e-mail: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 00:26:25 -0600;.
Available: http://list.ftech.net/pipermail/jokequeen/2001-November.txt
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Appendix C: America: The Good Neighbor.
TRIBUTE TO THE UNITED STATES
This, from a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing.
Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record:
"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth.
Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.
When 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.
When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.
The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.
I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?
Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy, and Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
you find men on the moon - not once, but several times and safely home again.
You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft- dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here.
When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.
I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.
Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They 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. I hope Canada is not one of those."
Stand proud, America!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This is one of the best editorials that I have ever read regarding the United States. It is nice that one man realizes it. I only wish that the rest of the world would realize it. We are always blamed for everything, and never even get a thank you for the things we do.
I would hope that each of you would send this to as many people as you can and emphasize that they should send it to as many of their friends until this letter is sent to every person on the web. I am just a single American that has read this, I SURE HOPE THAT A LOT MORE READ IT SOON.
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New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Issue 6 :: Chapter 3:: Page 4 ::References
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Bill Ellis
Appendix D: The Binch Who Stole Airplanes by Rob Suggs
"Copyright 2001 . Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved."
Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot, But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not. 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 But I think that the most likely reason of all May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
But, Whatever the reason, his heart or his turban, He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban. "They're doing their business," he snarled from his perch. "They're raising their families! They're going to church! They're leading the world, and their empire is thriving, I MUST keep the S's and U's from surviving!"
Tomorrow, he knew, all the U's and the S's, Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses, They'd go to their offices, playgrounds and schools, And abide by their U and S values and rules,
And then they'd do something he liked least of all, Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small, Would stand all united, each U and each S, And they'd sing Uville's anthem, "God bless us! God bless!" All around their Twin Towers of Uville, they'd stand, and their voices would drown every sound in the land.
"I must stop that singing," Binch said with a smirk, And he had an idea--an idea that might work! The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours, And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers. "They'll wake to disaster!" he snickered, so sour, "And how can they sing when they can't find a tower?"
The Binch cocked his ear as they woke from their sleeping, All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping, Instead he heard something that started quite low, And it built up quite slow, but it started to grow-- And the Binch heard the most unpredictable thing... And he couldn't believe it--they started to sing! Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
He stared down at U-ville, not trusting his eyes, What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise! Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small, Was singing! Without any towers at all! 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.
So we circle the sites where our heroes did fall, With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small, And we mourn for our losses while knowing we'll cope, For we still have inside that U-Pride and U-Hope.
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!
e-mail: Sept. 20 2001 9:57 AM; C: bill hansen Go back
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Bill Ellis
Appendix E: If I were President George W. Bush's Speech Writer By Mitchell R. Robb
Good evening my fellow Americans.
First, I want to pass on my condolences to the people of New York and all Americans that are hurting in this tragic time. You can rest assured that anything and everything that can be done to assure the safety of our country will be done. This is the greatest country in the world and we will get through this trying time. Now is the time for all people to set aside our petty differences and show the world that no one or nothing can destroy the fortitude of the American people.
To the people responsible for today's tragedy, I say this: 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? Americans are so hungry to kill, that we shoot at each other every day. We will relish that opportunity for new targets for our aggression.
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. Ever seen Texas on a map? Ever wonder why it's so big? Because we wanted it that way, Mexico started jacking around with the Alamo and now they cut our lawns. England? We sent them packing.
Ask your buddy Saddam about fucking with the good 'ole USA. The only reason he got away the first time is because it's too hard to shoot someone when you're doubled over laughing at them. Our soldiers aren't trained to laugh and shoot at the same time. Now he couldn't stop a pack of cub scouts from taking over his shitty little country.
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. Hell, we might even drop a few bombs on people that have pissed us off in the past. This is America. We kick ass. This is what we do. Go ahead and laugh now, but the Tomahawks are coming and we will smoke your sorry asses.
Good night and God bless the USA.
p.s. Die camel fucker, die Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
soc.culture.indian: 2001 Sept. 14 18:50:24 PST Go back to page 2 Go back to page 5
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Appendix F: Osama Jokes
Jokes flush to the left margin are from ott.general: Oct. 12 2001 14:52:07 PST. Jokes indented underneath these are examples of earlier versions of these jokes from other sources.
If you need a good laugh at a time like this, here are some good jokes. Enjoy! I know I did :)
Q: What is Osama going as for Halloween? A: A dead man.
