Yes, I get what Freddie was saying about how it's one thing to be funny occasionally, quite another to be compulsively so (or attempt to be). But he is enviably funny sometimes!
Yeah, he always made me uncomfortable too because he reminded me so much of manic people I have known. I recognized his extraordinary gifts, though, especially as a mimic.
The imitation of jokes on Twitter is instantaneous. If you make a good joke your replies will be filled with people making the same joke back to you. It’s lame.
Comedy, like anything else, should be presented for public consumption only when done by people who are very, very good at it, and once you've marinated yourself in Lubitsch and Sturges most of the stuff that gets forced-sounding guffaws these days actually seems pretty weak. (Just like all the hours I've spent watching Astaire and Charisse forever ruined Dancing with the Stars for me.)
Yes, we talk about that a lot in my house; how Chris Rock's new special didn't just appear one day when he felt like it; he spent years (I think) shopping the material around at small clubs with low stakes, refining, refining. People (esp kids) just DO NOT GET THAT.
I also think there's a sense in which comedy's "natural" home is the small group of friends who share a lot of in-jokes and know each other well. The comedian's special skill is in establishing that level of rapport (or the illusion of it) with a large audience of strangers within the first few minutes of a set.
Nah I think your perspective is sound. It was not my generation of television, but my mother ported over a great appreciation for the Era of Astaire to me. As a pit musician, I lament the loss of media entertainment that supported the cultivation of artistic fields like stage work.
I like this piece - you've put your finger on something that's really hard to articulate. It brings to mind a lot of the The Ringer podcasts with a seemingly forced group laugh every 20 seconds as I sit there stone faced almost feeling like I should try to laugh to fit in. Contrast with Bill Simmons himself, who does seem to pull off the sarcastic banter in a genuine way that I enjoy.
Yes. I like the Ringer as a publication, and have written so. And I have some affection for many of their personalities. But as an institution Ringer podcasts clearly operate under the theory that they have a mandate to tell a joke every 90 seconds, and I find it tiring.
Verno and KOC (The Mismatch) do laugh quite a bit, but it's clear that they have genuine affection for each other. And it's manifested as a really stereo typical couple: one over the top and the other long suffering. Last ten minutes or so of the April 14th episode is an example of this.
This is interesting because I do see myself as a funny person, but I mostly don't try to carry that into my online life. My IRL humor is mostly just riffing on whatever mildly absurd thing is happening in the moment, and I never really thought about trying to port that over to a place like twitter, which is so constantly absurd there's nothing left to do but stand back and appreciate.
totally! me too! I've always been mildly annoyed by that; I used to be on FB and I think I was *sometimes* funny, but I always felt like it was just going into a void and lacked the feedback and joy that comes from making the person in front of you laugh. But then I always felt strangely bad about it and slightly annoyed with myself; kind of like how I am absolutely horrendous at the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. I'm like, I can be so quick-witted IRL WTF?
Here’s another completely different kind of funny. My wife doesn’t come up with a lot of funny lines herself. But she has the best TASTE in humor. More than one person has described her as one of the best follows on Facebook, because every single thing she decides to share is hilarious and she finds a lot. She’s funny in a completely different way: she’s a fantastic curator.
I was going to post a comment to the same effect, but you beat me to it. I like to think I'm good at comedy, good enough to rapidly make a room full of strangers laugh. But when everyone's trying to be funny, saying "fuck it" and going full earnest sincerity is so much more effective.
The recut Shining trailer reminded me of a similar trend from 2005, when a bunch of people took clips from existing movies to create fake trailers in the style of Brokeback Mountain, highlighting moments which, taken out of context, might read as subtly homoerotic. "Brokeback to the Future", that sort of thing.
Not a particularly funny meme. One example really stuck out to me, however. Someone made a fake Brokeback Mountain trailer using clips from - Fight Club.
I wonder if the person who created this trailer thought to themselves "wow, it's REALLY easy to find clips from Fight Club which seem subtly - even OVERTLY - homoerotic!"
