Gen Z Humour Or The Decline of Humour?
Written by Alice Song
Edited by Daisy Hong
Cover Image by Linda Xu
One of the ways Chrysippus, an ancient Greek philosopher, was rumoured to have died was by coming across a donkey eating figs. Upon seeing this, he yelled “Now give the donkey some wine to wash down these figs!” and he found this joke so wonderfully witty and humorous that he laughed himself to death. Chrysippus pretty much amused himself to death. Isn’t that absurd? Oh, wait.
Compared to past generations, Gen Z has increased access to the web and social media. Like Chrysippus, Gen Z falls victim to the same idea of “amusing oneself to death”. Surrounded by a seemingly unlimited supply of information and entertainment, Gen Z can be entertained at any given moment.
How does the internet affect our sense of humour? Presumably, when humans were given the ability to communicate across the world at extremely fast speeds, we started to care less about whether or not information affected our lives. A couple decades ago, people were reliant on the news in order to obtain information that directly impacted their personal lives. With the rise of social media, people became more interested in information that didn’t necessarily have to affect them or be true at all, for that matter; it just had to be interesting to them. So, in short, the quality of content didn’t matter as long as it was appealing enough to us and there was lots of it. Notice, then, that humour online today follows this kind of logic.
Today, it’s hard to encounter “original” humour. People don’t bother to make up witty jokes anymore. Instead, they use pre-existing vocabulary or formats to come off as “funny” and amuse people enough to suffice. Recently, the whole “side eye” trend came to fruition and perhaps it was funny the first time each of us saw it or heard it. However, now it’s so overused to the point where it comes across as annoying and is extremely effective at being a killjoy. Of course, there are practical reasons why people might be inclined to use overused jokes; whether that be social media’s algorithm or they have a really creative method of using these templates. Even so, this doesn’t negate the fact that people are able to be incredibly lazy with humour these days and still squeeze some laughs out of overused jokes.
There are three other defining characteristics of Gen Z humour: irony, misery, and absurdity. Let’s start off with irony. Gen Z makes use of post-irony and meta-irony, which is unique from past versions of humour. Millennial humour makes use of irony and some post-irony, but Gen Z humour truly capitalizes and embraces the confusion of post and meta irony. Irony itself is just sarcasm. Post-irony uses irony to convey sincerity. This essentially looks like saying a phrase sarcastically but actually being sincere about what is said. An example would be “oH yOu dId gReAt!!”; the phrase itself is said sarcastically but keeps the true meaning of the phrase. Meta-irony is when the actual meaning is indistinguishable from the use of irony. “Oh, you totally did great! No, but, actually, I’m really proud of you. You tried your best, I guess?” is an example of meta-irony; there is no way to discern the actual meaning. Gen Z is quite snarky.
To explain the misery in Gen Z humour, there’s a German saying that sums it up quite well. Schadenfreude combines two words, “schaden”, which translates to harm and “freude”, which translates to joy. So therefore, schadenfreude means to find pleasure in someone else’s pain. In the context of Gen Z humour, Schadenfreude takes upon a new meaning because we are constantly laughing at not only others’ pain, but also at our own pain. The number of videos that I have seen that have been captioned something on the lines of “flashback to that one time when *insert traumatic experience here* LOL”. These types of videos never fail to leave me dumbfounded: personally, they’re more enlightening than humourous. These jokes reveal a lot about Gen Z’s nature. We brush off things easily by forcing ourselves to believe that they weren’t significant and we often use humour to “trauma dump” and cope. Maybe it’s nice to know that others are suffering, too, and that we can get a good laugh out of it. Millennial humour does make use of dark humour, but they don’t laugh at their own misery as much as Gen Z.
Absurdism is present in Gen Z humour in all different ways. The frequent choice to end videos by cutting off mid-sentence, or just absolutely random jokes. The prevalence of absurdism in Gen Z humour tells us that Gen Z has gotten used to laughing in the face of confusion and embracing it.
Ultimately, I find Gen Z humour to be all over the place and very disorientated compared to humour in the past. Still, Gen Z humour isn't all that bad. After all, what's wrong with amusing ourselves to death?