People say they are now ready to laugh. I want to ask the audience something: Then what are you doing HERE?

- Craig Kilborn, "The Late Show"

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said it to CBS late-night jester David Letterman. Sen. John McCain said it to NBC's Jay Leno. Culture critic Frank Rich said it to Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. Three weeks after the attack on America, the message has come often and in pleading tones: "The country needs you to go back to being funny."

Behind America's outward-focused obsession with national response - from combating terrorism abroad to assuring safety at home - a more inward-looking question is emerging for those who analyze the national psyche through the lens of popular culture: Will being "funny" in America ever be the same?

"This may be the event which historians look back to as the beginning of a new era of sensitivity, introspection, and growth," says George Schlatter, producer of America's No. 1 hit in the 1960s, "Laugh In," and creator of the American Comedy Awards. "It could produce new styles, new textures, and new subjects."

Some social historians say America is in for no more than a temporary period of cultural mourning, in which comics will adopt a brief moratorium on certain topics from belittling politicians to demonizing foreigners.

But others believe the issue of permissible humor amid national trauma goes even deeper than it might at first appear. What is acceptable and reliable fodder for mainstream satire, sarcasm, cynicism, and nihilism (a "nothing matters" attitude) says much about what a society accepts and rejects as core values. And such values change.

"The history of comedy in America shows us there are seismic shifts over what the culture thinks is acceptable and what is not," says Lawrence Mintz, director of the Center for Humor Studies at the University of Maryland. Such shifts are often so gradual that they go unnoticed except over the arc of time.

Yeah, people in New York are bending over backward to be nice to each other after the tragedy. Today I saw a store clerk helping a shoplifter out to the car with her bags.

- David Letterman

Twenty-five years ago, the Dean Martin comedy roasts made regular fun of drinking, womanizing, and bigotry. But through decades-long efforts of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and gains in the women's movement and civil rights, such jokes are no longer the core grist of mainstream comics. "You don't hear comics talk so much about these now because they were jokes that were acceptable 20 years ago but not now," says Mr. Mintz.

But the seeds of a new shift can sometimes be traced to cataclysmic events, and such a shift may be starting now, if only gradually. "This event throws a real bucket of water on America's level of irony that has flourished from the late 1970s until now," says Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. America's relative physical security and good economic times have allowed the luxury of broad entitlement to poke fun at the system that produced them. "We now have a situation that could throw that long-entrenched attitude into decline," he says.

What a culture finds funny can also reflect the inner strength of a nation and its leaders, how open that country is to self-examination, and how willing it is to scrutinize its own underbelly, and shadow motivations.

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