I like this one, too. My 14-year-old son is really funny (truly—not just a mom thing); he's been an old muppet in the balcony since he was about four. He absolutely overshoots the mark with commentary and hot takes sometimes (often), though, and we tell him so: to be truly funny requires a huge helping of judiciousness. We listen to a lot of comedy in the car (not to make him a better comic, just b/c it's fun), and lightly talk about what is behind all of that greatness. But mainly we call it like it is: tone it down, not everything needs a take, etc. It's a balancing act to support creativity/humor/cleverness but also not just let it run like wildfire; you need checks and balances, people who love you to tell you that that one was great and this one was a dud. I think the difference here is that the only people telling you online that something sucked are doing so in such a mean-spirited and ultimately self-aggrandizing way; there's a huge absence of unconditionally loving criticism in people's lives, I think.
yes! that's exactly it. What I meant was that we love him unconditionally, and he knows that, so the criticism lands differently than it would from anyone else (peer, teacher, mentor, coach, etc). the stakes are low and our goals are for him to evolve and refine on his own terms but with some sense of what works and what doesn't through the eyes of an audience, albeit a totally non-objective one. the material is definitely hit or miss, as you pointed out (thank you!) and as I tried to make clear in my post; plenty of hilarious observations and plenty of unfunny hot takes as well!
ha! I guess you'd just have to see it to believe it ;) or maybe more to the point, we're definitely not the best, but we're better than nothing and he has no other choice!
> I think the difference here is that the only people telling you online that something sucked are doing so in such a mean-spirited and ultimately self-aggrandizing way
Which is in large part due to the phenomenon this article is about. Dunking on something that clearly sucks is an appealing way to attempt comedy without having to refine your craft. Not that mean-spirited dunks *can't* be really funny or done with craft, but there's a very low bar to entry so the Internet is saturated with them.
A key problem is that with professional forms of most creative activities constantly available on demand, we've lost sight of what amateurism can and can't do. I have a few friends I can make laugh pretty consistently and they in turn make me laugh. We aren't objectively funny out of our specific social context but that's fine. Similarly a friend's art work or music can be pretty good even if it's not going to meet a gate keeper standard and can be live and in person, a fun niche, or tuned to your specific context in ways that professional art almost never will be.
That can be awesome, but really relies on boundaries between the amateur and the professional that social media tears down. I think hobbies in general can similar suffer.
Being funny with people you know, people within your Dunbar number circle or whatever, is also very different from being funny publicly as a stand-up comic or Internet writer. The former relies a lot more on in-jokes and callbacks to things that happened six years ago. It can be cruel or supportive, but it's fundamentally playing off of the relationships you already have with people in the room.
My friend group used to have an annual get-together with a "talent show" and I would always knock the room dead with laughter performing song parodies, but I know I'm no Weird Al Yankovic. The entirety of the humor came from inserting rhyming lyrics about somebody's hobby into a Lady Gaga song or whatever the case may be. You can't scale that up to a career as a TikToker.
Exactly, which makes me realize this is even more true in comedy than in some other creative arts. But I would find more delight in that than in a typical high quality Weird Al song just because I'd feel seen (and often skewered). Dating myself, but some older forms of social media, LiveJournal and the like, were more compatible with focusing on your friend group rather than always encouraging playing to a broad audience.
I totally agree. My family has a habit of quoting a specific set of movies when we get together (ones we saw many times as kids) — part of the fun is responding with something that’s recognizably a quote from that movie in a context that’s completely different from the original. It’s hilarious, even though some of the movies we do it with are serious movies. You can only do this with people you know really well and have experienced that movie with — as evidenced by the fact that quoting movie lines in general, in the outside world with people you don’t know, is seen as one of the lowest forms of humor. (Without that rich social context, all you can do is along the lines of “It’s only a flesh wound!” “I understood that reference!”) But if you’re with the right group of people, then just imitating how that one guy said “no” that time (or whatever) can be hilarious.
