#19: Jokes & the Hyperlocal
I believe Twitter, in general, has elevated jokes to a higher plane, but it has also ruined a certain category of joke: the obvious one that everybody comes up with at the same time. Any mass event, from the Super Bowl to whatever American political blooper/nightmare we're currently finding out about, yields a set of semi-obvious jokes that, even ten years ago, we'd have told our friends and felt proud to have come up with. Now—as I did when Amazon bought Whole Foods last week—you can just search for your joke ("more like Whole Paycheck!") on Twitter and find that a hundred others already made it, preventing you from doing so.
The internet's most distinctive joke form, the meme, stretches this repeatability to its limit: The act of copying and pasting becomes the joke itself, which is what a lot of human culture has always been, just with inferior tools for making and distributing the copy. Nevertheless, humor, along with food and sex, is one of the most localized human social activities. It resists absorption by the global village, unlike shopping and entertainment, which we're quite happy to get from centralized sources. Unlike food and sex, though, the limit on humor is not corporeal, but an abiding demand for originality. A mass-produced joke is not funny, in general. Once copies are found to exist, the joke usually dies.
This is why Twitter humor has become so interesting. In a global arena, jokes need to get more and more specific to survive. Any vital Twitter subculture has evolved its own language of references and micromemes that fuel its communication by ensuring originality (referencing years-old @dril tweets as though they were biblical allusions, for example). My friend once made a meme that contained his own address and social security number along with the joke, because that's almost how specific humor needs to get on a mass medium. Someday we'll have jokes that only exist at certain locations at certain times of day, and everything will be like it was before Twitter existed in the first place.
Reads:
The internet as existential threat: how fragile our internet-depending society really is.
"Now that the iPhone is everywhere, it can finally disappear."
10,000 words ranked according to their Trumpiness ("crap" is #1).
Until next time,
Drew