9/11 has become an internet meme

“I thought my morning had sucked so far!” a user called DZ responded.

At 8:55, someone with the username USAR NAEM quipped: “There’s a band from here called I am the World Trade Center. They should do their next show while being on fire.” Too soon? Not for this anonymous proto-social-media platform.

SomethingAwful still exists, a shell of its former self. But before the likes of Facebook and Twitter conquered the social web, it was one of the early 21st century’s primary destinations for dark humor, birthing plenty of memes. On 9/11, the first meme dropped at 8:56 a.m. “That is a big fucking hole in the World Trade Center sirs!” DogWelder wrote, attaching an image from the 1999 film “Fight Club” with a caption that loosely quoted Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden: “In the industry, we call these cigarette burns.”

A few minutes after United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03, another meme followed, as monkeu posted “WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR” and beneath it a photo of the Radiohead front man Thom Yorke looking upset, with the caption “DON’T MAKE THOM ANGRY!” On and on went the increasingly caustic and chaotic memes as the national tragedy unfolded that morning.

In the aftermath of the attacks, comedians, pundits, and citizens grappled with the nature of comedy. They debated when it would be OK to make jokes even tangentially related to the collective horror experienced that day. What’s politically correct? What’s even funny anymore? Late-night talk shows suspended their programming for weeks, and when they came back, most were mournful, solemn, and tepid. On September 29, Gilbert Gottfried was booed during a stand-up set after he joked that he couldn’t get a direct flight to New York because the pilot had to stop over at the Empire State Building first.

But that discourse about what’s OK to joke about and when it’s OK to joke about it missed a crucial point. As those SomethingAwful posters demonstrated in watching and processing the events of September 11 in real time, everyday people were using the freewheeling language of the internet with little care about whether society felt it was gauche. 9/11 was destined to become a meme.

Twenty-three years later, however, 9/11 memes have become so diffuse and abstracted from the tragedy, and the people creating and sharing them too young to remember 9/11 as it happened, that a crucial question has emerged: What does 9/11 even mean to the internet anymore?

When the “unsinkable” Titanic sank and claimed more than 1,500 lives on April 15, 1912, it made newspaper headlines around the world. It was a nightmarish tragedy that shocked humanity’s psyche. Within two weeks, the first Titanic joke had already been logged.

In a short story dated April 28, 1912, the Czech humorist Jaroslav Hašek quipped that the ship sank because its passengers “were not praying on its board throughout the voyage,” adding, “They did so only when the ship was sinking but God punished them, it was too late.” The iceberg the ship struck, however, “prayed and so nothing happened to it.” Ba dum tss. Hašek was far from alone. In a 2019 essay for the International Journal of Humor Research, the Czech linguistics scholar Jan Chovanec chronicled dozens of jokes and cartoons printed around the world in the tragedy’s immediate wake, including the canned joke about the guy who complains about the price of his lobster only for his waiter to say it was found near the site of the Titanic wreckage, so, who knows, there could be diamonds in it.

While neither of these jokes from a century ago is funny by today’s standards, they and the dozens of others Chovanec found are similar to 9/11 jokes. Much of the dialogue on post-9/11 humor has focused on its power and intent to cope with grief. The 2021 documentary “Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11” features comedians breathlessly explaining how their craft helped the country heal and “push back terror.” But Giselinde Kuipers, a Dutch sociologist who has extensively studied 9/11-related internet humor, has found that disaster jokes are primarily made to entertain others — and an easy way to do that is to make light of an event everyone’s familiar with. 9/11 jokes, in other words, often have very little to do with 9/11. They’re much more like Hašek’s strange joke about the iceberg praying, a way to comment on the world using a widely shared reference event.

Kuipers argues that while the nature of most disaster jokes hasn’t changed, the difference is that 9/11 happened to occur during the rise of the social internet, when this once hard-to-find, “very specific, niche kind of dark humor all of a sudden became very accessible.”

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, says that when major disasters occur, something called “appropriate incongruity” — a perfect mashup of unrelated things — takes hold in online communication. “With September 11 humor, you saw a lot of references to the Kool-Aid Man bursting through the towers or Hulk Hogan or other cultural touchstones,” she said. Hulk Hogan “is so far removed from a terrorist attack,” she added, that the joke is simply the outrageousness connecting the two ideas.

This appropriate incongruity happens time and time again. When Donald Trump was shot in the ear on July 13, for example, X and Instagram were flooded with memes about Claire’s, the ear-piercing store ubiquitous in 1990s and 2000s shopping malls. Why do we do these things? In part because we can. “Whatever your motivation would be, if it wasn’t so easy to do it, people wouldn’t do it,” Phillips says.

The thing about memes is that they add layers of abstraction to the original thing they reference — until they’re either meaningless or full of meaning but meaning something altogether different.

Second only to my own in the mirror, George Bush’s face in 2001 is the face I see most often in 2024.

