Short-form content, such as Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, has introduced a myriad of different issues within our generation’s brains, one of the most evident being a lack of attention span. While the connection these platforms provide can have positive benefits, I think it presents a less talked about issue: generalized humor, that this connection fosters in young society as a whole. ‘Generalized humor’ is humor that everyone knows from the internet things like “6-7,” “sendy,” and “Italian brain rot.”
This phenomenon makes it so everyone has a default pool of references they can reliably pull from when they need to make a joke. Generalized humor allows for connections to be formed more easily, but under a fake guise of deeper connection and individuality.
The problem presents itself when there becomes a false sense of community from a shaky relationship rooted in taught humor. This relationship finds itself sprouting into common ground that eliminates much of what used to make social divides by age so prevalent, especially at times such as high school.
The age gap has been a large part of our culture for as long as we can remember and still is for the most part. But most references from generations past are hard to translate for the present. I’m sure you’ve been in a car with your parents, and they have made some comments about the past, and your lack of understanding ‘making them feel so old’.
With the internet, however, we see an abundance of similarities budding between people. This relation isn’t always separated by generation either, as millennials and even baby boomers are hopping onto trends as well.
But culturally what really makes this age gap such a large cavity? I would argue it’s through the experiences that have come from this age. The more life you lived the more experienced you are, and with that comes maturity. Lived experience allows for more than just jokes others have told hundreds of times. It brings inside jokes between friends, shared grief blossoming into humor, or puns that went out of fashion years ago but are funny to wallow in thought of. The main issue is that when you put every opinion and joke into a giant vat, it tends to spit out slop. And this slop tends to act as a social substitute for lived experience. This lived experience is the unique aspect of themselves everyone brings to a society and culture, when substituted, it makes a less complete and less mature conglomerate.
People often latch onto the first pieces of information they see, taking all headlines as truth, and all stories as fact. This becomes clear when jokes are taken completely at face value.
Most jokes found on the internet don’t exactly have ‘layers’, they are just funny references. Jokes like these tend to be hit or miss for some crowds. References are built upon having the background knowledge to understand them, and when everyone else understands a joke, there’s a larger pull to acquire the knowledge to find the humor. In a way, this causes a sort of conformity to occur, as more people adapt and learn about jokes that weren’t really that funny in the first place.
A personal example I found is the Chicken Jockey meme from The Minecraft Movie. This meme focused around referencing a scene in the movie and was heavily pushed into the public eye through marketing. Younger generations, mostly elementary schoolers, actually found it funny. But when it came up a few grades to High School, it really lost its spark.
Why this is an issue is because it starts bleeding into other places. Annoying middle schoolers repeat the same jokes over and over. Elementary schoolers start trying to make the same jokes as the middle schoolers, seeing that it makes them laugh. And high schoolers make these jokes with other high schoolers. Cause, well, sometimes they are funny. Certain jokes are pushed to becoming the norm, but this hinders deeper connection in groups.
This humor, which is best used as an entry way into connection, becomes a sort of filler for it. Maturity and deeper meaning are replaced by safe, unthinking jokes that people use to bridge gaps that would previously be untraversed.
At times it is evident when someone hasn’t exactly figured themselves out comedically but think they have when they start using jokes honed by others online. Again, when this becomes standard, the community that it is supposed to help thrive suffers a loss. Community is about groups of individuals coming together bringing their own unique ideas and quirks. When there is too much of a push for commonality, this same community is lost at its core.
Go and do things to make memories. Grow yourself so you can grow the whole. Because if we don’t know ourselves, no one can truly know others.