European Journal of Cultural Studies

Transcription

European Journal of Cultural Studies
http://ecs.sagepub.com
Media culture and Internet disaster jokes: bin Laden and the attack on the World Trade Center
Giselinde Kuipers
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2002; 5; 450
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             
studies
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks 
and New Delhi
Vol () 450–470
[1367-5494(200211)5:4; 450–470; 028296]
Media culture and Internet
disaster jokes
bin Laden and the attack on the
World Trade Center
Giselinde Kuipers
University of Amsterdam
A B S T R AC T The joke cycle about bin Laden and the attack on the World
Trade Center is the first cycle of Internet disaster jokes. This article argues
that both traditional oral jokes and visual Internet jokes are best understood
as a reaction to media coverage of disasters. For Internet jokes, this
connection with media culture is even stronger than for oral jokes. Internet
jokes are visual collages, assembled from phrases and pictures from popular
media which derive their humorous effect from a combination of elements of
innocuous genres from media, commercial or popular culture with references
to disaster. It is argued that the need for this genre of play is mainly a
reaction to the ambivalent feelings provoked by the media coverage of these
events. In form and content, digital disaster jokes are a reflection of today’s
fragmented, visual media culture, as well as a comment on this culture.
K E Y WO R D S
collage, genre, humour, Osama bin Laden, popular culture
in a car accident, an aeroplane crashes into a
building, a firework factory or spaceship explode, famine strikes in
Africa, the president of the USA is involved in a sex scandal or a
murderous paedophile gets caught, people start inventing jokes. Jokes
about shocking events usually circulate within several days of the event.
They spread fast and, within a few days, most people within the region/
culture concerned will have heard them. These ‘disaster jokes’ (Davies,
1998; Dundes, 1987; Ellis, 2001; Morrow, 1987; Oring, 1987) usually
cause outrage as well as amusement; they are deliberately offensive, as
well as highly popular.
The attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) on 11 September 2001
is a typical event that gives rise to disaster jokes: highly covered by the
media, much talked about, tragic, but undeniably sensational. The first
When a princess dies
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jokes about this attack reached me on 13 September. After this, many
jokes followed. However, the joke cycle about the attack on the WTC and
ensuing events differed from earlier joke cycles in that it consisted
mainly of pictures, sent by email or collected on websites, rather than of
the traditional orally transmitted jokes. Most of these pictures were
clearly ‘homemade’, not created by professionals. Text was added to
existing pictures or pieces of pictures were combined to create a
humorous effect. There were verbal jokes as well, both in the USA and in
other countries such as the Netherlands, but I encountered considerably
fewer of these than during the joke cycles about the Clinton scandals, the
death of Diana or other more regional disasters. The disaster joke had
been transferred to the Internet.
This article deals with such pictorial disaster jokes on the Internet.
First, the jokes about bin Laden and 11 September will be analysed and a
comparison will be made with ‘traditional’ verbal disaster jokes. This
comparison will shed light on the consequences of a transformation that
many oral and verbal genres are undergoing – the transformation from
daily interaction to the Internet, from oral culture to today’s highly
visual media culture. Both oral and pictorial disaster jokes, I will argue,
are best understood as a reaction to, as well as a comment on, mass media
and media culture. In the new Internet jokes, this connection with media
culture is even stronger than in oral jokes. Not only do they refer to
media culture, but Internet jokes are visual collages assembled from
phrases and pictures taken from popular media. Indeed, many of these
Internet jokes, in a joking attempt to put disaster back into the fictional
domain of popular culture, even portray the events of ‘911’ as events from
popular media.
The meaning of disaster jokes
Jokes are among the most widespread genres of modern popular culture.
All over the world, people tell jokes: short humorous stories or riddles
ending in a punch line. This standardized or ‘canned joke’ is a modern
genre. Wickberg (1998) has described the rise of this genre in the 19th
century as part of the ‘commodification of humor’, a process in which
humour became increasingly changeable, fleeting, easily transferable
from one context to another. The modern joke is an international – even
a global – genre: themes, characters, settings and punch lines are very
similar across cultures (Davies, 1990). However, they are constantly
adapted to local circumstances and new developments. The rapid change
of the joke is enhanced by the fact that jokes are transmitted orally and
adapted at every retelling. Their great variability, fast change, along with
the absence of a clear author and an existence across national boundaries
make jokes a typical specimen of popular culture.
The disaster joke is a small and probably recent subdivision within the 451
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larger genre of the joke. Several explanations for the existence of disaster
jokes have been put forward. A common explanation that is very popular
in common-sense accounts of these jokes holds that they are a means of
coping with unpleasant experiences. Morrow describes the jokes about
the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 as part of a process
similar to coping with a crippling disease: ‘the M.S. patient passes
through stages of anger, acceptance, and acceptation, the same stages that
many of us who have been hurt by the Challenger catastrophe must pass
through’ (1987: 182). Likewise, Dundes states: ‘The available evidence
strongly suggests that sick joke cycles constitute a kind of collective
mental hygienic defence mechanism that allows people to cope with the
most dire of disasters’ (1987: 73).
