Laughter in the ruins: what hasn't changed since 9/11.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Rant

LAST SUMMER SOMEONE e-mailed me an item from angryfinger.com, a satire site that sells T-shirts bearing the slogan "jihad: my anti-drug." According to the article, the authorities had finally settled on a plan for rebailding Lower Manhattan: "vintage television actor Dick Sargent would be hired as a replacement for the World Trade Center."

The site included an "artist's concept of the New York City skyline after Dick Sargent is installed," along with learned references to some lesser-known moments in the resume of the man most famous for taking over the role of Darrin in the later years of the proto-Wiccan sitcom Bewitched.

Now thi, is national greatness. We may or may not succeed in fending off future massacres, or in crushing the network of thugs behind the September II attacks. But in the facts of a separate but related threat, we have proved ourselves more than resilient.

It has been a year since scolds from Roger Rosenblatt to David Brooks exulted that the ironic would now give way to the iconic, the sarcastic to the bornbastic, the deadpan to the grave. No one called for humor itself to disappear--not openly, anyway. But certain subjects, we were told would be forgotten, discarded as so much frivolous nonsense; and the topics that remained would never be discussed without the appropriate gravitas.

Yet irreverence and distraction have prevailed. Crude jokes and celebrity trivia have survived. It took a while, but mocking the president is popular again. What a relief!

Unlike many writers, I didn't fret much about the future of dissent after 9/11, except in the larger sense that everyone in the country, dissidents included, might, you know, die. Within weeks, the most radical positions short of actual support for Al Qaeda were being not just championed but rewarded. Michael Moore had a best-selling book. Hell--Noam Chomsky had a best-selling book. It, wasn't just possible to challenge the consensus; it was profitable. The only prominent casualty has been Politically Incorrect, and that was already on its way to a long-deserved death.

But if I didn't worry about our ability to dissent, I did wonder about our ability to be wisecracking slobs. There was a time last fall when it seemed inappropriate to...