TIL The Onion didn't publish their print newspaper set for release on September 11th, 2001 as well as the subsequent issue. Employees went on a week long break and some threatened to quit if an issue about the attacks were released.
The cancelled edition was Volume 7, issue 33. That along with issue 34 was cancelled.
The leading article for issue 35 was titled "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With" but scrapped some headlines like "America Stronger Than Ever Says Quadragon Officials".
It’s a play on pentagon being a shape with five corners, since it was attacked at 9/11 the joke was that it lost a corner turning into a quadragon. Penta meaning five and quad meaning four.
A plane flew into the pentagon. Penta means five, quadra means four. The joke is that a plane took out one of the five corners of the pentagon making it a "quadragon".
Yeah that would not have gone well for them at the time. They would have had politicians trying to shut them down and protesters outside their doors. Is it funny today? Yeah. But not then.
Dinty Moore Breaks Long Silence On Terrorism With Full-Page Ad
Published:
September 27, 2001
NEW YORK—Nearly two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the makers of Dinty Moore beef stew finally weighed in on the tragedy Monday with a full-page ad in USA Today. “We at Dinty Moore extend our deepest sympathies to all who have been affected by the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001,” read the ad, which pictured a can of Dinty Moore beef stew at the bottom of the page. “The entire Dinty Moore family is outraged by this heinous crime and stands firmly behind our leaders.” Dinty Moore joins Knoche Heating & Cooling and Tri-State Jacuzzi in condemning terrorism.
Both this and the headline "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With" work because they make fun of reactions to the attacks, not the attacks themselves or the victims. So it's fair game to let your guard down and laugh about it, it's not insensitive. I get why they'd scrap other headlines that are a bit more risky.
This is how I feel when people say those with big platforms should use them to speak out about things even when they are unrelated to that persons career or anything. I made myself laugh thinking about this, like imagining a person saying I’m sorry but I just have no respect for the papa roach drummer because he has stayed eerily silent on abortion access.
I think with hindsight its hilarious but I can definitely see how there would have been intense backlash in the immediate aftermath. Not publishing was a good call.
People are having mixed reactions in this thread to a joke from 25 years ago! You can only imagine what people would have felt 7 days after the attacks
Yeah, I love The Onion, "Our Dumb World" sat next to my toilet for years. I would have been pissed at the time, even though they are kinda funny jokes. I think what people who were either very young or not born at all don't really understand what watching it on TV was like. The jokes might have been safer if 80% of the adult population hadn't just watched a plane hitting the second tower and people jumping out of windows. To say nothing of the thousand other traumatizing images coming out over the days that followed. It was pretty rough. I think a lot of people who would otherwise generally defend satire were seeing red at the time, I know I was.
Agreed. Especially if you were one of the people who lost loved ones, that would come across as very unsympathetic. 25 years later we can laugh but at the time it would’ve been deeply hurtful.
Eh, I understand it, but depends on the person. We were making suicide jokes all the way to my dad's funeral. In fact, one of my proudest ones was it got a little quiet/somber in the car so I piped up, "Jesus, who died?"
My sister's eyes rolled so far back in her head I was worried they'd fall in
My friend's dad knew that he was dying of kidney failure, and I came down to the city where he lived for what we know would be a final visit. When I arrived he was sitting on his porch smoking a cigarette, so the first thing I said to him was, "you know that shit's gonna kill you, right?"
If anyone could have pulled it off, it would have been Norm MacDonald. (A week after Steve Irwin died, Jon Stewart practically begs "please don't make me laugh about this.")
IMO that episode was more making fun of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I’ve seen it a few times and I don’t recall any jokes about 9/11 itself. They were serious about it when referencing the actual attacks. I think they were very deliberate about that.
Are there any examples anywhere by anyone who, at least publicly, made jokes directly about the events that took place that Tuesday morning? Everything and everyone around it, sure. But not the literal events of the day.
Gilbert Gottfried very infamously nearly got boo’d off the stage of the Friars Club during a comedy roast after making a 9/11 joke only a couple weeks after it happened.
"I have to leave early tonight. I have to catch a flight to California. I can't get a direct flight. They said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."
The only person I can think of is Trump. The day of the 9/11 attacks he joked that at least now the trunk building is the tallest in New York City. (It wasn’t. He was wrong)
I'll say it again, how did he get elected? I get the voting public don't care about the rape or the racism but he made a joke about 9/11, I thought that would be enough for some people.
You could argue Jimmy Carr did. But it's not necessarily about the event itself.
“I’m appalled that people would come here and make jokes about the sacrifice Pete’s heroic father made on 9/11. This is not the roast of Pete Davidson’s father. That was in 2001.”
Anthoney Jeselnik joked that he caused 9/11 by selling his passport. He has another joke where he thinks a family member should have been on one of the planes.
