The 25-year journey from national tragedy to national punchline.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum features multiple somber exhibitions. There’s “In Memoriam,” whose 2,977 pictures honor the individuals who died that fateful Tuesday 25 years ago. There’s “Faces of Ground Zero,” Joe McNally’s portraits of the tragedy’s first responders. There’s a battered FDNY Ladder 3 firetruck. There’s an oral history exhibit.
And there’s a gift shop. Actually, a “Museum Store.”
Despite that self-serious title, you’ll find a variety of ridiculous trinkets cosplaying as memorabilia. Pride Month saw a black fridge magnet that read “9/11 Memorial” in rainbow font. Stickers are sold with cartoon renderings of the rescue dogs—Otto, Annie, Wusel—who perished at Ground Zero. Even your tackiest aunt may reject Charles Fazzino’s framed pop art, in which sky-blue Twin Towers soar over New York to almost touch a moon that looks, inarguably, like a ball of cheese. (Speaking of, don’t forget the 9/11 cheeseboard that sparked fury.) There are lucky charms (why not), tote bags (with the deceased K-9s), and—to honor 9/11’s 25th anniversary—framed United States flags going for $225.
These daffy commodifications of grief lend the store an air of high camp. And while that might feel inappropriate, it’s actually a pretty accurate reflection of the place the attacks increasingly occupy in our culture. To put it simply, for many people, 9/11 has become a joke—a readily available meme, a feature of comedy sets, a crowd-pleasing punchline. Even attempts to be serious about 9/11 can falter. Witness, for instance, the audience’s bemused reaction to Glee’s Matthew Morrison when, in concert after concert, he pauses the crooning to earnestly describe the terror he felt that September morning, the anxiety of taking the subway to find his girlfriend, and the discovery of her safe at home—in bed with another man. (He follows that cheating episode by singing—again, earnestly—“Send in the Clowns.”)
Such a development would have seemed outlandish in 2001, when headlines declared that 9/11 had rendered irony obsolete and the White House was advising people to “watch what they say” about the attacks. Back then, comedy wanted to get as far away from the tragedy as possible. The Onion canceled its issue scheduled for release on 9/11. Ben Stiller scrambled to cut a shot of the Twin Towers from Zoolander, which premiered just a few weeks after the attacks. Gilbert Gottfried was shamed for cracking a 9/11 joke at a roast for Hugh Hefner. “Too soon” became a refrain.
But comedy, as the saying goes, is tragedy plus time. So what kind of joke is 9/11 25 years later?
It depends on who is making the joke, in which context, and to what end, as, ultimately, “the more radioactive the topic, the better the joke has to be,” comedian Zach Zimmerman said.
Multiple factors have contributed to the lack of taboo around 9/11 humor. Patriotism, per a June Gallup poll, is at a record low. And a quarter-century is a long time. Years back, Zimmerman himself tried out a 9/11 gag but got some advice: “Gary Gulman encouraged me to change it to Pearl Harbor,” he said. Today, there are 100 million Americans who are too young to remember the attacks—and that lack of lived, shared history can make interpretation of the event more malleable.
“There may be a kind of desensitized distance that comes if you don’t have an experience of the event—it’s not just you weren’t there; you weren’t then,” said Dr. Sarah Senk, a Cal Poly professor who has taught the class 9/11 in Cultural Memory. “What does it mean to say ‘never forget’ if you don’t remember it in the first place?”
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum hosts scores of students each year, but those same students are increasingly getting their news, takes, and opinions from their phones.
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“It’s hard to disentangle 9/11 from the media environment of the early digital age, which allowed images to circulate at an extraordinary rate,” Senk said, especially given “9/11 is such a visually spectacular disaster.”
Today, social media has only quickened that pace and further platformed subversive content, making online jokes about 9/11—or anything—highly disposable. (A Brooklyn gay bar, Animal, added a pool table to its dark room, making it harder to cruise; one X user compared this annoyance to “1 million 9/11s”.) The internet also lets Gen Zers contextualize 9/11 through their own subjective understanding.