This is why I love running and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not world class, but I don't have to be. I can craft something for an audience of 4-6 friends, they love it, and I get the warm fuzzy endorphins from being creative and social with my fellow human beings.
I think the inherent limits on scale of most RPGs in which one is a participant have helped that corner of the culture preserve a space for amateurism. Yes there's voice actors and masters of the art running things on youtube and MMORPGs are always an option, which is great, but ultimately the highly interactive parts of the are natural fits for small groups.
Yeah, the point about the boundaries between amateur and professional is an interesting one. At this point a lot of awareness has been raised about not working for exposure. Which is very important! But there are some things people say in those discussions that seem to me — if taken to their logical conclusion — to amount to “amateurs, don’t ever do your hobby in public, you’re being a scab if you do.”
To be clear, these are things people say online. As an amateur musician, I’ve never had this kind of discussion in person — the amateur/semipro music “ecosystem” in the city where I live works the way it works, perhaps it’s different in other places, and I’ve never been privy to any meta-discussions of it.
I’ve been thinking and talking about music scenes and the larger industry in my circles a lot recently. I’m pro trained, working on crossover genre skills, and the scene in my city is really opaque and oversaturated with people competing for space and attention.
I think a lot of it has to do with infrastructure when it comes to physical space. Technology has made it so easy to pull up or find exactly what your interest or niche is, and breaking into a scene remotely/digitally is hard enough if you don’t have a local scene in-person to cultivate experience and performance skills. Social media like TikTok has become a way to catch a break if there’s a popular audience for the style you’re working in already, but that relies so much on the algorithm and timing trends.
Where I’m at, there just isn’t a space to consistently develop out a local scene to a large scale without great difficulty and financial support. But because things have become so eclectic in taste and alienated by social tech, it’s hard to capture an audience and build up at the same time. Most of my peers burned out from what they trained to do, and what’s left are the cats who stay the course and gig what they can or they position themselves in a scene that’s already got some traction elsewhere.
Sorry in advance for the pretentiousness of the reference, but I think that this is an important point brought up by Walter Benjamin's "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." He was talking about the shift that occurred when we went from acting in the theater to film, but the larger point is that when we move from performing in a live setting, where audience responsiveness affects things to performing to a camera, we lose sight of art as something organically embodied within a human, cultural context. It becomes untethered and sapped of authenticity.
On the other hand... social media has in some ways made those "fun niches" bigger and allowed some activities that would've been purely amateur to become paid hobbies or side hustles, or at least to feel more like successful public performances than they would otherwise.
I've been able to turn making wisecracks while playing video games into a live streaming gig that brings in a modest profit - nowhere near enough to live off of, but enough to get that feeling of "hey, I guess I'm not bad at this, people are paying me to be funny and knowledgeable!" Because that platform exists, the quality bar I have to meet to get that feeling is a lot lower than it would've been 20 years ago. I can basically just be as funny as I was back when I was sitting around my apartment playing video games with my stoner roommates, but instead of getting laughs from the same two people every day, I'm getting laughs and tips from dozens of regulars plus a trickle of strangers.
In my best moments, I like to think I'm doing the kind of work I used to love listening to on comedy talk radio. In reality, those shows were consistently funny for hours every day at a level I've only been able to reach for a few minutes at a time. But still, the response I get provides enough of an incentive to keep putting myself out there in public and cranking out content, even when it falls far short of professional comedy standards.
I imagine something similar happens with people who crank out mediocre jokes for free on Twitter: they're getting a degree of social rewards, in the form of the occasional like or retweet, that without social media they could only have gotten by meeting a much higher quality bar.
You've hit the nail on the head that so many people are so desperately trying to force humor everywhere all the time, but I wonder where it all comes from. Could it be that so many of us are deeply insecure, and the internet has made that insecurity worse rather than better?
The Apatow style comedy and Joss Whedon really taught most of the country very bad lessons about humor. They've made quips extremely annoying in general, but they also make me long for comedy that was well scripted and didn't spend 2 minutes of every 15 allowing actors to riff badly at one another.