An obvious problem with this approach is that disaster jokes are
appreciated by many people who in no way can be said to suffer
personally from the disaster. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for
instance, gave rise to a worldwide cycle of jokes (Davies, 1999). One can
wonder whether the jokers around the world really were struggling to
accept her death. It is likely that jokes are a coping mechanism for those
directly involved, but for those more distant from the event, such jokes
might provide very different pleasures. As often happens in the study of
humour, it is reduced to one specific psychological function that all
humour is supposed to have. Another objection to this explanation is that
it tries to explain the existence of the jokes without looking at the jokes
themselves. In my view, a close look at the content and structure of the
jokes is needed before one can explain their existence. A final objection
to this approach is that it cannot account for historical change. Although
it is hard to trace the history of jokes, disaster jokes are probably a fairly
recent genre (Davies, 1998: 142–9), whereas suffering and disaster are as
old as humanity.
A more promising approach is the analysis of Challenger jokes by
Eliott Oring (1987), who suggests that the rise of these jokes is connected
with the coverage of disasters in the mass media. The media attempt to
prescribe the audience’s reactions, forcing feelings of grief and mourning
upon them, openly discussing and showing what is usually considered
‘unspeakable’ suffering. The estrangement this causes is augmented by
the ‘sandwiching’ of tragedy between commerce and entertainment in
the media. Oring suggests that these jokes are a ‘rebellion’ against this
‘discourse about disaster’ (1987: 276). He provides several examples of
jokes that clearly refer to media coverage. For instance, many jokes about
the explosion of Challenger contain references to television commercials.
Since 1987, the impact of mass media has increased significantly. New
digital media have joined traditional media and enabled an even more
rapid global circulation of texts, sounds and images, to the point that
western culture can be described as ‘media culture’ (Kellner, 1995). The
452 transformation of verbal/oral disaster jokes into pictorial digital jokes
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may well provide new insights into the way disaster jokes are related to
and comment on the media. In order to understand this relationship,
however, we first need to look at the characteristics of both oral and
Internet jokes.
Oral disaster jokes and media culture
Most disasters in recent years have led to cycles of disaster jokes: the
explosion of Challenger (1987), the sinking of the Herald of Free
Enterprise (1987) and the Estonia (1994), the Gulf War (1991), the death
of Diana (1997), the near impeachment of President Clinton (1998–9)
and many more regional disasters. These joke cycles are all remarkably
similar. They usually follow a clear pattern, developing from short twoline jokes to more sophisticated narratives. The earliest jokes are often
puns and wordplays, whereas the later jokes are more complicated,
playing with meanings rather than words.
All disaster jokes have a similar technique, which I will call the
‘humorous clash’. In the joke, the disaster is in some humorous way
linked with a topic that is felt to be incompatible with such a serious and
dramatic event. This incompatibility can go two ways. In some cases, the
joke combines the disaster with a reference to something shocking or
taboo. In these cases, the humorous clash results from the confrontation
of the disaster with ‘forbidden’ references popular in many jokes, such as
sex, religion, aggression or ethnicity. However, in most cases, disaster
jokes focus on topics rather less common in jokes, something innocent or
innocuous such as children, food, advertising or fairy tales. Two examples
from the ‘Diana cycle’ are:
Q: What does Princess Di turn into at midnight?
A: The wall.
Q: How did they know that the driver had dandruff ?
A: They found his head and shoulders in the glove box.
According to modern humour theory, the basis of humour is always some
kind of humorous incongruity or ‘script incompatibility’ (Attardo and
Raskin, 1991; Raskin, 1985). This incongruity can be between the real
and unreal (absurd humour), between the taboo and non-taboo (sexual
humour) or between the gruesome and the innocent, the banal or even
the cheerful (sick humour). The ‘clashes’ provoked by disaster jokes are a
specific variety of this humorous incongruity.
An important characteristic of disaster jokes is their use of
standardized language: stock phrases and household names are combined
in an incongruous way with references to the disaster. They may be
derived from media, as in the jokes collected by Oring (1987), but also
from other domains. As previously noted, many of the Challenger jokes
contained references to commercials and brand names – after all, the 453
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stock phrases are hammered into our heads. Popular techniques are
parodying television commercials, inventing new meanings for old
abbreviations or mimicking the style of advertisements (New: . . .! Out
now: . . .!).
In these references to commercials and other standardized language,
disaster jokes differ from other jokes. As with all oral genres, jokes are
highly standardized but use stock phrases and situations of a specific joke
culture (‘a man in a bar’, ‘a desert island’, ‘a fly in my soup’, and so on),
elements that disaster jokes hardly ever use. This difference is probably
caused by the ephemeral character of disaster jokes. Jokes referring to
commercials and other stock phrases are easily reproduced and
transferred to contexts other than the original one. Therefore they
rapidly transform from spontaneous jokes into ‘canned’ jokes. Moreover,
slogans and stock phrases are easily repeated, and the combination of
everyday clichés with shocking events easily provokes a joke. However,
this difference between disaster jokes and other jokes suggests that
disaster jokes form a specific category of joke. They are related to
cultural domains other than joke culture, such as the media.
Another characteristic of disaster jokes supporting Oring’s thesis is the
fact that disaster jokes are often introduced as ‘information’ or ‘news’.
