Hear the One About the Traveling Taliban?

In the first days after Sept. 11, it was hard to imagine laughing. The sophisticated view of the world that had come to dominate the culture suddenly seemed inappropriate, as if terrorism had destroyed not only people and buildings, but America’s appetite for irony as well.

“In the age of irony, even the most serious things were not to be taken seriously,” commentator Roger Rosenblatt wrote in Time magazine. “No more.”

Now, a little more than three months later, we seem to be laughing again.

As the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan nears its endgame, America’s comics have already taken Osama bin Laden hostage. Jay Leno, a guardian of mainstream humor, thinks he knows why: “When times are good, you make fun of the king,” Leno said. “When times are bad, you make fun of the enemy.”

Scholars of humor (and there are quite a few, no kidding), agree.

“Osama is now a staple of American humor,” said Paul Lewis, a Boston College English professor who is organizing a panel on terror humor for a conference on humor next summer in Italy. “A lot of jokes transport Osama and the Taliban into American culture. We have to get him out of the caves and domesticate him. The alternative is, he’s too scary.”

As a result, it’s hard to travel around the Internet without running into a joke about the war on terrorism.

There’s the photo of a U.S. bomber, all of its intimidating ordnance at its side, facing forward like a menacing football front line. The caption: “The terrorists have won the coin toss and have elected to receive.”

There’s the “Taliban TV Lineup,” including such hits as “Mad About Everything” and “This Old Tent.” And there are sight gags, such as the cartoon figures of Bush, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney singing a satiric rendition of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann,” called “Taliban.”

Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, thinks that the Internet is a natural forum for expressions of humor because on some level, it is perceived as private. The Web may be public, and global, but it functions more like the water cooler or telephone did in an earlier era, he said. These are jokes told more or less in a protected circle, not really for public consumption.

“There’s an unedited intimacy,” said Thompson, past president of the International Popular Culture Assn. “It’s anonymous.”

Less anonymous but no less Internet-dependent are the e-mailed jokes: So Osama goes to a fortuneteller to find out how long he has to live. The fortuneteller informs him he will die on a famous American holiday. “Which one?” he asks. “Ah,” says the fortuneteller, “whatever day you die will be a famous American holiday.”

The Internet is not the only venue for jokes, nor terrorists the only topic.

On “Saturday Night Live” recently, Darrell Hammond lampooned Cheney delivering a message from his hideaway--a cave in Kandahar.

Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau has drawn a cartoon strip in which Bush delights in learning from aide Karl Rove that the war on terrorism has made his domestic agenda--from corporate tax cuts to oil drilling in Alaska--fashionable again. “Thanks, evildoers!” Bush exclaims.

And an Iranian American comic named Maz Jobrani is amusing audiences in Los Angeles with jokes about how his Mideastern friends are changing their names to Tony, trying to pass as Italians.

Psychologists welcome these expressions of comedy as a coping mechanism. Jokes, they say, provide a release of shared anxiety and deflect fear at a time of national crisis.

Laughter may even provoke a physiological reaction that offers protection from angst, or, as many believe, even from disease.

“Humor is an incredibly helpful and adaptive response to stress,” said Alan Lipman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Violence. “When we laugh, we feel less vulnerable.”

The instinct to belittle the enemy during wartime is hardly new--or surprising.

During World War II, Disney released an Academy Award-winning cartoon called “Der Fuehrer’s Face” in which Donald Duck works in a Nazi munitions factory where he frantically alternates between making bombs and saluting Adolf Hitler in an atmosphere in which everything--the houses, the trees, the clouds--is shaped like a swastika.

“The impulse toward humor in the face of aggression is a very ancient one in human civilization,” said Stephanie Hammer, a professor of comparative literature who teaches a course on humor and satire at UC Riverside. “It’s connected to the curse, to the use of magic.”

Truth is, Americans like to laugh in times of war. Confederate writers and cartoonists regularly poked fun at Abraham Lincoln. (“He could hardly be called handsome,” said one 1864 campaign screed, “though he is certainly much better looking since he had the smallpox.”)

During World War I, Americans were encouraged in a song to “bury the hatchet in the Kaiser’s head.”