You know what Osama Bin Laden is going to be for Halloween?....A DEAD GUY!!!!" Hider 2001: Oct. 3 2001 10:51 PM
Q: What do Bin Laden and Hiroshima have in common? A: Nothing, yet.
Q: What is in common between Baghdad and Hiroshima?A: Nothing. Yet. (No flames please, just a joke) alt.desert-storm: Apr. 11 1991
Q: How do you play Taliban bingo? A: B-52...F-16...B-1...
How do you play Iraqi bingo? B-52...F-16...B-52 [sic] rec.humor.funny: Feb. 25 1991 22:17:42 PST
Q: What is the Taliban's national bird? A: Duck
Q: What's the national bird of Iraq? A: DUCK! rec.humor: Feb. 20 1991 08:09:46 PST
Q: How is Bin Laden like Fred Flintstone? A: Both may look out their windows and see Rubble.
What do Saddam and Fred Flintstone have in common? When they look out their window, the only thing they see is Rubble. rec.humor: Jun. 24 1991 21:39:00 PST
Q: What does osama bin laden and General Custer have in common? A: They both want to know where those Tomahawks are coming from!
What does Sadaam Hussein and General Custer have in common? They both want to know where the hell are those Tomahawks are coming from! Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
rec.humor.funny: May 14 1991 23:29:37 PST
Q: What's the difference between the Taliban and a bucket of shit? A: the bucket
What's the difference between a lawyer and a bucket of shit? The bucket. rec.humor: Oct. 14 1993 08:12:02 PST
Q: What's the five day forecast for Afghanistan? A: Two days.
What's the five-day forecast for Harrisburg Pennsylvania? Two days, with temperatures to reach five thousand degrees. Goodwin: 2001, dated 1979.
Q: What's the difference between Christmas and osama bin laden? A: There will be a Christmas in December
Someone made a joke today, and I didn't laugh (What's the difference between Christmas and Afganistan... Christmas will be there next year) nor found it remotely funny. Some people have very short memories. pgh.opinion: Sept. 14 2001 20:28:54 PST
Q: Why is Osama frustrated? A: Osama not Bin Laden awhile.
[Presumably this joke relies on being told orally, so that the teller can mispronounce "Bin Laden" with a long "a," thus implying that Osama has not "been laid (had sex) in a while." BE]
Q: Why do Talibans wear robes? A: So the camels won't hear the zipper.
Sheep can hear a zipper from about 100 yards off, which is why us shephards wear long flowing robes. rec.food.veg: Dec. 03 1994 11:40:56 PST
Do you know why Arab's wear robes? Because camels can hear a zipper mile away. aus.jokes: Jan. 28 1998
Q: Why don't bin laden's people eat shit sandwiches? A: they can't stand bread
Seen in the Wesleyan tunnels: "The rumor that Ronald Reagan eats shit sandwiches is not true, he doesn't like bread." alt.fan.dan-quayle: Mar. 01 1993 06:09:53 PST
Q: Why doesn't the Taliban have drivers ed and sex ed classes on the same day? A: because the camels can't handle it
Q: Why can't the IRAQIS (sp?) teach Driver's Ed and Sex Ed at the same time? A: It's too hard on the camels. alt.sex: Sept. 06 1990 13:25:40 PST
Q: How many bin laden terrorists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: No one may ever know.
"How Many Buddhists Does It Take to Screw In A Light Bulb?" No one will ever know. To a Buddhist there is always plenty of light, the light bulb is only an illusion, as is the fact that the old one burned Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
out, and they have no *desire* to change anything. talk.religion.buddhism: May 29 1997
Q: What's orange and looks good on taliban militiamen? A: Napalm.
What's Red and Orange and looks good on Hippies? NAPALM! git.tech.futures: Sept. 20 2000
Q:What do you get when you cross a B-52 bomber and osama bin ladin? A: an expensive fire work show
Q: What will OSAMA say his name stands for now? A: Oh Shit - America's Mauling Afghanistan (the taliban assholes, that is :)
Q: How do you clear a afganistan bingo hall? A: Yell b-52 as loud as you can
From a radio show:How do you break up an Iraqi bingo game? Call out B-52! alt.desert-storm: Apr. 11 1991
Q : What do you call Osama's stinkin' corpse in the desert? A: Osama been Rottin'.
