I think I mean at least half of what I’m about to say.
I was thinking the other day about the phrase “Wait, that’s so funny.” It’s a sort of knee-jerk reaction to memes, odd news stories, and fun anecdotes that people say all the time with little thought. It’s overused, boilerplate conversation language that has weakened in spirit over time, similar to how “lol” no longer means “laugh out loud” but a watered-down shell of what laughing out loud kind of feels like.
But it’s not the meaning of the phrase that rubs me the wrong way but the tone it is often said with. “Wait, that’s so funny” is almost never accompanied with a laugh. It’s rarely accompanied with even a chuckle. It is more often matched with a desperate excitement, a humor addict getting one critically needed hit of endorphins, as if for a brief moment the only thing that matters in the world is that joke until the next joke comes along. I would venture to say some parts of American culture have become exactly this: a series of humor pit stops all connected by a meandering road that’s only purpose is to get drivers to the next laugh.
This is not an anti-humor manifesto. I have absolutely nothing against making jokes. I do have a problem when humor in a culture transitions from being the accent to being the entire substance. I love when a song has an amazing, well-placed saxophone solo. I hate jazz.
Not everything has to be funny, and not every interaction has to have comedic value for it to be valuable. Too often I find myself scrolling through social media or digging through my recent memories assigning a binary score of “funny” or “not funny” to everything. If it is funny, I decide it’s worth sharing. If it is not funny, then I file it away again for future consideration. And only sharing “funny things” has probably made my social interactions more superficially entertaining than they would have been otherwise, but I often can’t help but wonder how my relationships would differ if I used a different metric to gauge what was worth sharing. What if I scored things as “emotionally moving” or “not moving”? What if it was “inspiring” or “not inspiring”? What if I wasn’t constantly looking for humor pit stops to inject endorphins into my starving funny bone?
I think this all circles back around to how scary sincerity has become. The fear of external judgement is at an all-time high in the internet age. I feel way more vulnerable than I reasonably should just revealing to others the artists I listen to or what books are on my reading list or who my heroes are or what I truly want to do with my career. It’s much easier and psychologically safer to stick to the common language of humor. Not everyone will enjoy hearing why I find Jim Henson’s work with The Muppets to be the perfect balance of concise storytelling, clever characterization, and subtle moral teaching, but everyone enjoys a good meme.
And the algorithms can sense this. TikTok has become the Gen Z comedy epicenter because its algorithms have learned how to keep offering people these humor pit stops. TikTok trends in many ways take something in pop culture, suck out the funny part, parade that aspect for millions of viewers, and a week later leave the carcass to decompose in a laugh-less purgatory until it is forgotten altogether. It makes for good comedy but a poor foundation from which to build a culture. How can we decide what we stand for and value when the heart of conversation one week is stale the next?
I love a good joke, and a strong sense of humor is one of the qualities I seek out most when meeting new people. But the older I grow, the more cautious I get about living a life defined by funny things. And I hope I’m not the only one.
I lied. I think I meant all of that.
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