The Return of Irony

They told us Sept. 11 marked the end of irony in America.

The obituaries were written by hyperventilating pundits everywhere, who were quick to declare a seismic shift in our cultural landscape and the death of humor as we knew it.

At first, it looked as if they were right. Following the terrorist attacks, the late-night talk show hosts canceled their broadcasts, humor publications like the Onion temporarily stopped publishing, comedy clubs were virtually deserted, and even the notoriously free-wheeling Internet became a joke-free zone. America was in no mood to laugh and we wondered if we ever would be.

After a brief pause for grief and reflection, however, comedy slowly began to make a comeback. By the time we had mobilized for war in Afghanistan, America's humorists had begun to unleash their own salvo of jokes, satirical barbs and Web-based parodies aimed at lifting the country's spirits and cutting our new enemies down to size.

As the nation began the healing process, humor provided a much-needed salve, if not a way to momentarily escape the grim news of the day. Even New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani urged us to lighten up. "I'm here to give you permission to laugh," he said at the opening of a charity benefit in October. "If you don't, I'll have you arrested."

In the year since, our need for comic relief has not diminished -- if anything, demand for it has grown.

Far from being marginalized as frivolous and irrelevant, comedy continues to help us cope, and in many ways has served as a barometer for the way the mood of the country has changed. The fact that we can now poke fun at things like terror alerts, excessive homeland security measures, President Bush's blunderings and the hypocrisies of U.S. foreign policy underscores exactly how far we have come. It may not signal a return to political mockery as usual, but the sense of self-examination that has crept back into humor may be one sign of a return to normalcy.

The road back began hesitantly, almost apologetically, with David Letterman's return to the airwaves a week after the attacks. Forgoing his usual comic monologue, Letterman instead offered an emotional tribute to New York, setting a tone the rest of the late-night comics followed as they sought to strike the right balance between expressions of grief and the need for levity. "They said to get back to work," said "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart. "There were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying, which I would have gladly taken. So I came back here."

The jokes were tentative at first, steering clear of the tragedy itself. President Bush was off-limits (as Jay Leno wryly observed, "We can't do Bush jokes anymore; he's smart now.") Instead, the most successful humor targeted America's response to the tragedy and the absurdities of the emerging war on terrorism.

One of the boldest stabs at humor came from the Onion, a satirical weekly newspaper based in New York. Known for its biting social satire and dead-on news spoofs, the Onion took direct aim at the fallout from the attacks with a special report featuring such headlines as "America Vows to Defeat Whoever We're at War With," "Hijackers Surprised to Find Themselves in Hell," and "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule."

Hailed as one of the best comic achievements of the post-Sept. 11 period, the Onion provided cathartic laughs by tapping into raw emotion and subtle ironies. "We really were just trying to capture the sadness and anger everyone was feeling, and somehow it came out as humor," said Robert Siegel, the Onion's editor in chief.

"The Daily Show," Comedy Central's popular news-parody program, hit its stride when it began poking fun at media coverage of "America's new war." Dubbing its own coverage "America Freaks Out" and "Operation Enduring Coverage," the show aptly captured the way the media was preying on the nation's jittery mood, while lampooning its slick marketing of the war on terrorism.