“There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.” -Joe Biden on Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign
I heard this at the time and I thought it was amusing though not LOL:
After the planes plummet in the Pentagon in a blinding flash the hijackers appear in paradise. They walk tentatively into the light. The see a figure emerge from the clouds, they are amazed that it is George Washington. He walks up to each then in turn and kicks them in the balls as hard as he can. Before they can recover another figure appears, James Madison smacks each hijacker in the nose. “Where are our 72 virgins?” One of the hijackers says through the blood. “Oh that’s a mistranslation” says Thomas Jefferson as he emerges to punch them in the kidneys, “it’s actually 72 VIRGINIANS”
Just a couple of weeks after 9/11 an email joke went around with a picture of the proposed replacement for the WTC. It was a photoshopped version of the two towers, turned into five towers that looked like a hand with a raised middle finger. It was titled “Flippin’ the WTC”. That was one of the few early jokes that actually worked for me.
Columbia too.
I never heard any jokes after 9/11, bad or not, besides “Onion”-esque humor, TBH.
Most likely in late 1997, in the days of computer BBS’es, I saw a newspaper article about them, and someone said they were on one that specialized in tasteless jokes, and asked, as a joke, if anyone had heard any Princess Diana jokes. He was almost banned as a result!
It was the Onion’s first issue after 9/11. The Headline in giant caps: HOLY SHIT!
Every headline here delivers: Issue 37•34: The September 11th Issue
Thank you for sharing that, it was an interesting bit of history. I still remember the HOLY SHIT! headline.
Now THAT’s funny! 
I laughed too hard at this one:
https://images.app.goo.gl/SfewZfbcb2p5H5kz6
(for those who want to know what it is before they click on it, it’s a picture captioned “Cannabis legalized in the State of New York” but it’s a screenshot of smoke from 9/11 covering lower Manhattan)
One joke I saw about Joe Buck’s NFL commentating (if you’ve ever listened to him, he is awful, merely remarking things like, “Mitchell…Mitchell…Mitchell…Mitchell…touchdown!”) was that if he had been a reporter on 9/11, he’d have said:
“Airplane…airplane…airplane…airplane…building.”
This line from The Hangover
“It’s not illegal. It’s frowned upon. Like masturbating on an airplane. Thanks a lot, bin Laden.”
Back when NBC had “Last Comic Standing”, there was a guy who did a bit about ordering a pizza and the box it was delivered in had “9/11 - Never Forget!” printed on it. He says “Then after the guy left I realized he forgot my bread sticks. And I thought, why don’t you print that on your boxes? Never forget the bread sticks!”
Several months after the attacks I heard one from a stand up comic doing a sad sack schtick.
“I haven’t had sex since September 11th…September 11th, 1992”.
One that I heard right away was a repurposing of an older joke.
The set up is that a guy leaves home to go to work in the towers, kisses his wife goodbye but then goes to see his mistress on the other side of town. They spend the whole day in bed. <A good commedian, not me, would tell it well and add a bunch of detail here>. At 5pm he turns his cell phone on and there are fifty missed calls from his wife. He calls her back and says, “what’s the emergency honey? You know I’m in meetings all day Tuesday, Why didn’t you leave a message with my assistant?”
After Cory Lidle crashed his prop plane into a Manhattan condo tower in 2006, some writer quipped:
We need to go on living our lives as usual…otherwise, the Yankees have won.
What happened to the “HOLY SHIT” banner headline? I know I didn’t imagine it, so if it wasn’t The Onion, where did I see it??
Are you perhaps thinking of this headline from Our Dumb Century?
Dead center in that image
Oops. Made a mistake, back soon.
These must be the answer. Obviously I mixed the two together but at least I was only half wrong.
This link helped answer my question and was VERY interesting! Thank you several times!
About that linked story: this may be of interest only to hardcore Onion freaks like myself, but in the color photo of the Onion staff, Maria Schneider was in fact the genius who wrote all of the Herbert Kornfeld (H Dog) pieces. Also, Joe Garden was the mastermind behind Jim Anchower’s lowlife adventures.