I hate how repetitive it usually is. Modern Humor is built around "formats" that are proclaimed as "dead" in just a few days due to the lack of inventiveness with them. I also don't like how much of it attempts to be "cutting edge", from websites like Reddit, where conflicting opinions are censored. I also find many of the people who enjoy it to be underage and not find it exhausting to be "ironic". How long can you be "post-paleo-ironic" and not get mad about it?! It is all getting so tiresome... I wonder if any of you feel the same.
British TV comedy is a good cure for all of the unfunniness in the world, I think.
Maybe you're not tired of Modern Humor, you're tired of twitter jokes that get recirculated on the same handful of websites you happen to check.
There's a lot of things on the internet that I happen to genuinely find humorous and interesting but virtually none of it is from twitter or gets popular on reddit.
i hate what "memes" have become
i long for the days of old
>>5 Same. All modern memes are lazy and unfunny.
Memes died when they got popular.
I was actually just having this conversation the other day, we agreed that modern humor is very shallow, single-serving, and that it's hallmark is almost always some snide insult. That people seemingly only find things funny when it's belittling someone else. It's devolved into nothing more than a Nelson Muntz point-and-laugh simplicity. In other words, the lowest common denominator has gotten even lower. Spontaneous wit has been replaced by boilerplate appeals to this or that demographic.
One place that reflects that very well is late nite television. It's now but unwatchable other than maybe Conan O' Brien, once the young interloper with his lolsorandom style, but now he seems absolutely mature in comparison to the rest. His show is being cut down from an hour to thirty minutes beginning next year. With him out of the picture, probably not so far away, it will be nothing but a nonstop signaling extravaganza with the trite modern mirthmongers.
Reading websites, you mentioned reddit for example, there seems to be only two variants of humor. The former one, and this weird smug 'referencing' if you know what I mean... a variant of virtue signaling only the effort is to appear cultured. Culture signaling. If you have nothing to prove, you won't fit in with people like this, because it's all about self-aggrandizement.
>>7
You are absolutely right. The ones I hate especially are the ones that are made by obvious teens who use a 'meme template' to pander to their ideology (weirdly enough usually communism) even though they have no real understanding of the ideology they claim to be "strugglers in the meme war" for. I notice that the majority of these history/ideology memes that are ((sneaked)) into popular templates are by the types who only play strategy games.
This would be unthinkable only 10 years ago.
>Teens who are diehard Hearts of Darkest Defeat Duty Universalis whatever-the-fuck II choose an ideology off of superficial elements such as "I choose this country cause it's super powerful in my game!"
And they somehow pretend that they're being 'cutting-edge' or 'radical' by siding themselves with ideologies that virtually have no place here or in this time.
I absolutely abhore it.
Nobody ITT gets normies
Modern humor is what you get when the generation who unironically laughed at rage comics starts feeling guilty for laughing at stupid shit like rage comics and chuck norris memes and begins coming up with excuses to justify it.
They call it "ironic", but deep down they just genuinely like lolrandom shit.
Dunning-Kruger: the thread
gorilla
Dicks out for skibidi toilet
Jokes have been in decline for quite some time. Consider that before the 60s and 70s, most jokes were long form stories that built up to a single punchline. A priest and a rabbi in a bar, a husband rushing to the hospital to see his wife, a hitchhiker stops at a convent, etc.
Then a joke gets reduced to a question and answer format, "did you hear about the?", "how many to change a light bulb?", etc.
Then, jokes just become one-liners. One sentence was all that was needed to tell a joke. "The dalai lama stops at a hotdog stand and says 'make me one with everything'".
Along with the one-liners came the sarcastic quips. "That's what she said!". "Yeah, right". "Bazinga!". etc.
Memes are just the image form of the one-liner. Copypasta are a vestige of the older story-format type of joke, sort of.
>Memes are just the image form of the one-liner
Memes don't have to be images. But I guess this is a modern alternative usage of the word.
>>16
That's besides the point. Whether it's an image macro, a reference to an image macro, or a turn of phrase that can be turned into an image macro, it's still a one liner.
>>17
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
>>17 Rickrolling is a meme for example, but I acknowledged that you're using the word “meme” in the sense that's interchangeable with “image macro”. In the more general sense, ALL jokes are memes, along with recipes, fables, hand gestures, religious beliefs, etc.
