ABSTRACT
One of the less traumatic but nevertheless noticeable effects of the events of 9/11 was the voluntary moratorium on humour that immediately followed it in the American media. As a reaction to the horror of that day, intolerance for joking and an extreme sensitivity to the inappropriateness of laughter became a further way of emphasizing the extent of the tragedy. Some commentators were even moved to see 9/11 as occasioning the demise of certain types of humour: Newsday columnist James Pinkerton, for example, wrote of it as a ‘crushing defeat for irony, cynicism and hipness’ in America. Certainly, there were none of the poor taste jokes that followed hard on the heels of the Challenger disaster (1986), the King’s Cross fire (1987), or the explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform (1988). In the weeks after the attacks, the nightly talk shows of David Letterman and Jay Leno stayed off the air, and when they returned they returned without their opening monologues. The suspension of humour was temporary, of course, and within two weeks the 26 September issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion carried the headline ‘God Angrily Clarifies “Don’t Kill” Rule’. Shortly thereafter an explicit command to laugh again came from Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, who during a charity opening in October told the crowd ‘I’m here to give you permission to laugh. If you don’t I’ll have you arrested’. In time, the ability to laugh became symbolic of the resilience of Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular, with the freedom to laugh being held up as a defining feature of American democracy. Laughter-the pleasure, dissent, and first amendment freedom to express oneself freely that it
seems to assume-came to stand in opposition to the fundamentalist dogmas and joyless religious strictures that were believed to characterize those responsible for the attacks. The US comedian Lewis Black, whose routine takes the form of exasperated commentaries on current affairs, puts this idea most succinctly when he argues that ‘the terrorist is a person without humour at all’ (Black, 2003). Can we therefore imply a direct connection between the freedom to laugh and the right to live freely? What is the nature of the relationship between humour and freedom, and how does politics colour the world of comedy? The philosopher of humour, John Morreall, believes that a resilient sense of humour is an intrinsic defence against tyranny. ‘The person with a sense of humour can never be fully dominated, even by a government which imprisons him,’ he writes, ‘for his ability to laugh at what is incongruous in the political situation will put him above it to some extent, and will preserve a measure of his freedom-if not of movement, at least of thought’ (Morreall, 1983:101). A similar idea is found in Lord Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis (1709), where humour offers a release from the frustrations of social justice, and a nation’s appetite for comedy is formed in direct proportion to the degree of political oppression at work there. Discussing the ‘spiritual Tyranny’ of Italy, he writes that,
the greatest of Buffoons are the ITALIANS: and in their Writings, in their freer sort of Conversations, on their Theatres, and in their Streets, Buffoonery and Burlesque are in the highest vogue. ’Tis the only manner in which the poor cramp’d Wretches can discharge a free Thought…. The greater the Weight is, the bitterer will be the Satir. The higher the Slavery, the more exquisite the Buffoonery.
