When Jasmeet Raina walked into his middle school in Guelph, Ont., in the days following the September 11, 2001, attacks, he was met with a rumour that would shape the rest of his life. Classmates insisted they had seen his uncle — Osama bin Laden — drop him off that morning.
In truth, the driver was his father, a Sikh man who wears a turban and had simply taken his son to school. The rumour, born of fear and ignorance, cut deep for a child suddenly marked as different in the eyes of his peers.
“It was a pretty traumatic part of my life, as I’m sure it was for a lot of people,” Raina, now 36, recalled in an interview. “I always liked comedy, but I really used it at that moment, because it was more like a survival instinct. At that time not a lot of people knew what Sikh people were. I did my best to try to educate people on this.”
Raina leaned on humour the way countless others did after that Tuesday morning 25 years ago — as a way to make sense of the senseless, to push back against suspicion, and to find connection in the wreckage.
From Class Clown to Creator
Raina became “a class clown” in those early weeks, using jokes to defuse the suspicion swirling around him. What began as a coping mechanism eventually became a calling.
He later started uploading comedic skits and monologues to YouTube, drawing on his experiences growing up as a racialised kid in Canada. The clips racked up hundreds of thousands of views and built a loyal subscriber base eager for his particular brand of storytelling.
That online following helped open the door to television. His Crave-streaming dramedy, Late Bloomer, is set in suburban Toronto and follows a character named Jasmeet Dutta who chases viral fame while juggling his family’s expectations. One episode, titled “Not My Uncle,” draws directly on Raina’s own experience as a Sikh child in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Raina is far from the only Canadian comedian who found his voice in the years after the attacks. But his story captures something distinctive about that era: the way a national trauma forced a generation of performers to confront — and, often, to lampoon — the racism that surged in its wake.
A Before and After in Stand-Up
Raina draws a sharp line between what he calls “pre-9/11 racism” and “post-9/11 racism.”
“Pre-9/11 was like more lighthearted Apu jokes (from The Simpsons), gas station jokes, taxi driver jokes,” he said. “Then post-9/11, it just changed drastically, like, ‘You’re a terrorist, you want to bomb people, you want to kill.'”
That shift was visible on stages and screens across North America. Marlis Schweitzer, a theatre and performance studies professor at York University, said the immediate aftermath of the attacks briefly silenced satire altogether.
“In the immediate aftermath, there was this sense that irony was dead, that satire was dead,” Schweitzer said. “It was not acceptable to laugh or to poke fun at the horrific tragedy and the trauma of 9/11.”
Comedian Rick Mercer cancelled his beloved “Talking to Americans” segment on CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes in the weeks following the attacks, a striking absence for one of Canadian television’s sharpest political satirists.
But the pause did not last. James Nadler, a screenwriting and television professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, said comedians eventually helped their audiences metabolise the tragedy.
“When we laugh, it’s because we recognize, ‘oh yeah, that is true,'” Nadler said. “In the core of every joke there is truth.”
The Daily Show and a New Satirical Era
In the United States, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show transformed from a pop-culture parody desk into a pointed political force, skewering government policy in the wake of the attacks and the wars that followed.
“The Daily Show moved from being about pop culture to being much more political in its thrust, in terms of its comedy,” Nadler said. “There’s a whole generation that did not get their news from NBC or the New York Times or even Fox, but were getting it from The Daily Show.”
The format caught on. In Canada, Mercer launched The Rick Mercer Report in 2004, crisscrossing the country and ribbing politicians from coast to coast. The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axis of Evil, a Canadian stage comedy following two refugees from a war-torn country trying to adapt to Western life, also emerged in that period and remains one of Schweitzer’s favourite productions.
Racialised Canadian comedians, including Russell Peters, found new audiences willing to engage with jokes rooted in lived experiences of prejudice. Social media, still in its infancy, allowed those voices to travel further and faster than ever before.
“The big genre shift was not so much longer-form comedy, but really bite-size comedy,” Schweitzer said, pointing to platforms like YouTube as accelerators of the trend.
Why it Matters
The attacks of September 11, 2001, redrew the boundaries of what was acceptable to joke about — and who got to tell the joke. For performers like Raina, comedy became both a shield and a tool of education, a way to push back against a new, more menacing strain of racism while holding on to something resembling normalcy. Twenty-five years on, the post-9/11 era of satire has shaped everything from late-night television to the algorithms of TikTok, and it remains a reminder that laughter, when wielded with care, can be one of the most powerful forms of survival.