Progressive, hyperonline members of Gen Z were born into a recession and raised during presidential administrations that did not represent their views, so “that ribbing or pushback against Millennial culture was a way of saying, ‘There’s a new internet on its way,’” CUNY media studies professor Jamie Cohen said.
That pushback included not taking 9/11 so seriously and “converting the tragedy into a memetic event,” Cohen said. “Gen Z, a younger, less enfranchised group, basically created their own culture and created it on their own: they were born on the internet, so 9/11 occurs just after the dot-com crash but before major social media. Young people were born into the frictionless architectures that [Mark] Zuckerberg developed, so their gallows humor is a way of coping with a lot of the ways the world works—it allows them to exert some kind of agency over things they can’t control.”
The long-term effects of turning travesties into meme-able content are “not great,” per Cohen, as “gallows humor, or the flattening of tragedy into memetics, desensitizes us to any kind of ongoing horror.”
Still, Senk sees humor as “ important from a civic perspective.”
“It’s a way of daylighting the narratives that are crystallizing around something; jokes tackle stuff that’s taboo,” she said. “It’s counter-discourse—I don’t think it’s right to equate jokes with callousness. My sense is people use humor about traumatic things as an attempt at catharsis.”
Catharsis is often a goal, including in The Musical, a Sundance film that premieres one week after 9/11’s 25th anniversary. In that film, Will Brill plays a manic teacher looking to sabotage the school principal (Rob Lowe), who starts dating his ex-girlfriend, by staging a controversial musical about 9/11.
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But perhaps more than individual release, 9/11 is remembered as an event that allowed collective processing. Humor also acts as a unifying bond.
“I see a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 era, a time when people would at least talk to each other across political divides,” Senk said. Ahead of this silver anniversary, she expects more of that to arise.
The timing of the 20th anniversary overlapped with COVID, so Senk remembers “the media coverage asking whether the pandemic might produce the kind of national unity commonly associated with 9/11,” she said, also noting “that unity was never universal; different communities have from the outset experienced 9/11 and its aftermath very differently. In one of my classes, a Muslim student said she remembers 9/11 as the year she had to move because her family was getting harassed. This anniversary, I expect there will be a lot more attention to that pluralistic take of what this event meant for people—alongside sentimental stories about the country coming together around a common cause.”
Cohen said that how 9/11 is remembered shifts each year, and “it’s very hard right now to do forecasting because we live in the age of reactionaries: people react to reactions, we live in a very meta space…the internet is more AI and agentic, so what I think you’re going to see this anniversary is much more reactionary.”
This, in a way, means the internet has become the event people today share—except, in the course of a single day, multiple events can take place online, and those that are more radical or biting rise to the top. That can put pressure on jokes to be sharper, even as they can be more fleeting.
“9/11 feels like one of the last unifying moments the country had,” Zimmerman said. “Has Gen Z felt a unified response? The idea of ‘too soon’ in today’s fragmented media ecosystem, where everything is so fast, it’s more often that, after a tragedy, you’re too late: you weren’t the first to make a Mitch McConnell joke, everyone gets to make jokes now, and it’s a race to make it first, which I don’t think existed around 9/11.”
“There was space for reverence,” he added. “Is anything reverential as a broader culture today? The comedian would say no, but should the society?”
Time heals, and humor heals, Zimmerman said.
Still, he admits to a fear of flying, and as such being “perversely obsessed with 9/11; I read most of the 9/11 Commission, and it’s a pretty horrific thing that happened,” he said, “but I do want to shout out the terrorists because they created more jobs than I think anyone has in the past 25 years.”
What kinds of jobs?
“TSA,” he said. “That’s me testing a new joke.”
Billy McEnteeBilly McEntee is a Brooklyn-based writer.