How 9/11 Became One of the Internet’s Most Popular Memes

Olivia, a 21-year-old college student, was sitting in an English class at her Minnesota school last week when her professor began talking about the challenges in writing about traumatic events. But when he used 9/11 as an example, and described to the class how hectic things seemed that day, she realized just how she felt — or rather, didn’t feel — about the attacks. “Being terminally online is wild [because] someone mentioned 9/11 in my class today and I genuinely forgot that not everyone thinks it’s funny now,” she subsequently wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), favorited more than 10,000 times.

“I had this moment of realization within myself that this should be having an impact on me and it weirdly isn’t,” Olivia recalled to Rolling Stone, asking that her last name not be used due to the sensitivities around 9/11. (She has since taken down the tweet.) “I think it’s been watered down a lot for our generation. It’s a moment of levity, this very heavy moment. For our generation, it’s very almost casual.”

Olivia is not alone. To be on social media in 2024 is to be swimming in jokes and memes about 9/11. Things that might once have been whispered among friends are now shared by meme accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. On TikTok, videos contrasting the year 2024 with 2001 (often ending with someone reacting to the planes hitting towers) frequently went viral. While on X, a famous photo of President George W. Bush being informed by his chief of staff that the U.S. was under attack is now frequently used to mock everything from Ozempic to JD Vance to the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef. Want to be overly dramatic about a minor event in your life? Why not use a video or GIF of Caitlyn Jenner standing in a sea of American Flags, solemnly saying, “9/11”? Or you could keep things simple and just say, “This was my 9/11.”

As the world marks 23 years since the attacks, the ways in which people talk — and joke — about the tragedy have evolved dramatically, especially on the internet. For some people, the passage of time has reduced the trauma associated with it and allowed them to feel more comfortable using humor to process the last two decades in a different light; for other younger, Gen-Z internet users, black comedy is a tool they use to discuss something they’ve only ever read about in history books. 

Social media, which didn’t exist at the time of the attacks, has also given rise to a digital space for these jokes that is steeped in irony, rewards outrageous humor, and encourages others to join the trend. The few 9/11 memes last decade mostly involved mocking conspiracy theorists, such as “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams” or “Bush Did 9/11,” both of which surged in usage around 2015. These gags drew their shock-value humor by juxtaposing something innocent with something extreme, like when the words were frosted onto a cake or said by a cartoon pony.  

Now, however, many viral jokes about 9/11 now rely on the punchline that it happened at all. Others are absurdist shitposts that are outwardly trying to be in bad taste, like a watercolor painting of Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness wearing a rainbow leotard and performing the splits as The Falling Man, a pair of jeans superimposed with the burning Towers, or saying Robert DeNiro lept from a yacht “like a 9/11 jumper.”Still others are almost self-deprecating gags intended to say more about the person posting them, like one individual joking that their tardiness would’ve led them to miss the attacks or another comparing the tragedy to their feeling of being sought out for sex because of their race; of course, the two things aren’t the same — that’s the joke. 

For someone like 19-year-old X user Willow, who also asked that her last name not be used, making a viral 9/11 joke this month that riffed on RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Plane Jane was simply intended to make friends laugh. “That event is traumatic,” Willow tells Rolling Stone, “But I also think that if you can’t try to find something humorous in the worst of places, then I think you fall really easily into very negatively oriented nihilism.”

Obviously, it wasn’t always this way; in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, comedy in popular culture was particularly fraught. Gilbert Gottfried famously bombed when he quipped to a New York audience just weeks after the attacks, “I have to leave early tonight, I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight — they said I have to stop at the Empire State Building first.” (“I don’t think anyone’s lost an audience bigger than I did at that point,” Gottfried later said.) Bill Maher’s show, Politically Incorrect, was canceled soon after he made comments about the terrorists not being cowards. Conversely, when he returned to air, Jon Stewart used his monologue on The Daily Show to deliver a somber message full of grief and pain, as did David Letterman. 

But gradually, and carefully, people began to use humor to work through the horrific event. The staff at The Onion released a Sept. 27 issue, widely praised to this day, full of jokes like, “U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever We’re At War With.” And when Saturday Night Live returned on Sept. 29, the show’s cold open featured New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani giving a speech flanked by Ground Zero first-responders, followed by a performance by Paul Simon. “Can we be funny?” SNL creator Lorne Michaels then asked Giuiliani. “Why start now?” the mayor quipped. 

Online, though, things were a different story. Some people were sharing jokes on internet message boards in the days after the attacks — even on the day itself. Soon, crudely photoshopped images — “proto memes,” writer Matt Farwell later dubbed them — began circulating via email or on blogs showing Bush as The Terminator, the characters on The Sopranos vowing revenge, or the Twin Towers rebuilt in the shape of a giant middle finger. Some were even printed out and shown to Bush in the White House, and then subsequently stored forever in the National Archive.

