Humor based on the September 11 attacks

The September 11 attacks were a series of terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Jokes based on the events have been made in print and other media since soon after the attacks took place.

A number of scholars have studied the ways in which humor has been used to deal with the trauma of the event,^[1][2][3] including researcher Bill Ellis who found that jokes about the attacks began the day afterwards in the U.S., and Giselinde Kuipers, who found jokes on Dutch websites a day later.^[4][5] Kuipers had collected around 850 online jokes about 9/11, Osama bin Laden, and the Afghanistan war by 2005.^[4] A notable early public attempt at 9/11 humor was by Gilbert Gottfried just a few weeks after the attacks. During a comedy roast for Hugh Hefner at the Friars Club the crowd did not respond well to Gottfried's 9/11 gag. One audience member at the club yelled out "Too soon!", a common response to jokes told in the immediate wake of tragedies.

In contrast to these early jokes about 9/11, late-night comedy shows and humorous publications did not appear for several weeks following the attacks.^[4] The Onion, a satirical newspaper, cancelled the issue that had been scheduled to be released on September 11, 2001, and then returned to print with a special edition on September 26, 2001, which was devoted to the attacks.