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What Do You Call A Joke That Isn’t A Joke?
What happens when a comedian goes “too far”?
On September 29th, 2001, eighteen days after 9/11, Gilbert Gottfried, decided to be the first comedian to tell a “really-poor-taste joke” about it:
I had to catch a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight, they said they had to stop at the Empire State Building first.
This joke sounds so tame in 2025 that it’s hard to imagine what the fuss is about, but it’s impossible to overstate how raw people were back then.
Ben Stiller, whose New York-based movie, Zoolander, came out the day before Gottfried’s show, famously edited out all traces of the Twin Towers before he released it.
George Carlin’s comedy album, “I Kinda Like It When A Lotta People Die,” ended up being delayed for fifteen years.
And Clear Channel Communications, the largest owner of radio stations in the US, banned any song with even a whiff of death, war, and violence from the airwaves — 164 in total.
Two-and-a-half weeks after 9/11, nobody knew why it happened or if another attack was coming, nobody wanted to think about it too deeply, much less joke about it. So when Gottfried tried, his audience quickly let him know he’d gone too far.