But with time, the public’s sensitivities abated — and in less time than you might expect. George Bonanno, a Columbia University clinical psychology professor and author of The End of Trauma, says that rates of good mental health in New York City returned to normal levels within a few months of 9/11, suggesting surprising resilience. What may have initially been taboo amid the immediate aftermath became less so as public anxiety faded. “There’s a certain time that people seem to need where they just absolutely don’t want any disrespect or anything funny about it at all, because they’re deeply wounded — but it’s not that long,” Bonanno tells Rolling Stone. “Most people get beyond even the worst events a lot quicker than we tend to realize.”

This passage of time also is a key component of the “benign violation theory,” a framework for comedy about controversial events and time proposed by academics Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren. This 2010 theory — further explored in a study by the pair into the acceptability of Hurricane Sandy jokes before, during, and after the 2012 storm — posits that the perfect joke must be a violation of social norms or good taste, while also being relatively benign or harmless. “The more distant something is, the less threatening it is, and that makes it easier to see as benign,” Warren tells Rolling Stone. “Over time, it becomes slightly easier to make jokes about these horrible events that have happened, including something like 9/11.”

But it’s not just time that has passed — it’s that times have changed. In many ways, the War on Terror has receded from the public consciousness. Groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS no longer dominate headlines, prompting us to feel more comfortable recontextualizing the last two decades of history. “We’re not in that moment anymore, and we’re not consumed with this global War On Terror; it’s just not as sad and terrifying anymore,” says Rutgers media professor Lauren Feldman, who has co-authored a book about the political power of memes. “We can sort of experience that emotional release.”

Think also of figures like Bush and Giuliani, who were valorized in some of the early 9/11 humor but whose public images deteriorated in subsequent years. Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media at CUNY Queens College in New York, explains that it’s difficult to convey to his Gen Z students how serious 9/11 was when these men are now best known as subjects of mockery. “We’ve had the concept of watching this degrade over time, or at least seeing how history unfolds, but when you’re a young person and you’re seeing this man sweat hair dye down his face and trying to defend fake election conspiracies, you can’t,” Cohen said. “It’s hard to take that seriously, so it becomes meme fodder.” 

“It’s hard not to find the absurdity in it when you think about things like Freedom Fries or how there were 9/11 food meal deals,” says Olivia, the Minnesota student. 

Ruby Karp, a 24-year-old comedian and digital coordinator for late night show After Midnight, tells Rolling Stone that she can understand why so many in her generation feel such distance from 9/11. “Obviously, we’re not insensitive assholes. 9/11 is a tragedy. We know this, but I think we feel less emotionally connected to it or less emotionally triggered by it because none of us were alive or we were barely conscious,” Karp says. 

And contrary to some views about her generation being overly “woke,” she thinks the Gen Z sense of humor is firmly based in shitposting. It’s a natural outcome, she says, of being online since before she can remember. “We were just so exposed to the tragedies of the world, and there’s so many of them, that I think how the fuck else are we supposed to deal with this other than just being like, ‘LOL,’” Karp says. 

Karp doesn’t make any 9/11 jokes on stage, though. She thinks people have an easier time laughing at black humor when it’s online and no one else — in, say, a comedy club audience — can see them doing so. The web is also the perfect space for such humor because of the “embedded irony” inherent in posting, according to Cohen, the CUNY expert. “Memes are already coded as ironic,” he says. “Whenever you see those, you’re already encoded with the knowledge of either cynicism, nihilism, irony, or sarcasm, and if you’re not, then you’re not really a meme-enjoyer.”

The goal in sharing such jokes, according to Cohen, is to test your friends and followers to see if they’re as online, as cynical, or even as smart as you (there’s evidence that people who appreciate black comedy have higher IQs). “We’ve normalized the 4chan behavior; things that would not be acceptable outside of those darker spaces are today,” he says. “We are now much more willing to interact with dark humor in that way.”

So why is the internet suddenly awash with 9/11 memes and not, say, Holocaust jokes? Warren, one of the academics behind the benign violation theory, speculates that this could simply because 9/11 jokes are in “the sweet spot for comedy,” made neither too soon nor too late for chronic posters to find funny. Cohen, meanwhile, suspects the answer is simpler: 9/11 jokes don’t feel targeted at a specific group in the way that Holocaust jokes do. “Most people are fairly averse to racism and antisemitism and any form of making fun of the Holocaust aligns with the worst parts of the internet,” Cohen says. 

Karp knows there are limits to all these 9/11 jokes. Unlike others in her generation, she does have some ties to the events of that day: she was an infant living with her family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side when the attacks happened. On the anniversaries, her teachers would assign her homework that involved talking to her parents about what it was like to live through it, and she’s heard stories about how her dad felt compelled to hit the streets with his camcorder to document history.

“This is the danger of memes and comedy: you do get desensitized to the weight of the topic,” Karp says. “But at the same time, not to be like, ‘It’s not that serious’ — it’s literally 9/11. But…it’s not that serious. To us, we’re just making silly little jokes.”