This connection with news and current events is especially clear in jokes
such as this one circulating in the Netherlands in 1987:
Q: Did you know how the Herald of Free Enterprise sank?
A: A Jehovah’s Witness put his foot in when the door was closing.
Jokes like this are very common in disaster joke cycles. They jokingly do
what many journalists try to do in earnest – reveal the cause of the
disaster. Disaster jokes have another tendency in common with
journalists; they try to personalize the disaster. Even when the disaster is
not directly linked to a specific person, the jokes tend to single out one of
the victims or villains. For instance, most jokes about Challenger focused
on teacher Christa McAuliffe (Oring, 1987).
One final characteristic of disaster jokes, which is evident in the jokes
cited, is that they do not contain a statement. Rather, they are
deliberately amoral, withholding any kind of moral language where this
is felt to be fitting or even obligatory. In this respect, they challenge not
exclusively the media discourse, but all discourses on disaster and
suffering. It is this amorality, which is felt as being highly disrespectful,
that causes the usual indignation about these jokes. At the same time,
this amorality accounts for the shock effect that provides much of the fun
of these jokes.
The characteristics described here can be discerned in most of the joke
cycles I have witnessed: a development from language play to playing
with meanings, to sophistication; the recycling and use of stock phrases;
454 the highly personified jokes; their presentation as ‘information’; and the
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amoral tone. Disaster jokes contain few traditional joke ingredients other
than the basic narrative structure and the punch line. Instead, they use
elements from media and advertising, but also from folk culture,
children’s songs and taboo domains such as sex or religion. In short, they
use whatever they can find to produce an incongruous effect.
Disaster jokes on the Internet
The 398 Internet jokes analysed here were collected in October and
November 2001 from five different Dutch websites.1 Jokes that were
clearly made by professionals, such as cartoons, were excluded from the
analysis because I was looking for pictorial jokes that most resembled
oral jokes: no author, freely spread and adaptable.
The pictures were first subjected to a content analysis. They were
assessed for subject, form and humorous technique. The few pictures that
weren’t clearly humorous were excluded. They were usually patriotic,
showing American national symbols without any clear attempt at humour.
Table 1 shows the subjects of the jokes. As is clear from this Table, Osama
bin Laden was the most popular subject in these jokes, figuring in 68.8
percent of the pictures. Like oral disaster jokes, the jokes were highly
personalized. The second most popular subject was the war in Afghanistan
(41.5 percent). The attack on the WTC was third (35.4 percent). Jokes
referring to Islam and Muslims formed only 7.29 percent of the jokes
which seems to indicate that, at least in this part of the popular imagination, the blame was more on bin Laden and Afghans than on Islam as a
whole. Although all jokes were pictures, only 29.4 percent contained no
text at all. The text was either part of the picture (a slogan, name or logo)
or a caption-style comment on the picture. In many cases, especially in the
last category, it was the text that provided the humorous effect.
Table 1.
Subjects of the jokes
Subject
Number of jokes
Osama bin Laden
War/Afghanistan
Attack on the WTC
Muslims
Bush
Other western leaders
Saddam Hussein
274
165
141
29
22
10
5
Total
646
%
68.8
41.5
35.4
7.29
5.63
2.51
1.26
Note: While the number of jokes analysed was 398, the total here (and as a
percentage) reflects the considerable overlap in the subject matter of the jokes.
455
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Most of the pictures were as blandly global as is most of the Internet.
The language used was English, without any clear reference to their
origins. Although collected on Dutch sites, most of the pictures were
probably created in the USA. Judging from the patriotism or the
references to exclusively American brands, some were definitely made by
Americans. Of all the jokes, 15.3 percent were Dutch, which means they
were either in Dutch or referred to Dutch culture. On the whole, the
technique and content of these jokes were similar to the international
ones. The main difference was that the Dutch jokes were never openly
hostile, which is probably the result of the geographical and psychological distance. Other peripheral countries had their own jokes: I
encountered one Swedish, one Spanish and several Belgian jokes. Thus,
these jokes show the interaction between global joke culture and local
cultures – American pictures conquer the world, other cultures invent
their own variety for ‘domestic’ use.
The jokes can be divided into two broad categories: first, humour based
on a clash of incongruous domains; and, second, jokes containing more
aggressive and/or degrading references to bin Laden and/or Afghanistan
and the Taliban. I will now describe both categories in more detail.
The humorous clash
The majority of the jokes (71.3 percent) contained a clash of incongruous
domains similar to the one described in the verbal disaster joke genre: a
reference to bin Laden, the war in Afghanistan or the attack on the WTC
combined with a reference to something that is relatively innocent or
banal. Most of these innocent or banal references came from three
specific domains: commercials, popular culture and computers.
