A Funny Thing Happened...

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, irony was pronounced dead and an unofficial moratorium on joking declared in the U.S. It wasn't just late-night talkshow hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman who took time off; the Internet, the most efficient gag-spreading device ever invented, was also, for a while, a wisecrack-free zone. It doesn't take a student of humor to deduce that the closer you are to the butt of a joke, the unfunnier you'll find it. But to measure just how close, and to deconstruct some of the other mechanisms of laughter under fire, 200 such experts gathered last week for the 14th annual conference of the International Society of Humor Studies in Bertinoro-Forlì, Italy, where the most popular panel was on Humor and Terrorism. "There were not many degrees of separation between the victims of Sept. 11 and just about everyone in the U.S.," says Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College and chair of the panel.

Within two weeks after the attack, of course, America's satirists, amateur and professional, were skewering Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the press, on TV and above all again on the Internet, where the number of sites dedicated to war-related humor now runs into the hundreds. Much of the humor, Lewis notes, shows a marked tendency to Americanize the terrorists as they parody them in joke ads for Taliban Barbie and Jihad Joe dolls, rewrites of classic American songs like Osama, I Just Met a Boy Named Osama and 50 Ways to Kill Bin Laden, even spoof TIME magazine covers. They're jokes, says Lewis, that "seek to shift bin Laden out of Islamic cultural references and into contexts that are ludicrous, distinctively American and popular. Americans don't like having to deal with the rest of the world, so they're saying, 'You're doing this in our court and you're going to become pathetic by association.'"

Delegates heard that in the U.K., Poland and Italy, by contrast, there was never a truce on Sept. 11 humor. "In Britain," says Christie Davies, professor of sociology at Reading University, "the jokes started within minutes," and within weeks were proliferating like mad through e-mail and online gossip-shops. "They were not in any sense anti-American," says Davies, noting rather that the jokes were often transmogrified into that hoary old standby of British humor, the Irish joke, as in "the provisional I.R.A. have hijacked a blimp and hit Big Ben — twice."

From his contentious election until Sept. 11, President George Bush was his nation's number one butt and today once again, drawing flak on domestic issues such as Enron and WorldCom, finds himself up there with Martha Stewart, Janet Reno (and bin Laden still) on the online humor sites. On the subject of his conduct of the war on terror, though, there is barely a sign in the U.S. of the satirical backlash that has hit Bush and his allies in British and European press and on TV where, for example, editorial cartoons, top comic impressionist Rory Bremner and most recently George Michael in the song and cartoon video Shoot the Dog all regularly portray Tony Blair as an overeager lapdog to a dumb and dangerous President Bush.

One U.S. exception, the comedian Sandra Bernhard, arrived in London last week, hoping for a more understanding audience than those back home, for a one-off performance of her Hero Worship, a typically splenetic routine aimed at the state of post-Sept. 11 America and its leadership. The show, she told an interviewer, is "a proclamation that irony never went way. It's about the absurdity that we're all supposed to become jingoistic, nationalistic and jump on the bandwagon as if to justify everything that's happening."

America's own sense of humor has swung round the compass since Sept. 11. Reports that teens are assimilating the words and images of that day into their slang — "ground zero" for an untidy room, "firefighter cute" for a fanciable boy, "that's so Sept. 10" for anything outdated — are no surprise to the students of humor (educators, sociologists and linguists) meeting in Italy. As The Oxford Companion to the English Language notes of a sense of humor: "There are times when people are free to make jokes, times when they need to make jokes, and times when joking is inhibited or disallowed." Times change.

But there are times too when a sense of humor is resolutely about place. With so many bones of contention between the U.S. and Europe piling up — the conduct of the war, international treaties and criminal courts — it's curious to note the one-way traffic in humor on the transatlantic tensions. "From this [the European] side of the Atlantic, there's a lot of heat about the Euro-American rift. In the U.S., it's barely a blip on the register," says Lewis. "A poodle joke about Tony Blair's predicament as Bush's ally? I don't think anybody would get it."