Disaster-joke cycles have long been studied by folklorists, and are notable for their stable structural features and for their relatively short circulation run. In other words, while you'll often see structural similarities between jokes that refer to different events (almost the exact same joke, re-tooled for a different context), once the surprise or shock about an event has passed, you'll almost never hear the jokes about that specific event told again. As a recent example, when both Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy, Jr., died in tragic accidents, there were a number of jokes about both events that, structurally, were nearly identical, with only a few changes in personnel needed to adapt the joke to a specific event.

The advent of e-lore has both enhanced and altered the circulation of these jokes and their context. Whereas they were once told almost exclusively in face-to-face settings, now they circulate almost exclusively by e-mail. Disaster-joke cycles as e-lore represent the perfect marriage of form and function: e-mail allows people to "tell" such tasteless jokes to others without having to assume ownership of them. In the era of post-political-correctness, e-lore gives people an opportunity to simply "pass along" electronically jokes they might never tell in person for fear of offending others. This odd combination of convenience and distance often results in the jokes circulating even more widely than they would through face-to-face channels, since people can offer more explicit disclaimers when they transmit the jokes.

It wasn't a surprise, then, that soon after 9/11, folklorists began speculating about when the jokes would start (see Bill Ellis' essay in the NEWFOLK journal). However, a disaster-joke cycle of the traditional kind never emerged--or if it did, it did not emerge as e-lore. To be sure, there were plenty of tasteless jokes (as some of the following jokes, as well as other items in this archive, will attest), but these differed significantly from traditional disaster jokes in that their content focused on issues other than those directly related to the tragedies in New York and Washington.

While it will be awhile before we can draw any firm conclusions about what made this event "off limits" for traditional disaster-joke telling, a couple of obvious differences between it and earlier disasters (such as the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger) are clear: first, the scale of the events of 9/11 was much larger than any other disaster that had been fodder for joke cycles before. Second, the issue of the attacks being planned also distinguishes them from earlier joke-cycle events, most of which were accidents; this also partially explains the fact that most of the jokes that did emerge focused on the figure of the "enemy," Osama bin Laden (and Afghanistan in general).

Finally, my own theory about why we didn't see widespread jokes about the attacks themselves has to do with the issue of the "imaginary." Most disasters that spawn joke cycles are things that are well within the scope of our imagination: we believe, even if we don't want to, that beautiful young people can die tragically in car and plane crashes (Di and JFK, Jr.), that space travel is still experimental and dangerous (the Challenger explosion), and so forth.

However, nothing in our national experience prepared us for the shock of watching the World Trade Centers crumble into dust. We may have been willing to "imagine" such a sight in the context of an action movie, but not in the context of reality; the very distance between what we were willing to imagine and what we believed possible was what enabled us to enjoy special effects of similar disasters on-screen: we never imagined it was possible in real life. When the towers fell, the imaginary became the real, and there's no joke that can speak to that dissolution of boundaries.

So the examples in this section aren't true "disaster jokes" in that they do not make light of the actual events of 9/11, but instead, deal with more manageable and peripheral issues surrounding those events.