European Journal of Cultural Studies
Transcription
European Journal of Cultural Studies
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 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/4/450 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for European Journal of Cultural Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ecs.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 5 ( 4 ) 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 5 ( 4 ) 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 455 5 ( 4 ) 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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. Figure 2. 5 ( 4 ) 458 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 5 ( 4 ) 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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 5 ( 4 ) 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : 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 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 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/ Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. : (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. Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. 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: [email protected]] 470 Downloaded from http://ecs.sagepub.com at Universiteit van Amsterdam SAGE on July 22, 2008 © 2002 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.