Q: How does a member of the taliban have safe sex? A: They put a red X on the camels that kick.
Q. How is safe sex made possible in a Muslim country? A. By making an 'X' mark on camels that don't kick.
soc.culture.indian: Sept. 11 1996
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Appendix G: Mall-o-ween
Hi All -
I think you all know that I don't send out hoaxes and don't do the reactionary thing and send out anything that crosses my path. This one, however, is a friend of a friend and I've given it enough credibility in my mind that I'm writing it up and sending it out to all of you.
My friend's friend was dating a guy from Afghanistan up until a month ago. She had a date with him around 9/6 and was stood up. She was understandably upset and went to his home to find it completely emptied.
On 9/10, she received a letter from her boyfriend explaining that he wished he could tell her why he had left and that he was sorry it had to be like that. The part worth mentioning is that he BEGGED her not to get on any commercial airlines on 9/11 and to not to go any malls on Halloween. As soon as everything happened on the 11th, she called the FBI and has since turned over the letter.
This is not an email that I've received and decided to pass on.
This came from a phone conversation with a long-time friend of mine last night.
I may be wrong, and I hope I am. However, with one of his warnings being correct and devastating, I'm not willing to take the chance on the second and wanted to make sure that people I cared about had the same information that I did.
alt.folklore.urban: Oct. 09 2001 21:23:18 PST
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Appendix H: Alligators in the Potty
Don't go to the bathroom on October 28th. CIA intelligence reports that a major plot is planned for that day. Anyone who takes a poop on the 28th will be bitten on the ass by an alligator. Reports indicate that organized groups of alligators are planning to rise up into unsuspecting American's toilet bowls and bite them when they are doing their dirty business.
I usually don't send emails like this, but I got this information from a reliable source. It came from a friend of a friend whose cousin is dating this girl whose brother knows this guy whose wife knows this lady whose husband buys hotdogs from this guy who knows a shoeshine guy who shines the shoes of a mailroom worker who has a friend who's drug dealer sells drugs to another mailroom worker who works in the CIA building. He apparently overheard two guys talking in the bathroom about alligators and came to the conclusion that we are going to be attacked. So it must be true.
This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited.
alt.wisdom Oct. 16 2001 16:54:21 PST
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Have You Seen Me?
rec.music.makers.percussion: September 11, 2001 20:44:25 PST
bin Laden Milk Carton
"War Gallery" 2001: September 22 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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New WTC Design. rec.humor: September 13, 2001 00:54:25 PDT; alt.tasteless.jokes: September 13, 2001 00:55:26 PST
New WTC Design 2 "War Gallery" 2001: September 17
New WTC Design 3 "War Gallery" 2001: September 21
New WTC Design 4 "War Gallery" 2001: September 23 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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Ugliest Damned Piñata I ever saw. [George W. Bush is about to hit Osama bin Laden in the head with a baseball bat in front of a group of Little Leaguers.] e-mail: September 23, 2001
Afghanistan weather forecast [Tomorrow's predicted high‹3000 degrees: image of a mushroom cloud.] e-mail Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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Osama's Head. [Statue of Liberty holds up bloody head of bin Laden, like that of an executed criminal.] alt.tasteless.jokes: Tue, September 18, 2001 01:35:45
Osama Urinal Osama urinal. [bin Laden's picture in the bottom of a men's urinal.] "War Gallery" 2001: September 21
Osama Mastercard "Ammunition $12 / New rifle $384 / Airline travel to Afghanistan $1349 / Clear line of fire Priceless." [Parody of MasterCard ad; recycled Columbine massacre joke. e-mail: September 23, 2001 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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If You Can Read This--You're Fucked [Stenciled on the bottom of a B-2 bomber] "War Gallery" 2001: September 18
New Middle East Map. [Afghanistan is replaced by "Lake America."] rec.humor: September 18, 2001 19:06:46 GMT
Osama window [A missile is about to come through the glass.] eunet.jokes: September 19, 2001 09:55:00 GMT Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
Can Osama Come Out and Play? [An airbase field covered with Stealth bombers] "War Gallery" 2001: September 21 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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The Chase. [A jet fighter is chasing an Arab on a flying carpet.] "Osama bin Laden Pictures" 2002: October 15.