Most common were jokes referring to the attacks combined with
commercials and advertisements: advertisements with bin Laden’s
picture pasted onto them; well-known slogans (‘Just do it’) added to
pictures of the attack on the WTC; or pastiches of packages of goods with
bin Laden’s name or face on them. Also popular were references to
popular culture, varying from Sesame Street’s Bert flying a plane into the
WTC to variations on song titles, lyrics and CD covers. A much smaller
category consisted of jokes referring to computer culture: flight simulator
games or pictures of the WTC with the well-known Microsoft window
graphic asking: ‘Are you sure you want to delete these buildings?’ Other
domains that were used were weather forecasts, children’s culture
(‘Talitubbies’), tourism and travel (‘Fly straight into the heart of New
York for only 599 guilders’). All these domains are harmless, innocent
and very much part of everyday life – very remote from the
extraordinary events of 11 September. Another common factor, which I
will return to later, is that all these domains are prominent in
456 contemporary visual culture.
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Figure 1.
What these pictorial jokes do is best described as ‘playing with genres’:
they combine news events with the generic conventions of the computer
game, the postcard, the karaoke video, the advertisement or the CD
cover. The basic mechanism resembles verbal disaster jokes; a clash of
domains, one of which is felt to be incompatible with the serious nature
of a disaster. However, where the oral joke is a genre in itself, the
Internet joke has no generic conventions of its own (yet). By definition, it
borrows from other genres. As can be seen from the many incongruous
domains used in these jokes, the new medium offers a whole new
repertoire of pictorial and linguistic conventions to play with. Disaster
jokes on the Internet play with language and meanings, just like oral
jokes, but most of all they play with genre.
Like traditional disaster jokes, Internet jokes are deliberately amoral.
Much of the fun lies in the irreverence of these jokes. These did not
contain any empathy, nor did they make any statement. The aim of these
jokes is primarily fun, albeit a deliberately shocking kind of fun. But, like
oral disaster jokes, this fun may contain a comment on culture and the
media.
However, the Internet jokes in the next category are similarly
irreverent and amoral, but some of them do contain a statement. The
humour in these jokes is based on aggressive and degrading references,
and not all of these references are entirely amoral, neutral and detached. 457
Figure 2.
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458
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Figure 3.
The humorous visualization of aggression, patriotism and
degradation
Of all the pictures, 46.5 percent contained elements that could be
described as aggressive, degrading or patriotic. These three were coded as
one category because they turned out to be hard to distinguish:
aggression and degradation were strongly linked in many of the pictures.
And, as will become clear from the descriptions, the patriotism in the
pictures was also usually aggressive. The one thing that was easy to code
was the generally aggressive nature of these jokes.
These aggressive references varied from playful pastiches on war
movies to unmistakable bellicosity. In some cases, the pictures are best
understood as playing with genres that contain a lot of violence such as
computer games or movies. Some 20 percent of the jokes unmistakably
contained an aggressive statement,2 such as pictures of bin Laden being
hanged, gutted or raped. The hostility in these jokes was usually aimed at
Afghanistan or bin Laden; in some cases, at Bush. Only very rarely was
the aggression aimed at Muslims in general, which makes this genre
stand out from oral jokes that thrive on references to generic ethnic and
religious stereotypes.
The aggression and degradation were mostly expressed visually rather
than in words. Ample use was made of signs and symbols denoting war
and aggression, again showing how strongly these jokes are embedded in 459
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Figure 4.
visual culture. Some pictures denoted direct physical aggression such as
the picture of bin Laden’s severed head being eaten by an American
eagle and other bloody pictures of hangings and injuries. Others
contained symbols of modern warfare: mushroom clouds, fighter planes,
explosions. Not all of these jokes were equally explicit. Many jokes were
simple pictures of bin Laden with the concentric circles of a shooting
target. American national symbols, often visual ones, were a recurrent
theme in many of the jokes: stars and stripes, the American eagle, Uncle
460 Sam, American fighter planes and McDonald’s golden arch.
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Many pictures were degrading rather than violent or bellicose. These
had mainly to do with traditionally ‘shameful’ subjects: sex, gender, faeces.
Several pictures showed bin Laden engaged in sex with animals or with
Bush, Saddam Hussein or anonymous males. Others showed bin Laden’s
photo at the bottom of a toilet or a dog defecating on his picture. The few
degrading pictures that did not refer to bin Laden himself were concerned
with his mother or his birth, or concerned Afghan women (‘Miss
Afghanistan’) pictured as either fat, hairy or both. Finally, a fair number of
pictures portrayed bin Laden either as an animal or congregating with
animals such as pigs, monkeys, goats and other ‘degrading’ animals.
Hostility and degradation are common ingredients of humour
(Zillman, 2000). However, simple debasement is never enough: a good
joke has to have some kind of incongruity or surprise effect – a clash of
domains. There was a whole series of jokes, for instance, where the
annihilation of Afghanistan was suggested in a humorous way: the map
of the Middle East showing Afghanistan as nothing but scorched earth or
replaced by ‘Lake America’ or ‘Lake Victory’; the well-known picture of
the American flag planted on the barren landscape of the moon with the
caption ‘Planting the flag in Afghanistan’. Another technique is the
‘simile’: bin Laden among pigs, bin Laden toilet paper, bin Laden
nappies. In the cleverer jokes, the incongruity was enhanced by a text
accompanying the degrading picture. One of the porn pictures of Bush
and bin Laden came with the text ‘Make love not war’.
