As we come closer to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it has come to my attention that some younger folks don’t understand why 9/11 was ever a big deal or why we memorialize it at all. How cringe! How millennial! Slap a fucking mustache on the Twin Towers and call it a day, why don’t ya!
As irritated as this kind of rhetoric makes me, part of the issue is that tragic events understandably don’t register the same way for people who weren’t alive when they happened, and what’s more: over time, they become funny. (You know the old adage, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”) There is no set period of time at which point a tragic event can become funny, but eventually, it just sort of dawns on a population that certain jokes are no longer “too soon.” (Most of us have no qualms making jokes about the Titanic or the Black Plague, for example.) But typically, when it comes to the death of thousands of innocent people, this line is not crossed for multiple generations. Even mass death events with fewer casualties than 9/11, which occurred around the same time (see: Columbine) are not treated with this degree of flippant levity.
While some edgy comics joked about 9/11 right away (and were typically heckled for it), it feels like 9/11 uniquely barreled past “too soon” in just one generation, or perhaps even faster than that. So what was it about 9/11 that made it both a significant traumatic memory for an entire generation and an easy laugh for the next one?