I’ve heard one of my favorite writers say “whenever I see the very best (world-class) improv, my first thought is ‘that could use a rewrite.’” So true.
I think this goes beyond comedy... everyone thinks they’re funny... everyone thinks they’re a food critic, infectious disease expert, social justice expert (whatever that would be), criminal justice expert, etc, etc.
Giving everyone the ability to livestream their lives appears to have convinced them that they always have something worth live-streaming... ;)
I think the culprit is as much (maybe more) the expectation for everyone to have an opinion/take on everything (which is also implicit in pervasive social media). If we didn’t socially ‘require’ people to have an opinion about everything (the second that it happens), then we’d see less of this. It wouldn’t go away (you’re right that its just a part of human nature), but it wouldn’t be amplified nearly as much.
This is a great point. The "stakes are low" when we think of the person trying to be funny at the internet's dinner table. But the requirement to build a personal brand via social media (for social but also often professional reasons), leads to far more attempts at humor than we would probably see otherwise.
Yes, I was thinking this too. But it's like the worst combination of everyone thinking they're a comedian/expert and also the most braindead groupthink around those topics. Like the self-assumed "expertise" (in comedy, food, infectious diseases, social justice, etc.) is actually just a received catalog of talking points and one-liners.
Even before the pandemic there was a disturbing tendency in American culture to discount expertise. And obviously that's gotten a lot worse in the last few years.
Bizarrely, I’m (as described by others) way funnier now than I was in my teen and college years--mostly because I’m now confident enough to be self-deprecating and pull it off.
But that’s not West Wing comedy, and I’m by and large not a funny writer. Go figure.
At any rate, I feel this kind of “being funny” is tainted by trying to _produce_ humor. That rarely works. But lots of people are reasonably funny in person, once they’re comfortable--not that it’s a cavalcade of zingers, but rather a ton of interesting observations and amusing moments.
To reply to my own post: one of my friends tells HILARIOUS long stories. His timing in these stories is immaculate, his sense of the telling detail perfect, his manner infectious, so that what would be fairly mundane becomes way funnier.
But he’s not “fast” and he doesn’t do zingers. So Freddie wouldn’t say he’s funny, at least by the kinda tight definition implied here. But he sure as hell is.
Tangentially related - I’m 25 and a lot of people my age remember Vine very fondly. I feel the need to remind them that the vast majority of Vines were fucking terrible. There were a few genuinely funny people and some everyday hilarity that people were lucky enough to record, but 80-90% of it was the kind of unwatchable sketch comedy you describe here.
God, most of the "good" ones are almost incomprehensible in the TikTok era. Pacing and structure matter so much, and our brains are primed differently now
Instagram and TikTok for one evolve at a faster pace, meaning that by the time a specific concept is brought into the mainstream its basically a template, a condensed version of a specific comedic structure. With Vine, it was mostly about the videos themselves rather than an amalgamation. Vine was also less stimulating in general, so if your brain is particularly fried the seven seconds are over before your brain was really primed into whatever was going on in the video.
Yeah, everyone seems to have at least one layer of ablative irony going these days. Seems the only sincere ones are the fanatics...
Ah, a Marvel movie.
Yes, I get what Freddie was saying about how it's one thing to be funny occasionally, quite another to be compulsively so (or attempt to be). But he is enviably funny sometimes!
Yeah, he always made me uncomfortable too because he reminded me so much of manic people I have known. I recognized his extraordinary gifts, though, especially as a mimic.
As the Buddha might have said in 2021, existence is doomscrolling.
The imitation of jokes on Twitter is instantaneous. If you make a good joke your replies will be filled with people making the same joke back to you. It’s lame.
Comedy, like anything else, should be presented for public consumption only when done by people who are very, very good at it, and once you've marinated yourself in Lubitsch and Sturges most of the stuff that gets forced-sounding guffaws these days actually seems pretty weak. (Just like all the hours I've spent watching Astaire and Charisse forever ruined Dancing with the Stars for me.)
