Here’s a funny story.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Titanic. I devoured novel after novel, documentary after documentary — but I never actually watched the “Titanic” movie out of an inclination to avoid actually seeing the tragedy. One of the first long-form pieces of writing I ever produced was about the Titanic, one evidently so compelling my mom had the pages of my scrawled chicken-scratch laminated. But somewhere in that timeframe, during my obsession with that tragedy, I saw a kid’s bounce castle themed after the Titanic online, one like this Reddit post. It wasn’t just the ship, but a bouncy slide of the Titanic turned on its axis in the image of it sinking. For a kid constantly reliving the tragedy of the Titanic through the art it had inspired, the inflatable felt like a monument to generational apathy. I remember to this day a comment made on the post, furthering my perception of the internet’s abhorrent insensitivity: “So when do we get one of the Twin Towers?”
Some say comedy is tragedy plus time, and enough time has passed, it seems, for some people to consider 9/11 jokes acceptable. One epitomizing example of this is a compilation of the late, great Norm MacDonald (“The Orville”) invoking the incident every chance he got: “9/11 was a National Tragedy.” It features a catastrophically incongruous image in the thumbnail: MacDonald’s laughing silhouette with a superimposed image of the smoking Twin Towers and the second plane inbound. MacDonald evokes the video’s title phrase to plant tension and discomfort in his guests. At the slightest hint of an uncomfortable laugh, he admonishes them for doing so, interrogating them for the source of their potential disrespect. This, of course, is all for MacDonald’s enjoyment, building up tension in his subjects as much as he can, prodding them with anecdotes until he releases it all in fits of laughter.
But how did we get here? I’ve watched the clock pass from Sept. 11, 2001 until now, and somewhere in all that time, a switch flipped to make a national tragedy comedic. Was it just that time had passed? Was there something involved in the politics of its fallout? Was the “comedification” of 9/11 another part of its grand “conspiracy”? I don’t know. Let’s wind back the clock and find out.
Some of the first comedic responders to 9/11 were on the country’s comedy TV circuit, many of which are filmed in New York. A week after, on Sept. 18, 2001, Conan O’Brien (“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”) delivered a monologue about the attacks in a completely sober tone. Two days later, on the 20th, Jon Stewart (“Death to Smoochy”) on “The Daily Show” gave his bit, receiving laughs admonishing the omnipresence of these tragic television monologues, even suggesting that low-brow TV shows like “Survivor” would give their own speeches on the matter. He then told an anecdote about how excited he and his classmates were to be sitting under their desks and given cottage cheese from their teachers, not knowing it was an act of security because riots had broken out over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — Stewart delivering this all while visibly on the edge of tears.
Eighteen days after the attack, two more jokes came. “Saturday Night Live” returned with a cold open featuring a gathering of first responders and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”) praising them before the night’s musical performance, a cover of “The Boxer” by Paul Simon. At the end of the cold open, Giuliani is asked, “Can we be funny?” He responds after a cathartic bout of laughter, “Why start now?” With a shout of the show’s title phrase, they would proceed into the week’s skits, which would include an uncomfortable Weekend Update segment, complete with blackface and another guest advocating racially profiling turban-wearing people with the phrase “Shake ‘em down!” The same night, just a few blocks down from 30 Rockefeller Center at the New York Friar’s Club, Gilbert Gottfried (“Beverly Hills Cop II”) delivered this line at the roast of Hugh Hefner: “I have to catch a flight to California; I can’t get a direct flight, they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first!” There’s first a wave of laughter, crescendoing before crashing into a foam of offended groans. A heckler cries that one temporal phrase: “Too soon!”
And that’s an interesting phrase, isn’t it? “Too soon” implies a condition of eventual appropriateness. It’s perhaps rooted in the time it takes to process the trauma response of tragedy before it can be made light of. There are two ways that this was circumvented, however. The first would be the rise of the 9/11 conspiracies, which would indeed be categorized as some type of trauma response but were nonetheless mocked for their inanity. 9/11 conspiracies would then go on to become a foundation for internet meme culture.
The second would be comedians directly involved in that trauma: Seth MacFarlane (“Ted”) and Pete Davidson (“The King of Staten Island”) are noted as comedians that can make light of 9/11 with relative impunity, considering the former barely missed boarding the American Airlines Flight 11 and the latter’s father, Scott Davidson, died firefighting on Sept. 11, 2001. Twenty-two years after SNL’s 9/11 Cold Open, Pete Davidson delivered a speech in Oct. 15, 2023’s Cold Open. Following the Oct. 7, 2024 Hamas attacks and the subsequent bombing of Palestine, Davidson defended his ethos for speaking on it: “When I was seven years old, my dad was killed in a terrorist attack. So, I know something about what that’s like.” He recalls that after the death of his father, one of the first things that had made him smile again was an Eddie Murphy (“Shrek”) tape, concluding, “I don’t understand it. I really don’t, and I never will. But sometimes, comedy is really the only way forward through tragedy.” The world came to a complete halt on 9/11, threatening to tip off its axis. Why was comedy not in question when a similar attack happened in the Middle East — and continued through all the death that would follow?
