How 9/11 became a meme

September 11, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

How 9/11 became a meme

On September 11, 2001, someone posted an image online with the caption "World Trade Center Stanford" and "Welcome to Canada. World Terrorist Convention. What Trade Center?" The joke was posted the same day as the attacks. Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, has been tracking 9/11 humor since 2008, but the phenomenon goes back to day one. "There are folk artists who were tracking the humor in response to the attacks from the day of the attacks," she says.

The evolution of dark humor

The earliest 9/11 jokes were text-based wordplay—"How do you make a big apple crumble?"—or simple visual gags, like a mockup of a rebuilt World Trade Center skyline where the tallest tower is a middle finger "flipping the bird to the world." As platforms evolved, so did the humor. On 4chan and Something Awful, users created GIFs of Hulk Hogan smashing the towers or the Kool-Aid Man bursting through them. Later, short-form video and audio allowed creators to overlay techno music on footage of the attacks.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:03) **The Central Puzzle** - The host introduces the strange phenomenon of 9/11 memes flooding social media, and sets up the episode's core question: how did the worst attack on American soil become a source of ironic, irreverent humor?
2 (01:50) **Expert Introduction: Whitney Phillips** - Whitney Phillips, a professor of media ethics at the University of Oregon, admits to laughing at 9/11 memes, establishing her as an insider to the very culture she studies.
3 (03:29) **The Origin of 9/11 Jokes** - The humor did not emerge years later; "folk artists" were creating jokes on the day of the attacks, with archives of wordplay and visual gags dating back to September 11, 2001.
4 (06:04) **The "Gateway Drug" Meme** - The iconic image of George W. Bush being whispered to in a classroom is identified not as the most popular 9/11 meme, but the most "gateway drugie," because it requires no knowledge of the actual tragedy.
5 (07:37) **The AI Era of 9/11 Memes** - The latest iteration of the meme is an AI-generated 9/11 recap starring Super Mario, which Phillips calls "bananas," and it signals that these memes will continue to evolve with technology.
6 (08:35) **A Bipartisan Phenomenon** - The impulse to joke about 9/11 appears to be bipartisan, with Phillips noting that politics is not predictive of whether a young person engages in this kind of humor.
7 (09:21) **The Death of the Grace Period** - The host observes that for Charlie Kirk's death, the jokes started "as the news was breaking," suggesting the "comedy equals tragedy plus time" equation has collapsed.

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Show Notes

On the 25th anniversary of the deadliest attack on America, 9/11 has quite possibly become the most memed event in human history.

This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.

President George W. Bush was reading to an elementary school classroom in Sarasota, Florida on September 11, 2001 when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informed him about the second plane hitting the World Trade Center towers. Photo by Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images.

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