The new generation of 9/11 jokes may not intend to make light of the tragedy itself, but it does have the effect of exorcising the event from America’s collective consciousness.
One April morning, a medium-deal teen Vine personality was sitting in his history class, learning about 9/11. The classroom lights blinked off and a warmup exercise projected onto the whiteboard with an enormous photograph of the World Trade Center at the moment that the second plane slammed into the second tower and a gigantic fireball came out the other side. Hundreds of people died in that instant. Thousands more were doomed to wait in the blistering towers until death came for them. Millions watched in horror as the attacks unspooled on live television. But 14 years later, a 16-year-old kid looked at the photograph and saw an opportunity. He pulled out his camera phone, aimed it at the towers, panned to his teacher, and called out, “Mr. Varg? I thought Bush did 9/11.”
“Uhhh,” Mr. Varg said.
Soon the video was looping on Vine over and over again as a jubilant caption cried: “HE PAUSED SO HARD OMG BUSH DID IT GUYS I KNEW IT.” It’s since been played more than 3.4 million times. Every few hours, another teen adds a comment to the thousands already filed: “It’s a conspiracy,” they say. Or “I KNEW IT BRUH.” Or just emoji after emoji for tears of joy.
This is not what that crying eagle envisioned when he told us to never forget. Fourteen years after 9/11, teenagers too young to remember the tragedy in the first place are now mining it for comedy. Some prankster hacked into a Minnesota highway sign last month and reprogrammed it to say “BUSH DID 9/11.” When Steph Curry’s 4-year-old daughter Riley commandeered the mic at her dad’s MVP press conference in May, teen Twitter imagined her spitting lines like, “DICK CHENEY MADE MONEY OFF THE IRAQ WAR.” And this spring, a California high school student surprised one lucky girl with a terror-themed promposal:
he modern 9/11 joke takes aim at the truthers, the conspiracy theorists who ruled the Internet fringe in the early aughts. Constructing the joke is often as simple as fishing a conspiratorial slogan out from the Internet’s past and releasing it on the modern Web. The most popular catchphrase of the moment is “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” a riff on the truther mantra that fires sparked by planes couldn’t have burned hot enough to tumble the towers, so government bombs probably helped them out. More than 10 years after the attacks, jokesters co-opted the line, and after an incubation period in weird Twitter, it graduated to teen phenomenon last year and confirmed meme this spring. Now, Sept. 11 conspiracy humor is everywhere. A fringe theory materializes in cappuccino foam. A sinister vision of George W. Bush surfaces in the iPhone wallpaper. A local news exposé of “teen texting code” gets warped into truther jargon. A glitch in this novelty photo recognition software points the finger at Bush. The trend stirs up a predictable narrative about kids today: that they have no respect for their elders, that they don’t understand history or appreciate the value of human life, etc. “Dumb kids,” one teacher-in-training scolded on Vine. “9/11 isn’t a joke. Never has been.”
One April morning, a medium-deal teen Vine personality was sitting in his history class, learning about 9/11. The classroom lights blinked off and a warmup exercise projected onto the whiteboard with an enormous photograph of the World Trade Center at the moment that the second plane slammed into the second tower and a gigantic fireball came out the other side. Hundreds of people died in that instant. Thousands more were doomed to wait in the blistering towers until death came for them. Millions watched in horror as the attacks unspooled on live television. But 14 years later, a 16-year-old kid looked at the photograph and saw an opportunity. He pulled out his camera phone, aimed it at the towers, panned to his teacher, and called out, “Mr. Varg? I thought Bush did 9/11.”
“Uhhh,” Mr. Varg said.
Soon the video was looping on Vine over and over again as a jubilant caption cried: “HE PAUSED SO HARD OMG BUSH DID IT GUYS I KNEW IT.” It’s since been played more than 3.4 million times. Every few hours, another teen adds a comment to the thousands already filed: “It’s a conspiracy,” they say. Or “I KNEW IT BRUH.” Or just emoji after emoji for tears of joy.
This is not what that crying eagle envisioned when he told us to never forget. Fourteen years after 9/11, teenagers too young to remember the tragedy in the first place are now mining it for comedy. Some prankster hacked into a Minnesota highway sign last month and reprogrammed it to say “BUSH DID 9/11.” When Steph Curry’s 4-year-old daughter Riley commandeered the mic at her dad’s MVP press conference in May, teen Twitter imagined her spitting lines like, “DICK CHENEY MADE MONEY OFF THE IRAQ WAR.” And this spring, a California high school student surprised one lucky girl with a terror-themed promposal:
he modern 9/11 joke takes aim at the truthers, the conspiracy theorists who ruled the Internet fringe in the early aughts. Constructing the joke is often as simple as fishing a conspiratorial slogan out from the Internet’s past and releasing it on the modern Web. The most popular catchphrase of the moment is “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” a riff on the truther mantra that fires sparked by planes couldn’t have burned hot enough to tumble the towers, so government bombs probably helped them out. More than 10 years after the attacks, jokesters co-opted the line, and after an incubation period in weird Twitter, it graduated to teen phenomenon last year and confirmed meme this spring. Now, Sept. 11 conspiracy humor is everywhere. A fringe theory materializes in cappuccino foam. A sinister vision of George W. Bush surfaces in the iPhone wallpaper. A local news exposé of “teen texting code” gets warped into truther jargon. A glitch in this novelty photo recognition software points the finger at Bush. The trend stirs up a predictable narrative about kids today: that they have no respect for their elders, that they don’t understand history or appreciate the value of human life, etc. “Dumb kids,” one teacher-in-training scolded on Vine. “9/11 isn’t a joke. Never has been.”
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