Following 9/11, more than 600 hate crimes were committed against U.S. citizens because they were perceived as Arab or Muslim, whether or not they actually were. My own father — a Hindu man who had emigrated from India just years before — was almost one of them, escaping the situation as fast as he could to be with my mother, who was pregnant with me at the time. When I entered high school, I began growing a beard and with it, a tolerance for constant insinuations that I could be a terrorist, a baseless accusation that is hurled at countless brown protestors today. At least three post-9/11 murders were confirmed as hate crimes, with several others suspected. George W. Bush’s (“The Daily Show”) administration would use the national fervor to launch war in Iraq, a country with no relation to Al Qaeda but nonetheless a foothold for America in the Middle East. This would be repeated in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Yemen, in Libya and in every country where America could find an opportunity to wage war. A “conservative estimate” from a 2023 Brown University report places the total death toll between 4.5 and 4.7 million. When discussing the Ukraine invasion in 2022, Bush would drop a Freudian slip condemning the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq … I mean, of Ukraine.” He shrugs and adds, “Iraq too … anyway.” The audience laughs. A former president of the United States openly voices a confession that would deem him a war criminal by any sensible tribunal, and the audience laughs.
Off the top of your head, could you tell me the date of the Pearl Harbor bombing? What about the Oklahoma City bombing, the second deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil? You could likely tell me the date of the 2021 insurrection, but that also could be in part because so many people disagree over whether or not it was an insurrection. 9/11 is an awfully convenient term — one whose naming is rarely questioned — for a date that will rear its head once a year without fail, a day that can be used to pause and rewind the world back to the tragedy of nearly thousands of killed Americans as our country “avenges” them through killing millions more. Maybe this is the goal of 9/11 comedy, a political project that negates the power of the politicization of its tragedy, an effort by the West to eternally justify its imperialism in the Middle East that continues up until this day.
When I was in eighth grade, I found myself unable to look away from a mural, placed in the back of a classroom I had never previously set foot in. Unable to make heads or tails of the work, my friends and I, who were only in the room to set up instruments for a band festival, began mocking the odd expressions, the contorted bodies, the fact that one of the women had square nipples. That mural was a reproduction of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” a depiction of the horrors experienced in an eponymous Spanish village under a German bombing raid in WWII. Tragedy divorced from its time, from its context and from its victims — I guess that was comedy.
Goshka Macuga’s installation “The Nature of the Beast” features another reproduction of “Guernica,” albeit this time juxtaposed with a bust of former Secretary of State Colin Powell defending the decision to invade Iraq in front of the United Nations Security Council. That tapestry hung in the U.N. hall behind Powell when he looked the world in the eye with the intention to reproduce the tragedies of war. “Guernica” was covered up with a navy-blue curtain on that day, with one diplomat giving this reasoning: “It would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N., John Negroponte, or Colin Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings.” They also could have covered it out of routine, not comprehending the meaning of the painting or the tragedies they were going to reproduce. Whether there was a conspiracy in covering it up, or in invading the Middle East, or in staging 9/11 or in predictive programming or in controlling the world’s wars — it didn’t fucking matter. Essayist Big Joel’s analysis put it best: “At the end of the day, the people in the U.N. Security Council were off to reproduce ‘Guernica,’ that much is true — but you don’t need art to do that. You don’t need abstraction and meaning and thought. You just need to bomb a bunch of people for no reason.”
There was no reason — at least, not one that can ever truly, morally be justified. I’ve been drawing dots and connecting them with my bits of red thread, but I’m not sure if I can ever convince you why people laugh at tragedy, especially one like 9/11 — whose impact stretches into the present and beyond. No time has passed since its tragedy at all. None of it makes sense, just like every bit of analysis and theorizing and potential conspiratorial critique we could do; they all collect contradictions until they collapse into the chaos and absurdity of evil and destruction and tragedy.
So maybe absurdity is the only thing we can move forward with. The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus conceptualized the absurd as created from a “confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” In the end, conspiracy is the fruitless act of rationalizing the irrational, instead of persisting forward through the absurd in whatever way possible. Tell me — when we face Macuga’s Beast, when all of us have protested and resisted and survived — what else can we do at the end of the day, at the end of injustice’s infinite absurdities, besides laugh?
But there’s a different way to look at it. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but in an age of information where tragedy after tragedy is unleashed upon us, time becomes irrelevant. I no longer think comedy coming from something as tragic as 9/11 is a result of apathy; in fact, I think it’s completely the opposite. A generation born in the shadow of ceaseless and unrelenting tragedy has grown up mourning, grieving and weeping for so long that eventually the tears have run dry while our still-shaking shoulders search for a new outlet for these feelings. I acknowledge that it is a privileged action to be able to overcome pain, and all I can hope is that this privilege can be brought to those in pain, which cycles and spirals and begets more pain if it isn’t stopped. We need laughter and joy and catharsis in the face of tragedy to be able to persist through it, to be able to make meaningful change that will prevent further tragedy in the future from happening. It is my persistent hope that through the actions we take now — of protest, of revolution, of liberation — we can make a world where the tragedy of injustice is a relic of the past. Maybe one day, it will just be a painful memory that we can only ever look back on and laugh.
Daily Arts Writer Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.