The technique underlying these jokes is, once again, genre play. They
make use of a visual symbolism well known from other genres, and many
actually mimic these genres. For degradation, they used (gay) pornographic pictures, but many other genres from popular culture were also
parodied. These were usually popular genres that contained violence such
as comics (bin Laden as Superman, flying into the WTC), television series
(the A-Team’s B.A. defeating bin Laden), movie posters (‘Afghanic Park’;
the Home Alone poster showing Bush assaulted by bin Laden). The most
prominent genre was cinema. Pictures of fighter planes in Afghanistan
and the destruction of the WTC were transformed into movie stills by
adding captions or actors. One in particular nicely sums up the mood of
these jokes: King Kong in his famous Empire State Building pose on the
WTC, swatting planes like flies (Figure 1). The caption says: ‘Where was
Kingkong when we needed him?’ As these examples show, these jokes are
strongly embedded in today’s highly visual popular culture. Indeed, they
seem to present the events of ‘911’ as an event of popular media culture.
Collage: the technique of Internet jokes
The relationship with a wider visual culture was visible in the jokes
themselves: all the Internet jokes used existing visual material. In some
cases, text was added to an existing picture, a caption to a cartoon or a 461
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headline to a news photograph. In the majority of the jokes, the picture
was literally assembled from elements of other pictures. Sometimes
elements of the picture were new – the ‘new World Trade Center’ in the
shape of a hand ‘giving the finger’, but even this was pasted onto an
existing picture of the Manhattan skyline.
The procedure by which these pictures are created is best described by
the term collage (Giddens, 1991; Levi-Strauss, 1962). The creators of
these jokes use pictures, words, sentences and slogans from many sources
to assemble their jokes (Figure 2). They paste the face of one person onto
another’s body, the slogan of one brand onto another picture. All the
pictures collected are in some way composed of disparate elements. Even
the simplest variety, adding a phrase to an existing picture, effectively
creates a new picture with a new message.
Very often, this procedure changes the genre: news photograph to
advertisement; US military promotional material to computer game. A
good example of such a genre shift is a picture of bin Laden making a
speech, subtitled karaoke-style with the lyrics to the Abba song ‘Super
Trouper’. Interestingly, adding a phrase to a picture is a genre convention
itself, most notably of the three genres of cartoons, newspaper
photographs and advertisements.
The manipulation of the pictures themselves provides more
opportunities for genre play than the mere adding of words. Adding
visual elements to a picture not only turns news items into commercials,
but also war into weather forecasts, human tragedy into comic strip,
terrorism into action movie. Thus, the collage procedure is a very
effective technique for the genre play that is typical of these jokes.
In Internet jokes, the collage technique seems to be used deliberately
and self-consciously. The creators of the pictures do not try to disguise
the fact that the jokes are pasted together. On the contrary, they seem to
want the collage to show. It is the deliberate ‘constructedness’ of these
pictures that makes them stand out from other genres on the Internet as
well as elsewhere.
The collage effect is omnipresent in today’s media culture (Giddens,
1991: 26; Slevin, 2000). Both in print and electronic media, disparate
elements exist side by side, interacting in random ways. Media users are
trained to navigate through these collages, constructing coherent
messages and narratives from these fragmented media. Creators of media
messages usually go to great lengths to aid their users in finding their
way around the collages by using pointers, captions and frames, and to
conceal the disparate elements joined by ‘cut and paste’ processes
underlying most media messages. The creators of Internet jokes do the
opposite, attempting to provide their audiences with a coherent image,
but not concealing the process. Even if their products are very
sophisticated technically, they make sure that the process of ‘cut and
462 paste’ underlying the joke remains evident. They are as self-conscious in
:
  
their play with the genres and conventions of visual culture as in their
play with the meaning of a disaster. And, I shall argue, underlying this
self-conscious play with genres, conventions and meanings is a play with
today’s highly visual and fragmented media culture.
Internet disaster jokes as genre play
In many ways, bin Laden jokes are similar to oral disaster jokes. Both
oral and Internet disaster jokes often derive their effect from the clash of
the innocent with the shocking. Quite a number of Internet jokes use the
kind of language play popular in oral disaster jokes; some are even ‘visual
puns’. Much of the humour in these pictures is dependent on language.
Usually the text provides the humour, and several of these texts could
easily be (and probably were originally) oral disaster jokes in themselves.
Like oral jokes, Internet jokes make ample use of commercials, song
titles and other standardized language. In some cases, Internet jokes even
refer to oral joke culture. For instance, several of the Dutch pictures
contain references to Belgians, the classical ‘stupid’ people in Dutch
jokes.
It is hard to discern the phases of oral jokes in Internet jokes. It may
be that the efficiency of the information flow on the Internet speeds up
these processes or that pictures spread so fast that developments cannot
be traced anymore. It seems likely, however, that it has to do with the
medium. Oral disaster jokes start out as spontaneous jokes in normal
conversation and only become jokes through numerous retellings, whereas the creation of pictures always needs some conscious effort on the part
of the creator(s). In a way, all Internet jokes are sophisticated – in a
strictly technical sense.
Another similarity is the focus on persons. The Internet jokes were
strongly focused on the character of bin Laden. The war in Afghanistan
was often visualized as a confrontation between Bush and bin Laden. If
anything, the Internet jokes seemed more personalized than oral jokes.
