By Arthur O’Sullivan
Sit down, kids. It’s time for a zoomer who was born after 9/11 to yap about this national tragedy to an audience of other zoomers even further removed from 9/11. Has anybody noticed that it’s become safe to joke about now? Sure, jokes about the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people probably started by midnight September 12th. Yet at some point in the intervening 23 years, 9/11 jokes went from being too extreme for TV networks (such as Gilbert Gottfried’s “Empire State Building lay-over joke”), to an endless barrage of them being aired on Family Guy, to edgy memes posted on Vine and MLG edits on YouTube by teens born around 2002, before finally becoming what it is now: a subject more safe to joke about (at least among younger people) than chicken-road-crossing patterns.
Is this a bad thing? In me writing this article, is “Gen Z trying to cancel 9/11 memes”? Far from it. The working title for this article is “nining leven bitch,” in reference to the world-famous tweet that I can hardly look at without wheezing.
But still, isn’t it odd that Gen Z, infamous for being cautious and hypersensitive on the internet (i.e. Twitter), in large part finds 9/11 a completely safe subject? Basically any mild inconvenience will at some point be described by a zoomer as a “personal 9/11,” yet these same kids will go “EEEEEEYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIKES” whenever someone posts anything else from the pre-2018 “edgy” internet. Now you might go, “Arthur old man, are you really making sweeping generalizations without any evidence and based entirely on vibes?” To that I say: of course! I’m talking about petty meme culture on the internet. Basing my thesis on anything more than vibes would do it a disservice. There is no data on the internet. It’s all just the meaningless ramblings of the terminally-online-disconnected-from-reality-pale-Smeagols who cause 80% of Twitter engagement from a room that hasn’t seen sunlight since Bush was president.
This is, in an elliptical way, my explanation for the “9/11 safe-edgy phenomenon.” This is a moral inversion: things that are trivial or childish in real life, like one’s taste in video games or anime, are matters of indescribable importance—of fundamental identity—on Twitter and the internet; meanwhile things that are significant in real life become defanged, meme-ified, and generally unmoored from their moral roots. Back during the Barbenheimer craze last year, the internet drama around Barbie getting snubbed for an Oscar was intense enough that Hillary Clinton sent a tweet about it (probably from an old bathroom closet in a downtown Denver loft). Meanwhile, when some Japanese internet no-lifers tried to express grievance with the Barbenheimer meme, it was largely received with chortles and elaborations on the meme.
So what am I getting at? Am I trying to convey that 9/11 should be more taboo again? Am I just elaborately sneaking in 9/11 memes that I personally find funny? Am I rambling because my thoughts are disorganized? It’s really a combination of the three.
As the Editor Emeritus of a paper that prides itself on free speech, I could never categorically declare something off-limits, no matter the context. This is especially true of humor, where taste is the only real judge and justification. The problem is not, in my view, that “kids these days” are too insensitive about 9/11; it’s that they’re too sensitive about everything else! They’re too wrapped up in trivialities, despite—or perhaps because of—how desensitized they are to major tragedies assaulting our feed all day.
That’s not to say that all edgy jokes are funny, and that nothing’s ever off-limits. I mentioned “taste” before, and while there’s no scientific formula for deciding whether something is in good taste, there are a few indicators which a discerning reader and editor could use:
[1] Intent—was the joke actually made in a good spirit, or is there some kind of bitterness or “shock for shock’s sake” underlying it?
[2] Skill—how much thought and effort was put into the joke or meme, its construction, its flow? In a meme, a good edit will always beat a lazy AI generation.
[3] The laugh/offense ratio—similar to point 2, how hard does the audience laugh compared to their discomfort at the edginess?
For 9/11, or any other massive tragedy, slacking on any of these three things should indicate that the joke isn’t good enough for publishing, on the internet or anywhere.
Image 1 fails on [1] intent (it’s a post on some left-wing anime subreddit that explicitly hates America), [2] skill (the image AI slop), and [3] laugh/offense ratio (whatever laugh is elicited by the absurdity of the image is ruined by the “(based)” at the end of the title, circling back to ill intent. Image 2 fails to even be a joke; it’s just a nauseating “NFT” based on a jumper during the attacks. The extreme tastelessness need not even be explained.
This is the standard to which I hope we adhere in Binghamton Review, now and in the future. As a collegiate “free speech” magazine, our jokes haven’t exactly been as clean and anodyne as say, Jim Gaffigan. But they also haven’t been the most skillful and tasteful either. This 9/11, we are reminded of the eternal tightrope on which the jester dances. And for all the freshmen who don’t even know what 9/11 is:
