Teens Only Laughing At 9/11 Until About Labor Day

Choire Sicha
The Hairpin
Published in
1 min readJul 6, 2015

Hmm, teens think 9/11 is only going to be funny for a little while longer now:

The modern 9/11 joke takes aim at the truthers, the conspiracy theorists who ruled the Internet fringe in the early aughts. Constructing the joke is often as simple as fishing a conspiratorial slogan out from the Internet’s past and releasing it on the modern Web. The most popular catchphrase of the moment is “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” a riff on the truther mantra that fires sparked by planes couldn’t have burned hot enough to tumble the towers, so government bombs probably helped them out. More than 10 years after the attacks, jokesters co-opted the line, and after an incubation period in weird Twitter, it graduated to teen phenomenon last year and confirmed meme this spring. Now, Sept. 11 conspiracy humor is everywhere.

As quickly as teens are amused, however, teens move on.

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