Norm MacDonald (The Orville) invoking the incident every chance he got: “9/11 was a National Tragedy” Some say comedy is tragedy plus time, and enough time has passed, it seems, for some people to consider 9/11 jokes acceptable. The first would be the rise of the 9/11 conspiracies, which would indeed be categorized as some type of trauma response but were nonetheless mocked for their inanity.