Very few jokes target Muslims or Afghanis, whereas humour can be used
very effectively as a means of stereotyping or degrading groups.
Another thing the genres have in common is their flexibility. In oral
jokes, as well as in pictures, there can be many versions of a similar joke.
There were numerous variations on advertisements for aeroplane carriers
‘to the heart of New York’ and ‘wanted’ posters showing bin Laden. Also,
elements were added to already assembled jokes to create new jokes. For
instance, pictures from a series called ‘what will happen if the Taliban
wins?’, showing the Statue of Liberty with a veil (Figure 3) and a mosque
on the Manhattan skyline, were later put together as a postcard called
‘Greetings from New Palestine 2006’.
A striking difference between Internet jokes and oral jokes is the
aggressive and degrading humour in some of the former. Although oral 463
                               5 ( 4 )
jokes can be highly personalized, they usually do not refer to the death or
degradation of the persons involved. This difference may be related to
the nature of the events: unlike other disasters, this was not an accident,
but an act of violence with a clearly defined perpetrator. Also, most
disasters don’t culminate in war, and war gives rise, of course, to
aggression (Figure 4).
Another reason for the prominence of aggressive symbolism in the
visual jokes may simply be the high degree of warlike rhetoric in media
and political discourse about the events. Just as disaster jokes are
interpreted by Oring as a reaction to the ‘discourse on disaster’, the
bellicose jokes may be a comment on the discourse on war. Content
analysis alone does not do complete justice to the ambiguity of humour.
From the pictures alone, it is often hard to tell whether the jokes express
hostility or a mockery of this hostility.
A major difference between oral and visual jokes is the importance of
collage in the latter. This technique is not as alien to verbal jokes as it
may seem. Popular culture, especially oral culture and traditional folk
culture, often makes use of the assembly of many different elements.
However, the self-conscious collage effect is typical of Internet jokes.
The aspect in which Internet jokes differ most from traditional jokes
is the mixture of, and reference to, many different genres – the defining
characteristic of these Internet jokes. Although traditional jokes use
items from different genres as well – notably commercials but also
anything from religion to children’s songs – Internet jokes have taken
this much further. Of course, oral disaster jokes already have (or are) a
genre. Genre conventions are very strong in oral culture, and disaster
jokes, being something of a hybrid already, cannot break away from
them. The visual jokes, on the other hand, are not as strongly bound to
generic conventions, although this may well change. The rise of a new
medium inevitably gives rise to new genres and new conventions: the
Internet has provided us with many new genres already. For the time
being, the most striking characteristic of Internet jokes – which may turn
out someday to be a genre in itself – is the genre play, the way in which
they combine and violate genre conventions to achieve humorous effect.
A final difference between oral jokes and Internet jokes has to do with
this mixing of genres. Internet jokes are constantly parodying, mimicking
and recycling items from many cultural domains. These jokes are
strongly embedded in the visual culture of commercials, movies,
television, computer games and programmes, and the various entertainments of modern popular culture. Oring (1987) shows how traditional
disaster jokes often use commercials. Internet jokes use even more
genres, in more different ways, and from all domains of popular culture.
This takes us back to Oring’s thesis: the analysis of the pictures clearly
shows their relation with media culture – news, commercials as well as
464 many other genres in both old and new media.
:
  
Visual humour and media culture
Humour is always among one of the first things to show up in new
technologies. The earliest mass produced print books were humorous; the
earliest Internet newsgroups were humorous; and now many pictures on
the Internet are humorous. It is too early to say whether Internet jokes
truly are a new genre, but they differ in several interesting ways from
traditional oral jokes. These new characteristics may tell us more about
the meaning of disaster jokes.
The new disaster jokes are visual rather than verbal. Digitization
often coincides with visualization, and, with democratization, it has
become extremely easy to create digital pictures, and even easier to
spread them around. The fact that the technology to create and view
these pictures has become accessible to more people is one of the reasons
for this visualization. Another reason is probably that media culture itself
is an increasingly visual culture. The coverage of 11 September and
ensuing events has been, like the Gulf War, a televised event (Kellner,
1995). In many ways, the visualization of these jokes is a reflection of
modern media culture. Likewise, collage can be seen as a reflection of the
increasingly fragmented nature of these visuals: channels such as CNN
now have several frames running at the same time, and the Internet,
with its banners, windows and pop-up images, is even more fragmented.
This visualization has created the opportunity for a new technique.
Internet jokes derive much of their humorous effect from the juxtaposition of text and image or an incongruous combination of images.
Genre play would not have been possible in oral jokes with their strong
genre conventions. The new techniques of visual humour resonate with
developments in the increasingly fragmented media, but they are more
than a reflection of visualized, fragmented media culture.
The creators of these jokes consciously create fragmented pictures,
whereas they could have created coherent, smooth, realistic ones, like
those on television. This cut and paste process creates the incongruity, the
clash of domains, from which the jokes derive their humour. But humour
offers more than just pleasure. Through this humorous effect, the
mechanisms underlying this visual media culture are exposed. As Oring
argues, jokes are a rebellion or a comment on media discourses. But, in
adapting, mocking and recreating media culture, the visual techniques of
these jokes expose the visual as well as the emotional mechanisms
underlying media culture.
