9/11 Humor in a Broken World

I’ll never forget the first time I cracked a 9/11 joke. It was September 14, 2001. I was 11 years old. My children’s theater company was holding a candlelight vigil for the victims. Trying to impress my older friends in the cast, I suggested that instead of the solemn, staid music that was scoring this observance, we should blast Drowning Pool’s then-popular rock radio hit, “Bodies.” (For those too young or too old to remember this tune, singer Dave Williams repeats the line “let the bodies hit the floor” about four hundred times in this song). Tasteless? Absolutely. But it worked—I managed to get a laugh from the older kids, who I was always afraid thought of me as a dweeby, try-hard hanger-on. 

Two years later, “Bodies” was played on repeat at Guantánamo Bay for ten days as interrogators tortured a Mauritanian engineer named Mohamedou Ould Salahi. Drowning Pool’s bassist, Stevie Benton, had no issue with this. In a 2006 SPIN article, he took pride in the song’s use, saying, “People assume we should be offended that somebody in the military thinks our song is annoying enough that, played over and over, it can psychologically break someone down. I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that.”

Benton’s mindless parrotry of the post-9/11 propaganda asserting that torture was necessary to stop terrorism was hardly an uncommon opinion in 2006, and it wouldn’t be shocking to hear many a MAGA habitué uttering the same conviction in 2024. This, of course, was one of the many falsehoods that came from the weaponization of the 9/11 attacks in order to serve the neoconservative foreign policy aims of the Bush administration. When I talk to people who find 9/11 humor inherently offensive, I always want to ask if they’re just as bothered by how 9/11 was used to justify torture. Or how it was exploited to brainwash the public into accepting bloated military budgets, and endless wars. Or how both parties used the fear of that day to construct a massive surveillance state that now tracks our every move—and has allowed tech companies to monetize our private lives.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks—the horror of witnessing them, the fear that followed, and the lingering numbness of living in a world permanently marked by that day (polarization, paranoia, hate), humor remains one of the few ways we can reclaim some sense of control over a tragedy that was taken from us by the powerful and made into a mockery.

Do some 9/11 jokes and memes veer into pretty ugly territory? Undoubtedly. Are some just weird and unfunny? Sure. But much of it is both tasteless and funny in an absurdist way. Take the image of the twin towers depicted as uncooked spaghetti with red sauce pouring out like smoke, captioned, “never forgetti.” It’s not for everyone, but I find it hard to take issue with repurposing the same imagery that was used relentlessly to propagate fear for a harmless pasta joke. Another widely circulated 9/11 meme features the famous photo of George W. Bush being informed of the attacks by his Chief of Staff, Andy Card, a template often used to mock contemporary online culture.  I find absolutely no issue with the application of this image for general mockery, though I sometimes wish more of these memes targeted Bush himself—the war criminal who used 9/11 for his own political gain, and successfully won reelection by casting his opponent as a terrorist-appeasing pussy–in the moment of utter fecklessness this picture represents. The “Bush did 9/11” memes, while pushing a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory, still manage to serve as criticisms of Bush’s foreign policy and the role of U.S. interventionism in inspiring the attacks, all while embracing the innate absurdity of the overall claim.

I could easily spend far too many words analyzing, and generally defending, 9/11-related memes, far beyond what anyone would care to read. But the point isn’t to argue that 9/11 humor is always funny, or that people don’t have a right to be offended by it. If there is a point, it’s to reflect on the ability of humor and meme culture to help us cope with fear and tragedy, and how it can defang the moralistic posturing that hands the legacy of 9/11 over to those who harness it as a propaganda tool. Memes that mock those who profited from the tragedy are powerful examples of humor at its most potent—”punching up.” And in these cases, the more distasteful the meme, the better.

But why do I, personally, enjoy 9/11-related humor so much? It’s still something that I can’t fully understand. I think 9/11—both the horrors of that day and the horrors it justified for years afterward—is painful for me in a way that’s probably similar to many people in my relative age range. We were old enough to understand what had happened, but too young to have the perspective or coping skills to process that reality. I wasn’t in Lower Manhattan that day, and I’m fortunate enough not to have lost anyone close to me. I don’t mean to suggest my pain is anything like the unimaginable grief of those who did. The pain I feel comes from a different, more distant kind of loss. It’s the pain that stems from the loss of the broader world I knew. The unparalleled strength of America’s military following the end of the Cold War, and the roaring economy of the mid to late 90s were distilled into a vision of impossible optimism, a vision that was imbued in our young minds by teachers, politicians, and the news media. However fleeting and foolish that optimism may have been, it was what we knew. No matter how much I struggled with anxiety and feelings of self-doubt as a child, I still felt confident that things would turn out fine because I lived in a world that seemed destined to remain peaceful and prosperous. 

That Tuesday morning, my friend and I were annoying our homeroom teacher by repeatedly shouting the year-old “whassup?” catchphrase. By that evening, I was lying in bed with my mom beside me, the first time I’d asked her to help me sleep in years. I was a scared little boy, staring at the stars through my open window, thinking about death, loss, and the traumatic images I’d seen on TV all day. I had watched countless Hollywood action movies from the ’80s and ’90s—full of explosions, bombs, and hijackings—without ever feeling scared, because I knew they were entirely fictional. When I first saw the footage, my initial reaction was that it looked like a Michael Bay movie—minus the low-angle spinning shots. That evening, though, I was beginning to grasp how painfully real it all was.

Childhood innocence inevitably comes to an end, but for me and many others in my microgeneration—those of us privileged enough to have food, shelter, and no major personal loss up until that point—9/11 left an indelible mark. It was a clear line between a world of endless possibility and one of perpetual uncertainty. And it turns out, it was just the first of many collective traumas that shattered whatever remained of our childhood illusions, from the Great Recession to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The world was never going to be as rosy as the adults in my life seemed to suggest it would be before September 11, 2001. But growing up in a belief system that embraced that delusion left me woefully unprepared for all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are a part of life. In some ways, I don’t feel like I’ve ever recovered from being jolted awake from that impossible dream. Maybe laughing at an image of Rudy Giuliani with the caption, “Men will profit off 9/11 instead of going to therapy,” makes it all a little less painful.

This year marks the twenty-third anniversary of the attacks, and although I’ll try not to, I’ll inevitably end up watching footage of the planes hitting the towers or some 9/11 documentary on YouTube. I hope this year I can also try to do something that will help me move beyond this day as the reoccurring trauma reminder that most tragic anniversaries tend to be. Maybe I’ll find the resilience that I—and many white cisgender men of my mid-millennial generation—have struggled to cultivate, and finally let go of a latent longing for the world we were promised, where life would be easy and that prosperity was our inevitable outcome for being born with a penis. One thing’s for sure, though: on this solemn American anniversary, I’ll share 9/11 memes with my friends and laugh. If you think it’s tasteless, that’s fine, but it will never be as tasteless as surveillance capitalism, endless wars, and limitless military spending guzzling funds that could be used to care for dying first responders and house homeless veterans—or, for that matter, as tasteless as an 11-year-old suggesting a violent nu metal song as the soundtrack for a 9/11 candlelight vigil.