Hit Me Hard
You need more than courage to make stand-up comedy out of Ground Zero
7 September 2002

If there's one subject that can be said to have dominated the programme at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it's responses to the events of September 11th 2001. From stand-up comedy to drama, 11 shows took their inspiration from the terrorist strikes and dozens more mentioned them in passing.

American groups presented many of the most serious responses to the attacks. Project 9/11, for example, an ensemble piece by the students of New York University's Playwright Horizon theatre, relates seven personal accounts of living in New York on the day the World Trade Centre towers were destroyed.

In The Guys, a tribute to the selfless professionalism of the New York firemen who sacrificed their lives in attempting to rescue victims from the crumbling World Trade Centre, actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon presented a heroic view of US citizens standing together in their darkest moment.

Less patriotically, Jumpers, a play devised by a group of young New York actors, follows a group of four New York twentysomethings through an imaginary crisis that takes place in the spring of 2003, 18 months on from the Twin Towers attack. It darkly envisages an America involved in military action in more than 20 countries worldwide and the ruinous effects on the characters as a nation mobilises itself for a major conflict.

Out of tragedy comes comedy and the events of September 11th have spawned several irreverent shows. British Drag queen Tina C's Twin Towers Tribute scorns entertainers making money out of the tragedy, and pokes fun at a nation's inability to comprehend why it is so widely hated.

Meanwhile Anglo-Iranian stand-up comedian Omid Djalili's show, Behind Enemy Lines, disrupts received wisdom about the Middle East and what has become known as the war against terror. "A bloke would come up to me and ask for the time," he says of the paranoia he experienced following the collapse of the Twin Towers. "I'd go, 'what do I look like? A bloody terrorist!'"

Copyright 2002 The Economist