Media culture and Internet disaster jokes

Abstract

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.