I think you two are getting a bit hung up on the last sentence. I don't actually care what is considered a meme and what isn't. The point is that jokes used to be told almost exclusively in long-form story format. A good joke actually took some time to tell, had a long build up, and the jokester may even have put on different voices like a storyteller. These types of jokes are getting rarer and rarer.
Modern "humor" is just memes, man.
modern humor is globohomo propaganda, very funny
>>22 I'm not hung up on it, I just thought that was the most interesting part of your post. I wasn't saying it for you to care about it, it was just an observation of an interesting modern phenomenon, related to the topic. Sorry but the rest sounds like hogwash to me. What timescale are you talking about? It simply isn't the case that at some point in history, jokes were all long, and now they're short. There are examples of long and short jokes from Victorian times, medieval times, as far back as the oldest recorded Sumerian jokes. How can a joke become rare? There are lots of modern comedians telling long-form jokes. Why's it only a good joke if it takes time to tell with a long build up? I'm not disputing they can be very funny, but that's just one kind of comedy.
>>25
It's an observation from Marshall McLuhan, who wrote about this change as he was observing it. Here is a transcribed quote from a speech he gave in 1970:
>One of the peculiar flips that goes with the change from the visual to the acoustic is a change in joke styles. First I’ll tell you a couple of old-fashioned jokes to show you what I mean. A friend of mine went to Kennedy Airport a few months ago to pick up an Irishman who was coming into New York. On the way in from the airport, the Irishman was enjoying the advertising and was especially attracted by a sign which read, “Be Younger. Use Ex-Lax.” “How about that?” he asked. “What is Ex-Lax?” His friend replied, “We’re coming to a drugstore right now, and I’m going to get you some.” He popped in and brought out a cake of Ex-Lax, which the Irishman proceeded to gobble down — and with relish. About half an hour later his friend said, “Are you feeling any younger?” The Irishman said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I’ve just done something very childish.” Now that’s an old-fashioned joke — it’s got a story line.
>Another one on that pattern concerns a Newfoundland chap who was sitting in an airport waiting for a plane. He was sitting beside another man and, gradually, they began to talk. The man asked the Newfoundlander, “What do you do?” And the Newfoundlander replied: “I’m a rancher. I have 40 acres in Newfoundland, and I grow a great variety of things there. It keeps me very busy.” And he turned to the other chap, a Texan, and said, “What do you do?” The Texan replied, “I’m a rancher too.” “How big is your ranch?” inquired the Newfoundlander. “Well,” said the Texan, “if we got in my car about now and drove till sunset, we’d still be on my ranch.” And the Newfie said, “You know, I had a car like that once.” Now that’s the old style.
>The one-liner joke, which has taken the place of the story line, has no plot at all. It’s instantaneous, “easy glum, easy glow.” That’s the whole point: you’re not supposed to have much attention span anymore. “If Nixon had been the captain of the Titanic, what would he have said to the passengers? ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re stopping for ice.’” These jokes are one-liners. “The British Empire is the empire on which the sun never sets because you cannot trust an Englishman in the dark.” One-liners are everywhere, and they have taken the place of the old story line.
The closest thing to the one-liner in Victorian times would have been a pun, which was originally a separate category from the joke. Puns were used within jokes, as a punchline. The one-liner is basically the punchline without the build-up.
I will say that I have never heard anybody younger than 30 tell me a joke like any of the above jokes, but I do remember jokes like this being much more common, and I only encounter older people who continue to tell these types of jokes. Comedians kind of preserve this style, but I would still argue they don't tell these exact types of jokes.
As for whether it's "only good" if a joke builds up, that's not really what I'm saying. Lots of one liners are good. I like the dalai lama joke I shared. The issue is a lot deeper. It's not just that jokes are different now: everything about how we communicate is different now, both in speech and in writing. It is McLuhan's and my own opinion that technology which suppresses literacy has driven this change. The implications are well beyond what kind of jokes people like to tell. People can think that's pretentious if they don't agree with that, or trite if they do agree with it, but it's well observable at this point. Read the kinds of letters that barely educated soldiers wrote to their families at war, and they are better written than almost anything a modern highschooler could written, certainly better written than my own post. The older jokes had a literary quality to them, the modern jokes usually do not.
modern humor is to make people jab themselves and wear muzzles, two more weeks