“Dr. Seuss Went to War” is a collection of classic print cartoons lampooning Hitler. Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film “The Great Dictator” stands as a classic in mockery of an enemy.

And even Holocaust victims joked about their grim fate. (In one example collected by an academic for a thesis project, one concentration camp inmate tells another: “Don’t eat too much. I may have to carry you.”).

During his many USO tours, comedian Bob Hope made a career of telling jokes to troops even as they were fighting abroad--a brand of war zone entertainment unique to this country.

“National unity has something to do with the humor response,” said Thompson. “During Vietnam, on prime time you could swear there was no war, unless you saw the Smothers Brothers, and CBS took them off the air.”

(Dick and Tom Smothers tackled controversial topics in their variety show, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” and were canceled by the network in 1969.)

Some humorists report that they are still treading on eggshells, mindful of the raw emotions and national purpose provoked by the terrorist attacks.

Airplane jokes are rare, though Leno got a laugh when he complained about airlines expecting passengers to serve as the first defense against hijackers--and still charging them $5 for a headset.

And jokes denigrating Bush’s brainpower have fallen off the radar.

Al Franken, a darling of liberal political circles, said he tells audiences, “It’s critical that we get behind the government and that no one criticizes President Bush--in public. Do that at home.”

In a time of raw sensibilities, when whole topics like religion and death are too sensitive for comedy, satire can be a hard sell. “I’ve had a fair number of rejections,” said satirist Christopher Buckley.

A satirical primer on the post-Taliban leadership in Afghanistan, featuring nothing but untrustworthy warlords, was turned down by the New Yorker. “The editor called and said, ‘This is very funny. Of course there’s no way we can use this.’”

He’s not striking out everywhere, though. Buckley, author of the 1994 novel “Thank You for Smoking,” a sendup of big tobacco, wrote a parody for the Wall Street Journal spoofing the media’s current war coverage with mock headlines from World War II: Jan. 6, 1942: “Media Reported ‘Frustrated’ at Lack of U.S. Victory in World War II.” March 1, 1941: “British Urged to Halt Bombing of Occupied France During Lent.”

Mocking the media--particularly Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera--turns out to be safe turf for almost any funny person, from Trudeau to Leno. (“Our Marines have now established a base inside Afghanistan,” Leno said in a recent monologue. “They’re setting up machine gun placements and digging trenches around the perimeter of the base--not to fight the Taliban, to keep out Geraldo.”)

Terror-related humor is showing up in the most unlikely public places as well. Since late September, the Haslam Septic Service of Ellsworth, Maine, has sported a message on its tanker that says the company will haul sewage waste from almost anybody but won’t take any (here the company uses a four-letter vulgarity for what it hauls) from Bin Laden.

“A gentleman from New York pulled the truck over and asked to take a picture,” said Robert Merchant, the company’s owner. The picture made its way onto the Internet, even spawning a chat room debate about whether the photo was doctored.

Observers note that much of the current crop of anti-Taliban humor is sophomoric. But this is to be expected, they say, because in times of gnawing, tummy-tugging anxiety, simplistic jokes work best.

“During hard times, we tend toward a zany kind of humor,” said Landon Parvin, a writer hired by every Republican president since Ronald Reagan to pen one-liners and witty speeches.

“The Marx Brothers were popular during the Great Depression, because they offered a complete escape from what people were living in their daily lives.”

But Parvin is among those who are not sure the recent jokes about Osama are all that funny. “I don’t think we’ve recovered,” said Parvin, who is advising clients to stick to jokes about children and dogs. “People don’t usually like political humor, and they want to hear it even less now.”

Added Buckley: “Maybe the only time safe to laugh is after you’ve won. Laughing at an arch villain while he’s still breathing instinctively makes us feel superior, but there’s a superstition that maybe he’ll have the last laugh. We’re still not laughing at Pearl Harbor, are we?”

Even in victory, some subjects remain problematic.

“The Producers,” Mel Brooks’ spoof of Nazi mentality that is enjoying a run as a Broadway musical, was first a movie--in 1969--some 24 years after the Nazis were defeated.

Even then, American backers of the movie balked at the original title, “Springtime for Hitler.”

In the end--in wartime or peacetime--humor is a tonic for the human spirit.

As Mel Brooks put it: “Humor is just another defense against the universe.”