This morning's grumpy old fossil take.
Yes, we talk about that a lot in my house; how Chris Rock's new special didn't just appear one day when he felt like it; he spent years (I think) shopping the material around at small clubs with low stakes, refining, refining. People (esp kids) just DO NOT GET THAT.
I also think there's a sense in which comedy's "natural" home is the small group of friends who share a lot of in-jokes and know each other well. The comedian's special skill is in establishing that level of rapport (or the illusion of it) with a large audience of strangers within the first few minutes of a set.
That is an amazing way of describing standup and I love it
Nah I think your perspective is sound. It was not my generation of television, but my mother ported over a great appreciation for the Era of Astaire to me. As a pit musician, I lament the loss of media entertainment that supported the cultivation of artistic fields like stage work.
I like this piece - you've put your finger on something that's really hard to articulate. It brings to mind a lot of the The Ringer podcasts with a seemingly forced group laugh every 20 seconds as I sit there stone faced almost feeling like I should try to laugh to fit in. Contrast with Bill Simmons himself, who does seem to pull off the sarcastic banter in a genuine way that I enjoy.
Yes. I like the Ringer as a publication, and have written so. And I have some affection for many of their personalities. But as an institution Ringer podcasts clearly operate under the theory that they have a mandate to tell a joke every 90 seconds, and I find it tiring.
Jason Concepcion and Mallory Rubin laughing in synchronicity every few seconds is my definition of an auditory hellscape.
Verno and KOC (The Mismatch) do laugh quite a bit, but it's clear that they have genuine affection for each other. And it's manifested as a really stereo typical couple: one over the top and the other long suffering. Last ten minutes or so of the April 14th episode is an example of this.
More often than not I smile when Wos laughs...
Yeah I'm definitely overgeneralizing to say "The Ringer podcasts"
This is interesting because I do see myself as a funny person, but I mostly don't try to carry that into my online life. My IRL humor is mostly just riffing on whatever mildly absurd thing is happening in the moment, and I never really thought about trying to port that over to a place like twitter, which is so constantly absurd there's nothing left to do but stand back and appreciate.
totally! me too! I've always been mildly annoyed by that; I used to be on FB and I think I was *sometimes* funny, but I always felt like it was just going into a void and lacked the feedback and joy that comes from making the person in front of you laugh. But then I always felt strangely bad about it and slightly annoyed with myself; kind of like how I am absolutely horrendous at the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. I'm like, I can be so quick-witted IRL WTF?
Here’s another completely different kind of funny. My wife doesn’t come up with a lot of funny lines herself. But she has the best TASTE in humor. More than one person has described her as one of the best follows on Facebook, because every single thing she decides to share is hilarious and she finds a lot. She’s funny in a completely different way: she’s a fantastic curator.
Yes, and being a good laugher and good audience (not necessarily the same as good curator but often correlated) are also special qualities.
I was going to post a comment to the same effect, but you beat me to it. I like to think I'm good at comedy, good enough to rapidly make a room full of strangers laugh. But when everyone's trying to be funny, saying "fuck it" and going full earnest sincerity is so much more effective.
The recut Shining trailer reminded me of a similar trend from 2005, when a bunch of people took clips from existing movies to create fake trailers in the style of Brokeback Mountain, highlighting moments which, taken out of context, might read as subtly homoerotic. "Brokeback to the Future", that sort of thing.
Not a particularly funny meme. One example really stuck out to me, however. Someone made a fake Brokeback Mountain trailer using clips from - Fight Club.
I wonder if the person who created this trailer thought to themselves "wow, it's REALLY easy to find clips from Fight Club which seem subtly - even OVERTLY - homoerotic!"
No kidding.
"Point Brokeback" (Point Break plus Brokeback Mountain) was also a classic.
