Hope and laughter: How comedy helped heal after 9/11 terrorist attacks
Comedians and TV satirists used jokes to confront grief and racism, while Raina’s online skits drew hundreds of thousands of views.
- As the 25th anniversary of the 2001 attacks approaches next week, York University professor Marlis Schweitzer notes that people globally turned to comedy to overcome the trauma of the events.
- James Nadler, screenwriting and television professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, explained that comedians helped audiences process tragedy even as irony initially seemed dead, before satire evolved more political in thrust.
- Jon Stewart shifted The Daily Show toward political commentary, while Rick Mercer launched the Rick Mercer Report in 2004 in Canada, both programs poking fun at politicians and government policies.
- Comedians including Jasmeet Raina and Russell Peters shared personal experiences with racism through comedy, while plays such as The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axis of Evil emerged after the attacks.
- Raina turned to humour as a survival instinct after facing post-attacks racism, eventually creating the dramedy Late Bloomer streaming on Crave, which explores his life in Toronto.
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Hope and laughter: Comedy's role after 9/11 terrorist attacks
Jasmeet Raina leaned on comedy days after the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when students at school began circulating rumours that his uncle was Osama bin Laden. "They were like, 'Oh yeah, we saw Osama drop him off at school,'" he said.
Winnipeg Free Press
Hope and laughter: How comedy helped heal after 9/11 terrorist attacks
Jasmeet Raina leaned on comedy days after the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when students at school began circulating rumours that his uncle was Osama bin Laden.
Hope and laughter: How comedy helped heal after 9/11 terrorist attacks – 105.9 The Region
Jasmeet Raina leaned on comedy days after the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when students at school began circulating rumours that his uncle was Osama bin Laden. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah, we saw Osama drop him off at school,'” he said. The driver was his father, who is Sikh, wears a turban and took Raina to his middle school in Guelph, Ont., not the al-Qaida leader who plotted the deadly attacks on the United States. “It was a pretty trauma…
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