Perhaps the most pervasive 9/11 meme of recent years is a simple one, a riff on one of the defining images of the 21st century. It’s the photo taken during President George W. Bush’s visit to a Florida elementary school showing the White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispering the news of a second plane hitting the twin towers to Bush, who stares wide-eyed ahead off camera. I see this 23-year-old image almost every single day on Reddit and X. Perhaps second only to my own in the mirror, Bush’s face in 2001 is the face I see most often in 2024. The image is typically coupled with the phrase “a second [thing] has hit [something else].” It might be about Kamala Harris’ idiosyncratic aphorisms: “A second coconut has hit the context of all in which you live and what came before.” Or about JD Vance’s college years: “Sir, a second JD Vance drag photo has hit the internet.” Or about the sculpted star of “The Bear” posing in his underwear: “Sir, a second Jeremy Allen White Calvin Klein campaign has hit the internet.”

The photo is now so seared into the brains of the terminally online that it sometimes requires no caption at all. Over the weekend, when the rapper Kendrick Lamar announced he would perform in the Super Bowl halftime show, @DDotOmen posted a stand-alone photo of Card whispering in the ear of not Bush but Lamar’s vanquished rap-beef adversary, Drake. The idea of context collapse is often derided as a negative effect of the modern web, but it’s also the engine that’s allowed abstract humor to become the memetic language of the internet.

“Seinfeld” had been off the air for more than three years on 9/11, but Billy Domineau knew exactly how Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer would have reacted. In 2016, the superfan published “The Twin Towers,” a masterful spec script that imagines the nihilistic quartet in the days after the attack.

George, ever an opportunist, is mistaken for a first responder and gladly accepts the undeserved hero’s honor. Elaine learns that her latest beau perished in the towers but accepts it: “I was gonna break up with him anyway.” She then learns, to her dismay, that he survived and she’s stuck with him. Jerry is annoyed and grossed out by the dust he sees everywhere in the city — in his food, in a date’s teeth. Kramer, meanwhile, is irate that he won’t be able to get back the prized box cutter he loaned to his “crazy friend Mo Atta.”

Domineau told me that 9/11 was an entirely humorless affair for him as a middle schooler in the Boston suburbs. He remembers being completely overwhelmed, refusing to watch news coverage of it that night and instead putting on a VHS of “Happy Gilmore” to dissociate. He wrote the script, he says, not to make light of or even offer commentary on the disaster but simply as a way of “playing with the limits of ‘Seinfeld’ itself, the tropes of the series, and the characters as we know them.”

He also had lofty goals for it, hoping it might help him break into the world of professional comedy writing. Despite some chatter about whether 15 years later was still too soon and whether it was written in bad taste, “The Twin Towers” went viral, received glowing reviews, and eventually helped land Domineau a writing job on “Saturday Night Live.”

But the highest compliment he received was from another comedian, Dan Gregor, who tweeted, as Domineau paraphrases, “If this had come out in the aftermath of 9/11, we could have avoided the Iraq War.” Domineau feels that when tragedies are treated like sacred cows, when we as a society don’t allow humor to allow us to heal, we dangerously relinquish control. If we’re not allowed to laugh at our collective trauma, he says, “basically the government just owns the rights to both talking about the issue and deciding how we’ll respond to it.”

Unlike Domineau or those anonymous SomethingAwful posters, many people making and spreading 9/11 memes today are too young to remember 9/11, if they were alive at all.

In July, for example, a 23-year-old from Las Vegas who goes by the X handle @aquatic_ambi posted to her 15,000 followers a video she made from a “Legend of Zelda” game with the caption “the horses in this game are so beautiful.” In the video’s foreground, the player’s character walks toward a horse, while in the background a flying machine crashes into one of two makeshift towers in a fireball explosion. The post has received more than 245,000 likes. She says 9/11 memes have always been popular with her cohort. “People always tend to make humor in everything,” she said. “I think it’s just an easy joke to make since two towers are an instantly recognizable thing and easy to portray in memes.” She posted the 9/11 video only after another irreverent meme of hers found success on the site. “I made a JFK assassination video in ‘Zelda,’ and a comment requested I do a 9/11 one too,” she said. “I assumed it had already been done, so I never thought to do one until then.”

Domineau says it’s only natural for young people to take 9/11 jokes to the next extreme. “When you inherit a piece of cultural trauma that you weren’t alive for, there’s a numbness or lack of appreciation,” he says. “It’s always been on the table to play around with.”

In some ways, that play is a vital sign of America’s resilience and resolve. But it also underscores the need to teach subsequent generations what happened and what it felt like for those who experienced it. As Domineau puts it, Gen Zers need to learn about the history of 9/11 in detail so that they “can hopefully — to some extent — be as shocked and horrified as people who were already living in the world when it happened.” Otherwise, “Never Forget” just becomes another 9/11 meme.

Scott Nover is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC. He is a contributing writer at Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek covering media and technology.