I like this one, too. My 14-year-old son is really funny (truly—not just a mom thing); he's been an old muppet in the balcony since he was about four. He absolutely overshoots the mark with commentary and hot takes sometimes (often), though, and we tell him so: to be truly funny requires a huge helping of judiciousness. We listen to a lot of comedy in the car (not to make him a better comic, just b/c it's fun), and lightly talk about what is behind all of that greatness. But mainly we call it like it is: tone it down, not everything needs a take, etc. It's a balancing act to support creativity/humor/cleverness but also not just let it run like wildfire; you need checks and balances, people who love you to tell you that that one was great and this one was a dud. I think the difference here is that the only people telling you online that something sucked are doing so in such a mean-spirited and ultimately self-aggrandizing way; there's a huge absence of unconditionally loving criticism in people's lives, I think.
Colour me sceptical that parents are the best critics/editors/mentors of a budding 14-year-old comedian or any other aspiring creative.
"Unconditionally loving criticism" strikes me as an oxymoron.
I read it as "criticism that comes from a loving place" rather than "criticism that always expresses love for the material itself".
yes! that's exactly it. What I meant was that we love him unconditionally, and he knows that, so the criticism lands differently than it would from anyone else (peer, teacher, mentor, coach, etc). the stakes are low and our goals are for him to evolve and refine on his own terms but with some sense of what works and what doesn't through the eyes of an audience, albeit a totally non-objective one. the material is definitely hit or miss, as you pointed out (thank you!) and as I tried to make clear in my post; plenty of hilarious observations and plenty of unfunny hot takes as well!
ha! I guess you'd just have to see it to believe it ;) or maybe more to the point, we're definitely not the best, but we're better than nothing and he has no other choice!
> I think the difference here is that the only people telling you online that something sucked are doing so in such a mean-spirited and ultimately self-aggrandizing way
Which is in large part due to the phenomenon this article is about. Dunking on something that clearly sucks is an appealing way to attempt comedy without having to refine your craft. Not that mean-spirited dunks *can't* be really funny or done with craft, but there's a very low bar to entry so the Internet is saturated with them.
yep, exactly. very true and you're right that my point was mainly just restating the premise :)
A key problem is that with professional forms of most creative activities constantly available on demand, we've lost sight of what amateurism can and can't do. I have a few friends I can make laugh pretty consistently and they in turn make me laugh. We aren't objectively funny out of our specific social context but that's fine. Similarly a friend's art work or music can be pretty good even if it's not going to meet a gate keeper standard and can be live and in person, a fun niche, or tuned to your specific context in ways that professional art almost never will be.
That can be awesome, but really relies on boundaries between the amateur and the professional that social media tears down. I think hobbies in general can similar suffer.
Being funny with people you know, people within your Dunbar number circle or whatever, is also very different from being funny publicly as a stand-up comic or Internet writer. The former relies a lot more on in-jokes and callbacks to things that happened six years ago. It can be cruel or supportive, but it's fundamentally playing off of the relationships you already have with people in the room.
My friend group used to have an annual get-together with a "talent show" and I would always knock the room dead with laughter performing song parodies, but I know I'm no Weird Al Yankovic. The entirety of the humor came from inserting rhyming lyrics about somebody's hobby into a Lady Gaga song or whatever the case may be. You can't scale that up to a career as a TikToker.
Exactly, which makes me realize this is even more true in comedy than in some other creative arts. But I would find more delight in that than in a typical high quality Weird Al song just because I'd feel seen (and often skewered). Dating myself, but some older forms of social media, LiveJournal and the like, were more compatible with focusing on your friend group rather than always encouraging playing to a broad audience.
I totally agree. My family has a habit of quoting a specific set of movies when we get together (ones we saw many times as kids) — part of the fun is responding with something that’s recognizably a quote from that movie in a context that’s completely different from the original. It’s hilarious, even though some of the movies we do it with are serious movies. You can only do this with people you know really well and have experienced that movie with — as evidenced by the fact that quoting movie lines in general, in the outside world with people you don’t know, is seen as one of the lowest forms of humor. (Without that rich social context, all you can do is along the lines of “It’s only a flesh wound!” “I understood that reference!”) But if you’re with the right group of people, then just imitating how that one guy said “no” that time (or whatever) can be hilarious.