Disaster and popular culture
The transformation of jokes from oral culture to the Internet is more
than just a transformation from words to pictures. The content of
Internet jokes differs in some ways from oral jokes, especially in the 465
                               5 ( 4 )
strong connection with commercial, popular and computer culture.
Although oral jokes often use such ‘media’ domains as well (especially
advertising), Internet jokes are almost exclusively based on such
references to popular culture. Even in the aggressive jokes, the
aggression is often depicted with imagery from popular culture.
Why did the anonymous creators of these jokes use images and phrases
from popular and commercial culture? Oring’s analysis provides a good
starting point here. Indeed, these pictures reflect the sandwiching of the
images of terrorism and war between commercials, comedies and games.
And the discourse of the media, as well as the actual coverage of events,
were as intrusive as Oring describes in the case of the Challenger disaster.
The whole world, not only the USA, was drawn into a discourse of, first,
shock and fear, then grief and mourning, and finally bellicosity and patriotism. This media discourse causes conflicting emotions in media users:
they are drawn into having feelings for people they do not know; they are
confronted with constant talk of things usually considered ‘unspeakable’.
These mixed emotions are complicated even more by the (slightly guilty)
fascination experienced by many people in the audience. The ambivalence,
alienation and annoyance this causes may well be vented in humour. These
visual jokes defy the moral discourse of the media, provide the pleasure of
boundary transgression and block feelings of involvement.
However, the clash and alienation caused by the presentation of
disasters in the media cannot explain the strong connection with popular
culture. In my view, there is another reason for these references to
popular culture. The media coverage of disasters is itself like popular
culture. It is ‘just like a movie’ many people interviewed on television, as
well as people around me, commented when they saw the explosion and
collapse of the WTC. As Ellis (2001: 5) observes: ‘I am . . . struck by how
many people found the video footage of the real Trade Center disaster
strikingly similar to the special effects in popular action movies like the
Die Hard Series.’ When the attacks on Afghanistan started, people even
complained about how little there was to see on television. Many people
watching television on 11 September remarked how ‘unreal’ it all
seemed, but yet so familiar: images of wars and exploding skyscrapers are
part and parcel of popular culture. Internet jokes referring to action
movies such as Die Hard explicitly articulate the similarity of images
from popular culture to these events.
During such events, elements of ‘fiction’ enter the news. Modern
media users are very skilled in reacting to and interpreting media. They
have been ‘trained’ to respond to messages and images in a specific way.
Grief and tears are usually restricted to the genre of drama, explosions to
the action movie, burning skyscrapers to the disaster movie. When
disaster strikes, ‘fictional’ events enter the news. Moreover, media often
frame such dramatic events as narrative, as Kellner (1995: 198–227) has
466 shown regarding the Gulf War.
:
  
This gives another clue to the importance of genre play in Internet
jokes. Disaster jokes occur when genre boundaries become fuzzy. These
jokes – verbal as well as digital – put disasters back where they are
usually found: in fiction and popular culture. This explains the
prominence of movie posters, characters from children’s programmes
and other references to fictional genres from popular culture. It also
explains the symbolism found in many of the aggressive jokes, which
used the visual language of pop culture and the aggression of comic
strips, computer games and war movies.
These disaster jokes can be interpreted not only as a play with genres,
but also as a play with reality and the fictionality of events. Modern mass
media constantly addresses people’s emotions and understanding, as well
as their skill in dealing with disparate and unrelated pieces of
information at the same time. This collage effect forces the audience to
constantly keep in mind the boundaries between different items and
genres in the media. But, most of all, it forces them to keep in mind the
boundaries underlying this; between fact and fiction, between commerce
and the stuff in between commercials, between comedy and tragedy. One
of the main signalling devices in dealing with this collage effect is genre.
The ability to play with something is the ultimate proof of one’s grasp
of the matter. These jokes play with many elements of media culture, but
especially with genre, in a highly sophisticated way. Thus, these visual
jokes are not just a comment on the discourse of disaster; they are a more
general reflection on, as well as of, the structure of modern media. Never
does the collage effect become as clear, the policing of genre boundaries
as complicated, as in the case of disasters. Then emotion, news,
commerce, games, fun, popular culture and human suffering become
more entangled then ever. Internet jokes can be interpreted as a joking
attempt to put disasters back where they are usually found, where we
feel they belong and where we want them to stay – in the fictional,
pleasurable domain of popular culture.
Conclusion
People are quick at stating that disaster jokes are a way of coping with
trauma. The completely amoral tone of many of these jokes does not
seem very soothing, healing or comforting. Some of the jokes are even
openly hostile – not the best way of coping with any kind of trauma. If
one has to point to one function that such jokes fulfil, it would have to be
reaction and expression of ambivalence. The things most joked about are
the things people have mixed feelings about: sex, gender relations,
religion, ethnic relations, abnormal or threatening behaviour.
