Humoring Humor

Our society is evolving, as is our humour, because our idea of the funny and the unfunny is, to a great deal, socially conditioned. Children are greatly tickled by many things that would not remotely amuse adults, but as we grow, we naturally start getting selective with what makes us laugh, based on the kind of humour we are exposed to and others' reactions to it. It is this selectivity that is being lost today.

For example, a lot of young people find Skibidi Toilet hilarious, and in my very humble opinion at least, it is everything but hilarious. It is cringeworthy, grotesque, and so completely lifeless that the only reason one would even smirk at it would be as a way of expressing that it is so unamusing that the very fact that it was intended to be comical is laughable. Of course, everybody is entitled to their own opinions and preferences, but the idea that the vast majority of growing kids find it entertaining makes one ponder if they even realise that there are funnier alternatives available.

A huge reason for this phenomenon, if one may use that term, is the unlimited amount of content that is marketed as comedy. In the search for quality the sheer quantity we end up consuming makes us incapable of distinguishing between good and poor quality humour. Our bar for what's funny and what's not progressively gets lowered until it is practically non-existent and the consequence is that we just don't know what's actually amusing anymore. One just scrolls purposelessly through hundreds of memes until one is diagnosed by what Oxford Dictionary deemed fit to designate as the word of the year for 2024, brainrot.

Gone are the days when sophisticated humour was cultivated as nothing less than talent. At this point, the very existence of humour is more than enough and ought to satisfy one, really. Indeed, humourists of yore would be turning in their graves were they to know that for many today, chimpanzini bananini is the zenith of comedy.

And that's not all; the issue of not knowing funny from unfunny has deeper implications. We don't realise whether our jokes are truly ridiculous or just insensitive. Studies show that there is a clear rise in racist, sexist, and more specifically even pro-Nazi "jokes" online. Hate groups, incels for example, deliberately circulate misogynistic content masqueraded in the form of memes such that it gradually and unobtrusively penetrates the vocabulary and thereby the mentality of the masses. When we justify concepts of "Alpha Male" and "Sigma Male" and various other kinds of "male behaviours," denoted only God knows why by Greek letters, as "harmless jokes," we unconsciously glorify unacceptable ideas of textbook toxic masculinity, and set back the progress feminism has achieved by decades.

While sense of humour may seem like a trivial thing, in reality it influences us as human beings, and shapes, and is in turn shaped by, our social interactions. It's essential to conserve the art of comedy and to stop low quality content generated by AI (or incompetent humans, for that matter) from distorting it. "When humor goes, there goes civilization," and by thus quoting Erma Bombeck, Yours Truly would like to conclude this tirade.