This is why I love running and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not world class, but I don't have to be. I can craft something for an audience of 4-6 friends, they love it, and I get the warm fuzzy endorphins from being creative and social with my fellow human beings.
I think the inherent limits on scale of most RPGs in which one is a participant have helped that corner of the culture preserve a space for amateurism. Yes there's voice actors and masters of the art running things on youtube and MMORPGs are always an option, which is great, but ultimately the highly interactive parts of the are natural fits for small groups.
Yeah, the point about the boundaries between amateur and professional is an interesting one. At this point a lot of awareness has been raised about not working for exposure. Which is very important! But there are some things people say in those discussions that seem to me — if taken to their logical conclusion — to amount to “amateurs, don’t ever do your hobby in public, you’re being a scab if you do.”
To be clear, these are things people say online. As an amateur musician, I’ve never had this kind of discussion in person — the amateur/semipro music “ecosystem” in the city where I live works the way it works, perhaps it’s different in other places, and I’ve never been privy to any meta-discussions of it.
I’ve been thinking and talking about music scenes and the larger industry in my circles a lot recently. I’m pro trained, working on crossover genre skills, and the scene in my city is really opaque and oversaturated with people competing for space and attention.
I think a lot of it has to do with infrastructure when it comes to physical space. Technology has made it so easy to pull up or find exactly what your interest or niche is, and breaking into a scene remotely/digitally is hard enough if you don’t have a local scene in-person to cultivate experience and performance skills. Social media like TikTok has become a way to catch a break if there’s a popular audience for the style you’re working in already, but that relies so much on the algorithm and timing trends.
Where I’m at, there just isn’t a space to consistently develop out a local scene to a large scale without great difficulty and financial support. But because things have become so eclectic in taste and alienated by social tech, it’s hard to capture an audience and build up at the same time. Most of my peers burned out from what they trained to do, and what’s left are the cats who stay the course and gig what they can or they position themselves in a scene that’s already got some traction elsewhere.
Sorry in advance for the pretentiousness of the reference, but I think that this is an important point brought up by Walter Benjamin's "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction." He was talking about the shift that occurred when we went from acting in the theater to film, but the larger point is that when we move from performing in a live setting, where audience responsiveness affects things to performing to a camera, we lose sight of art as something organically embodied within a human, cultural context. It becomes untethered and sapped of authenticity.
On the other hand... social media has in some ways made those "fun niches" bigger and allowed some activities that would've been purely amateur to become paid hobbies or side hustles, or at least to feel more like successful public performances than they would otherwise.
I've been able to turn making wisecracks while playing video games into a live streaming gig that brings in a modest profit - nowhere near enough to live off of, but enough to get that feeling of "hey, I guess I'm not bad at this, people are paying me to be funny and knowledgeable!" Because that platform exists, the quality bar I have to meet to get that feeling is a lot lower than it would've been 20 years ago. I can basically just be as funny as I was back when I was sitting around my apartment playing video games with my stoner roommates, but instead of getting laughs from the same two people every day, I'm getting laughs and tips from dozens of regulars plus a trickle of strangers.
In my best moments, I like to think I'm doing the kind of work I used to love listening to on comedy talk radio. In reality, those shows were consistently funny for hours every day at a level I've only been able to reach for a few minutes at a time. But still, the response I get provides enough of an incentive to keep putting myself out there in public and cranking out content, even when it falls far short of professional comedy standards.
I imagine something similar happens with people who crank out mediocre jokes for free on Twitter: they're getting a degree of social rewards, in the form of the occasional like or retweet, that without social media they could only have gotten by meeting a much higher quality bar.
You've hit the nail on the head that so many people are so desperately trying to force humor everywhere all the time, but I wonder where it all comes from. Could it be that so many of us are deeply insecure, and the internet has made that insecurity worse rather than better?
The Apatow style comedy and Joss Whedon really taught most of the country very bad lessons about humor. They've made quips extremely annoying in general, but they also make me long for comedy that was well scripted and didn't spend 2 minutes of every 15 allowing actors to riff badly at one another.
I’ve heard one of my favorite writers say “whenever I see the very best (world-class) improv, my first thought is ‘that could use a rewrite.’” So true.
That's pretty good, haha
I wonder if it’s more common for the critic or the performer to think their jazz improv solo could use rewrites 😂
I think this goes beyond comedy... everyone thinks they’re funny... everyone thinks they’re a food critic, infectious disease expert, social justice expert (whatever that would be), criminal justice expert, etc, etc.
Giving everyone the ability to livestream their lives appears to have convinced them that they always have something worth live-streaming... ;)
I think the culprit is as much (maybe more) the expectation for everyone to have an opinion/take on everything (which is also implicit in pervasive social media). If we didn’t socially ‘require’ people to have an opinion about everything (the second that it happens), then we’d see less of this. It wouldn’t go away (you’re right that its just a part of human nature), but it wouldn’t be amplified nearly as much.
This is a great point. The "stakes are low" when we think of the person trying to be funny at the internet's dinner table. But the requirement to build a personal brand via social media (for social but also often professional reasons), leads to far more attempts at humor than we would probably see otherwise.
Yes, I was thinking this too. But it's like the worst combination of everyone thinking they're a comedian/expert and also the most braindead groupthink around those topics. Like the self-assumed "expertise" (in comedy, food, infectious diseases, social justice, etc.) is actually just a received catalog of talking points and one-liners.
Even before the pandemic there was a disturbing tendency in American culture to discount expertise. And obviously that's gotten a lot worse in the last few years.
Bizarrely, I’m (as described by others) way funnier now than I was in my teen and college years--mostly because I’m now confident enough to be self-deprecating and pull it off.
But that’s not West Wing comedy, and I’m by and large not a funny writer. Go figure.
At any rate, I feel this kind of “being funny” is tainted by trying to _produce_ humor. That rarely works. But lots of people are reasonably funny in person, once they’re comfortable--not that it’s a cavalcade of zingers, but rather a ton of interesting observations and amusing moments.
To reply to my own post: one of my friends tells HILARIOUS long stories. His timing in these stories is immaculate, his sense of the telling detail perfect, his manner infectious, so that what would be fairly mundane becomes way funnier.
But he’s not “fast” and he doesn’t do zingers. So Freddie wouldn’t say he’s funny, at least by the kinda tight definition implied here. But he sure as hell is.
Some people are just that quick, but they are the exception that proves the rule. How many Conan O'Briens are there? And even he fails sometimes.
I blame everyone taking improv classes for this phenomenon.
Tangentially related - I’m 25 and a lot of people my age remember Vine very fondly. I feel the need to remind them that the vast majority of Vines were fucking terrible. There were a few genuinely funny people and some everyday hilarity that people were lucky enough to record, but 80-90% of it was the kind of unwatchable sketch comedy you describe here.
God, most of the "good" ones are almost incomprehensible in the TikTok era. Pacing and structure matter so much, and our brains are primed differently now
It isn't familiar to me - how was it different that Tiktok or Instagram Reels?
Instagram and TikTok for one evolve at a faster pace, meaning that by the time a specific concept is brought into the mainstream its basically a template, a condensed version of a specific comedic structure. With Vine, it was mostly about the videos themselves rather than an amalgamation. Vine was also less stimulating in general, so if your brain is particularly fried the seven seconds are over before your brain was really primed into whatever was going on in the video.
Really struggling to not come up with a witty zinger in response. There's a sort of impishness about comedy that is hard to deny.
Actually I am not struggling.
Good enough?
I was going to post "TLDR".
As recently seen on an old BBS:
*searches for a clever, biting, yet ultimately friendly and jovial retort*
um fuck you