Mass media provide people with an enormous amount of conflicting
emotions, showing from up close the suffering of others. Mass media also
teach us to react to this through fictitious suffering. In the case of 467
                               5 ( 4 )
disasters, media summon our involvement, but to many people this
remains distant, unreal and even fictional. The boundaries between
news, popular culture and fiction become blurred and this creates
ambivalence. Disaster jokes are best understood as a collective reaction to
a phenomenon that is, to a large extent, experienced collectively through
the mass media.
Internet disaster jokes are also a reflection of modern media culture.
Both the form and content of these jokes mirror today’s highly visual,
fragmented, commercial, popular computerized culture. These pictorial
jokes show media users’ skill in dealing with this culture, their grasp of
genre as an important signalling device and boundary marker. And,
finally, Internet disaster jokes comment on media culture by playing
with its conventions, exposing its techniques through collage.
In a modest way, the existence of these jokes shows that people are
capable of playing with the boundaries and distinctions guiding the
media. Thus, these jokes are examples of ‘the active way in which media
are appropriated by people. . . . Images of the media are quickly moved
into local repertories of irony, anger, humor, and resistance’ (Appadurai,
1996: 7). Moreover, the need for this play is triggered by real events.
People invent and enjoy these jokes especially when reality, as reported
in the media, tends to become unreal and fictionlike. Then they start to
invent jokes that show an awareness of the ways in which the boundaries
of the media are kept in order. The collage effect of these jokes mirrors
media culture, but exposes it also.
Interestingly, the ‘do it yourself’ style of the Internet, of which these
digital jokes are a prime example, resonates nicely with traditional oral
culture, which includes oral joke culture. Like the jokes and stories of
oral culture, Internet jokes have no authors (unless everyone is an
author). They are constantly created, adapted and recreated. Such aspects
of ‘folk culture’ make their comeback into Internet culture, albeit on a
grander scale. Through Internet jokes, media users are temporarily
transformed from spectators into participants, even commentators.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jeroen de Kloet as well as the anonymous referees of my
article for their helpful comments.
Notes
468
1. The focus on Dutch websites is a result of the fact that this study is part of a
larger project. As will become clear later in the article, most of the jokes on
these sites probably were not created in the Netherlands. A short check of
websites outside of the Netherlands showed that the jokes collected there
did not differ much, in form or content, from those of other countries.
The websites visited were: http://www.members.rott.chello.nl/maalst1/
:
  
(accessed 19 November 2001); http://www.home.student.uva.nl/
thomas.roes/wtc/index.html (accessed 4 November 2001);
http://www.home01.wxs.nl/~ceeli026/ (accessed 2 November 2001);
http://www.funnysex.nl/ (accessed 22 November 2001); and
http://www.onzin.com/ (accessed 22 November 2001). Each site contained
up to 300 pictures. After this, my collection became saturated and other
sites added no new pictures.
2. I am deliberately vague in my estimate. Only in extreme cases can hostility
be inferred directly from the content of a joke. Usually humorous
aggression is too ambivalent. It depends on the context as to whether a joke
is a ‘play with aggression’, a reference to a taboo topic akin to sexual or sick
humour, or real aggression. While hostility adds to the enjoyment of a
degrading joke, a clever joke might make people laugh while disagreeing
with the hostile content (Davies, 1990).
References
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Attardo, S. and V. Raskin (1991) ‘Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and
Joke Representation Model’, Humor 4(3/4): 293–347.
Davies, J.C.H. (1990) Ethnic Jokes around the World. Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press.
Davies, J.C.H. (1998) Jokes and Their Relation to Society. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Davies, J.C.H. (1999) ‘Jokes about the Death of Diana, Princess of Wales’, in
Tony Walter (ed.) The Mourning for Diana, pp. 253–68. Oxford: Berg.
Dundes, A. (1987) ‘At Ease, Disease: AIDS Jokes as Sick Humor’, American
Behavioural Scientist 30(3): 72–81.
Ellis, B. (2001) ‘A Model for Collecting and Interpreting World Trade Center
Disaster Jokes’, New Directions in Folklore (online journal).
[http://www.astro.temple.edu/~camille/journal.html]
Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Kellner, D. (1995) Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between
the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge.
Levi-Strauss, C. (1962) La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon.
Morrow, P.D. (1987) ‘Those Sick Challenger Jokes’, Journal of Popular Culture
20(4): 175–84.
Oring, E. (1987) ‘Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster: The Challenger Shuttle
Explosion and its Joke Cycle’, Journal of American Folklore 100(397): 276–
86.
Raskin, V. (1985) Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Slevin, J. (2000) The Internet and Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wickberg, D. (1998) The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern
America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
469
                               5 ( 4 )
Zillman, D. (2000) ‘Humor and Comedy’, in D. Zillman and P. Vorderer (eds)
Media Entertainment: The Psychology of its Appeal, pp. 37–57. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Biographical note
Giselinde Kuipers received her PhD in social science from the University of
Amsterdam in 2001. She has published on ethnic humour, gender and class
differences in humour, as well as on social class and the distinction(s) between
popular culture and high culture. A D D R E S S : Amsterdam School of
Communications Research, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48,
1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email: kuipers@pscw.uva.nl]
470

European Journal of Cultural Studies

Transcription

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