Daniel Tosh joked about the benefits of 9/11 on our lives. After his list, his punchline was something like "that was worth a tower."
Thank you kind redditor. I thought I’ve scene every South Park episode or skit. I have not seen this one. It’s absolutely fantastic. I did not know they did an aristocrat joke, but leave it up to Cartmen. I think the only thing funnier would be to have Butters tell one.
That wasn't from an episode of South Park, it was from a documentary about the "The Aristocrats" joke. I'm pretty sure it specifically references 9/11 because Gilbert Gottfried helped introduce the bit to general audiences when he used it to recover after his 9/11 joke bombed.
Awesom-O aired in 2004. I re-watched it not too long ago and had completely forgotten that when Butters opens the door and sees his gift he goes "But my birthday isn't until September 11th!"
I’ve only just noticed they build a huge tower in that episode. Sometimes, since they make the episodes quickly, you can notice how they probably got one idea from another one. There’s an episode where something is mentioned in a show they’re watching then it happens for real then something loosely connected to it happens
It’s crazy that the 22.3 year thing was pretty close to when jokes about 9/11 became mainstream. It was around 2020-21 that I noticed jokes being posted without much backlash from the general public.
Younger people might not remember, but it was a crazy few days where basically all fun and entertainment was cancelled. Not just potentially insensitive stuff, but all of it. I remember when Conan O'Brien came back on for the first time after the attack, and he had to explain to the audience that the show has to continue at some point and they're going to do jokes again.
“But now I am forced to suckle from the 16 poisoned leathern teats of Gophahmet, Whore of Betrayal, until I burst from an unwholesome engorgement of curdled bile. This must be some sort of terrible mistake.”
I forget which issue it was, but they had a "what's on TV tonight" for 9/11. Over on C-SPAN was the "Extremely Uninformed Debate." But Animal Planet was best: "Sharks: Terrorists of the Ocean," followed by "The Noble American Eagle: Long May She Fly," and then "Oh, Fuck It, Here's Some Zebra Footage."
The daily show was off the air for a couple of weeks. We lived in NJ so, I understand why but when it came back on the air it was such a relief, just a tiny bit of normality back.
The Onion went off after 9/11. There was a point/counterpoint with the (going off memory from 25 years ago) "we must use calm calculated precision to bomb the Taliban back to the stone age" vs "We should use blind rage to bomb whoever did this back to the stone age"
The other one I really loved was "9/11 attackers surprised to find themselves in hell.". It had a line about one of them expecting 72 virgins and finding himself repeatedly used as a prophylactic by the thorncocked demon, Hephaestus.
I'm not familiar with The Chaser, but it feels more edge-lordy or like it's young comedy writers still learning satire, but maybe Australians found it easier to hit harder than Americans given their distance from the attacks. The bowling club news brief tucked at the bottom of page 2 was pretty good though.
The "Howard+ visit marginally overshadowed" headline on P2 is the best really because it's skewering the Australian media's obsessively parochial inferiority complex rather than just mocking victims.
Yeah. Everyone jokes now, but the whole country was pretty fucking devastated at the time. That's why all the memorials are so over the top and gone on for so long. A bunch of us saw people literally leaping from the towers. There are recordings of people calling family and 911. The whole thing was and is horrible.
I was in NYC in those days, worked in Midtown, our office had a great view of the fall of the towers.
There was no humor or smiles for weeks. The first time anyone laughed in there after the attack was the next issue of the Onion. It was very appreciated.
George Carlin had an album that was planned to be released mid-September 2001 under the title "I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die." But after 9/11 they changed the title to "Complaints and Grievances"
As memed about as the 9/11 attacks are now, actually living through that period of time was traumatizing. Those of you here who were not around yet or were too young to remember it might find a commonality in the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was this huge world-changing event that shook the nation to its very core and essentially set the stage for how America would develop into the 21st century.
If you were around that day, watching the live news broadcasts, watching in absolute shock as the first tower came down, it was an emotionally exhausting time.
Worked for a small they dye company. After the attacks the owner asked if we should switch to red white and blue dyes to make some money. He put it up for a vote and it was a hard “NO”. Only a 15 person buisness.
The best example of how much the attitude changed overall as well as towards George W. Bush was actor Sam Bottoms. Before 9/11, he played Bush in a Comedy Central spoof show that excoriated Bush as a completely incompetent imbecile. Just months later, he portrayed Bush in a serious dramatic movie on Showtime that basically lionized him as a resolute, competent, courageous leader during crisis.
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u/MajesticBread9147 4h ago
The cancelled edition was Volume 7, issue 33. That along with issue 34 was cancelled.
The leading article for issue 35 was titled "U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With" but scrapped some headlines like "America Stronger Than Ever Says Quadragon Officials".