Even the jokers couldn't laugh

By Chuck Soder
210 west Writer [send email]

It took my brain a ridiculously long time to bring into focus that cold image of the New York City skyline minus the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Oh, not that I didn’t find out early. Despite the fact that I awoke in a college dorm full of about 200 televisions broadcasting nothing but a blue screen, I still heard the news right away – by radio. Just like so many did when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor nearly 60 years earlier.

But that’s just how my ears heard the news. They didn’t tell my brain. My, uh, achy, achy brain.

In other words, it didn’t “hit” me. But I remember when it did. Oddly enough, it came in the form of twisted Internet humor. Ever heard the old adage that comedy = tragedy + time? It’s pretty common online. And time is, like, a tiny-ass number. Anyone who’s spent a good three or four hours surfing the net will eventually find a Web site where every word is dedicated to how funny it is when puppies get bashed in the face with bricks. A place where tragedy becomes comedy at an incredible rate.

Now even I have been know to tell the occasional dead baby joke, especially when that joke involves a pitchfork or a microwave. But almost anyone, including me, eventually finds a point where they think about getting Internet filters for themselves.

Except for my former roommate, whom we’ll call “Brent.”
If he’s reading, he’ll take pride in the idea that he may very well posses the sickest mind this side of prison walls. I’ve heard completely casual comments about pretty much everything, from taste of a slutty girl’s placenta to the sexual uses of the soft spot on a baby’s head. And a bunch of other stuff I’m afraid to write down.

Then, one day after Sept. 11, 2003, I spoke with the boy. Within a few minutes he started describing a forward he received a few hours earlier. It was a picture of the twin towers – tainted, of course, by the black magic of Photoshop. I don’t recall the exact contents of the picture. For all I remember, it had something to do with dead bodies, lasers and the mascot from Cocoa Puffs. All I know is that, on Sept. 12, it was the Mt. Olympus of offensive humor – a knife of a picture. If my mom saw it, she’d probably die.

For the first time, Brent’s eyes didn’t have that happy-go-lucky, “puppy faces love bricks” glimmer.

He replied to the e-mail with only two words: “Not funny.”

And there was that vast New York City skyline, so incomplete, etched in my brain. My achy, achy brain. Brent somehow just couldn’t laugh at this. That was a first and a last. At the time, to laugh at anything at all seemed offensive. How could one think of laughing? The nation was a giant funeral. Things got better eventually, but, for a while, there wasn’t a joke in site. Not on Letterman. Not on the Daily Show. There was no denying that the country was hurting.

Terrorists had stolen our laughter, our best medicine.

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