Driving in Kabul. [A military helicopter appears in a side-view mirror, above the warning "Objects are closer than they appear."] e-mail: October 18
United and American Airlines "United and American Airlines Announce New, Non-Stop Service to Afghanistan," e-mail: October 2 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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Boeing Invitation. 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 e-mail: October 3
Boeing Invitation 2. [small images of Boeing 757 and 767 commercial aircraft pop up] e-mail: October 12
Don't wait for an appointment: we'll just drop in. e-mail: October 12 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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Boeing Invitation 3
Boeing Invitation 3 Mr. Bin Laden, Now that you have taken the time to get to know Boeing's fine line of Commercial Aircraft;
Boeing Invitation 3. We now feel compelled to introduce you to the rest of the line--The AV8B Harrier.
Kinda sneaks right up on ya.
Sampling of pop-up images From Powerpoint presentation, Page 8
Damn, this was a CALCM AGM-86C F18 Super Hornet missile Stings like a bee! Bad timing on my part. Sorry. Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
The JSDAM Sincerely, That's short for Joint Direct Attack Munition. The United States of America
Kinda looks like the sky is fallin' eh, Chicken e-mail: October 24, 2001 Little? Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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Ultimatum to the Taliban Give us Osama Bin Laden Or We'll Send Your Women to College. John Deering, [Little Rock] Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Originally appeared Sept. 20.
Boeing Invitation 2. [small images of Boeing 757 and 767 commercial aircraft pop up] e-mail: October 12
Don't wait for an appointment: we'll just drop in. e-mail: October 12 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...
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You Like Skyscrapers? e-mail: 2001 September 23 Newfolk NDiF: Making a Big Apple Crumble...References
New Directions in Folklore 6 June 2002 Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 6 :: References Cited :: Chapter 1 :: Chapter 2
Making a Big Apple Crumble... References Cited
Bill Ellis
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Australian Words. 2002. Australian National Dictionary Centre The Australian National University. Available: http://www.anu.edu.au/ANDC/Austwords/.
Block, Susan. 2001. We're All Afghans Now - Why We Should Support RAWA, Afghan Women and a Less Terrorized Global Future. Counterpunch (October 30). Available: http://www.counterpunch.org/block2.html.
Bronner, Simon. 1985. "What's Grosser Than Gross?": New Sick Joke Cycles. Midwestern Journal of Language and Folklore 11: 39-49
______. 1988. American Children's Folklore: Annotated Edition. Little Rock: August House.
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______. 2002. Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition. Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1986. The Choking Doberman and Other "New" Urban Legends. New York: Norton.
Conrad, Joann. 1998. Stranger Danger: Defending Innocence, Denying Responsibility. Contemporary Legend N.S. 1: 55-96.
Davies, Christie. 1991. "Nasty" Legends, "Sick" Humour and Ethnic Jokes about Stupidity. A Nest of Vipers: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend V., ed. Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, 49-68. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
______. 1999 . Jokes on the Death of Diana. The Mourning for Diana, ed. Tony Walter, 253-268. Oxford: Berg.
Dégh, Linda. 2001. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington: Indiana University.
Dorst, John. 1990. Tags and Burners, Cycles and Networks: Folklore in the Telectronic Age. Journal of Folklore Research 27:179-190.
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State University Press.
______. 1996. Sometimes the Dragon Wins: Yet More Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Ellis, Bill. 1991. The Last Thing . . . Said: The Challenger Disaster Jokes and Closure. International Folklore Review 8: 110-124.
______. 2001. A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes. New Directions in Folklore 5 (October). Available: http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/wtchumor.html.
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Grider, Sylvia. 2001. Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster (Preliminary Observations Regarding the Spontaneous Shrines Following the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001) New Directions in Folklore 5 (October). Available: http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/shrines.html.
"Guestbook," Amanda Lang's Home Page. Available: http://www.ohdear.itgo.com/fsguestbook.html
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Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 6 :: References Cited :: Chapter 1 :: Chapter 2 Newfolk: Bill Ellis
New Directions in Folklore Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive
Bill Ellis, Ph.D.
Bill Ellis is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State Hazleton. He has served as President of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, as well as of the American Folklore Society's Sections on Folk Narrative and Children's Folklore. His publications include Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media (Kentucky, 2000) and Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (Mississippi, 2001).
Bibliography
A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center Disaster Jokes (article)
Making a Big Apple Crumble: The Role of Humor in Constructing a Global Response to Disaster (article)
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive