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The Washington Post: Why is millennial humor so weird?

H

hardcastlemccormick

Banned
I've always liked absurd humor. I'm kind of tapped out of pop culture and commercials but it seems like they go for the "lol so random" humor which I don't consider actual good absurd humor. It needs to be working on multiple levels.

The bulk of lol random Reddit humor is trash but good memes can still be found
 
F

Freeza Under The Shower

Member
Because nobody has any class anymore? /old man + cloud

I wouldn't call Bojack Horseman weird though. More of a ad-lib running gag that became a show and is still horsin' around with it. And a LOT more character driven than you would assume. Also a way to have more and better jokes than just 'person with difference is funny because difference', like an Adam Sandler (and such) type production.

I mean: anyone can do "people from ____ are like ____ and people from _____ are like ____!" because that's literally what Plato already did two and a half millennia ago. Hell, we still use most of his stereotypes today.
Call Me Lucky actually goes into that a bit when the main guy comments on what separates good comedians from the amateurs. People don't want the lies they have already been told from comedians, they want truth. Just like in drama, where a human truth is exposed. A lot of these 'weird' surreal comedies actually do go to a level of truth a lot of times (Community for instance, or anything Dan Harmon created, has that a lot).
Otherwise you have nothing to say, or you're just an asshole.
 
C

CrimzonSamurai

Member
PAULINK said:
not only is their humor weird, but their cartoons suck. It's a good thing anime is taking over, otherwise i'd feel sorry for this generation.
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Wait, what?

Nickelodeon Golden Age and CN new age greats like Regular Show and Adventure Time suck?

What?

Or do you mean like Adult Swim stuff? Because that's hit and miss, although I like almost all of it. Hell, even the Animation Domination stuff on FXX was pretty good.

Lord_Byron28 said:
Then why is there a broad sweeping generalization made of my generation when most people in my generation don't even seem to like it.
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The general humor the article describes is just different forms of absurdism, which has become much more popular in recent years as "millennials" become more of a target audience. Tim and Eric is just one example. Rick and Morty, Archer, South Park, It's Always Sunny, these are all comedies with heavy focus on absurdism.
 
Z

Zen_Arcade

Banned
It's not like there is no comedy with meaning in 2017. There is nothing wrong with weird absurdist comedy. Everything doesn't have to be the same.
 
B

BoosterDuck

Banned
Pancho said:
I live for all the dank memes, come at me
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image.php
 
C

CrimzonSamurai

Member
LegitMcfalls said:
Where does Aqua Teen fall under. Its pretty stoner comedy but it's also super weird. I fucking miss Aqua Teen! :(
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Also absurdist comedy.

I mean it's about talking teenage food products and every episode ends at a juncture where the circumstances of the world cannot possibly be reverted to normal, and yet each week the episode starts from the same baseline while also referencing those irreversible occurrences. It's.... absurd.
 
L

low-G

Member
I was born in the early 80's and today's (kids & teens) jokes are the best the world has seen.

Crafted, pure, referential, layers deep, subversive, self-depreciating...

In the 80's and 90's joke concepts got spit around for years until they were so stale and unpalatable that I wanted to barf.

Today's memes still get stale, but they run their course in months, and the various mediums available today allow for diversity of humor delivery that simply wasn't possible ever before in history.
 
benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
like bird up eric andre has the same birthday as me

speaking of which doesn't the washington post investigate 311?
 
C

chubigans

y'all should be ashamed
I am a millennial (32) and my 16 year old cousin surprised me when she opened a calculator app on her phone, pressed in a seemingly random assortment of numbers, and the app disappeared and a photo folder icon was in its place. I was like, whoa...

"This is where I keep all my memes!"

She had like hundreds of pictures, memes I've never even seen.

I never felt as old as I did then. ;_;
 
R

Rhete

Banned
PAULINK said:
It's a good thing anime is taking over, otherwise i'd feel sorry for this generation.
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Anime comedies are FAR more often misses for me that they are hits. Japanese humor (manzai in particular) just isn't for me. Explaining the joke as the punchline isn't ever funny.
 
C

Chichikov

Member
As the article itself noted, this is nothing new, and honestly, what we're seeing right now is hardly the most extreme version of that type of humor that have been.

But "the tradition of absurdist humor carry on in the digital world" probably draws less readers than "LET ME EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY YOUR GRAND-KIDS ARE SO WEIRD".
 
A

AngmarsKing701

Member
I'll admit that at 50 years old I don't get the humor lately. I couldn't get through Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Master of None's pilot episode, let alone enjoy the series as many others have. I couldn't get through the Stand Ups either, not the first five minutes of the first episode and not a randomly selected one either.

The people I find funny aren't the younger generation, I guess.
 
benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
how many of you guys are posting from your phone instead of talking to the person at the table next to you?

betcha didn't even know there was a table and a person next to you because you're phone zombies who don't look up and get a job
 
L

LegitMcfalls

Member
CrimzonSamurai said:
Also absurdist comedy.

I mean it's about talking teenage food products and every episode ends at a juncture where the circumstances of the world cannot possibly be reverted to normal, and yet each week the episode starts from the same baseline while also referencing those irreversible occurrences. It's.... absurd.
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So fucking absurd! They are crime stopping fast food and they never stop any crime lol.

One day when i have kids they will see me watching Aqua teen and ask "why is giant food talking to the bald man about getting his dick ripped off for winning a contest?" And ill say "kids will never understand the fine humour of our millennial generation".
 
H

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
To actually expand on some things touched by the article, it's easier to be a "participant" in the millennial generational humor than ever before in any time or place. There's more comedy being made at every second. More comedic territory being consumed. Everyone is constantly plumbing the depths of irony and sarcasm (the primary modes of humor for millenials) in search of novelty. If older generations can't recognize it, it's because it's happening at a pace that never existed in their lives. Even millennials are struggling to keep up with their successors, the so-called Gen Z, and millennials are still young.
 
Surface of Me

Surface of Me

I'm not an NPC. And neither are we.
Haly said:
To actually expand on some things touched by the article, it's easier to be a "participant" in the millennial generational humor than ever before in any time or place. There's more comedy being made at every second. More comedic territory being consumed. Everyone is constantly plumbing the depths of irony and sarcasm (the primary modes of humor for millenials) in search of novelty. If older generations can't recognize it, it's because it's happening at a pace that never existed in their lives. Even millennials are struggling to keep up with their successors, the so-called Gen Z, and the millennials are still young.
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Lol Gen Z can get fucked.
 
G

gaugebozo

Member
Atom Heart Mother said:
I've grown tired of the "weird" humor. Tim and Eric, MDE, etc. Shit's boring to me now. I find myself retreating back to Trailer Park Boys or Seinfeld nowadays for a laugh. Eric Andre is still funny, though. Tim and Eric is a huge hit and miss, sadly.
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Was the Eric Andre episode where he came into a globe and then poured out gallons of white goo the normal one, or was it Jillian Barberie! Jillian Barberie!...
 
benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
The true dark post-ironic weird humor regarding millenials is the name:
Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe are widely credited with naming the Millennials.[1] They coined the term in 1987, around the time children born in 1982 were entering preschool, and the media were first identifying their prospective link to the new millennium as the high school graduating class of 2000.[2] They wrote about the cohort in their books Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (1991)[3] and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation (2000).[2]

In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X.[4][5] According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y",[1] and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them".[6] Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers,[7] due to them being the offspring of the baby boomers and due to the significant increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, mirroring that of their parents
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Psychologist Jean Twenge described Millennials as "Generation Me" in her 2006 book Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which was updated in 2014.[13][14] In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation.[15] Newsweek used the term Generation 9/11 to refer to young people who were between the ages of 10 and 20 years during the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001. The first reference to "Generation 9/11" was made in the cover story of the 12 November 2001 issue of Newsweek.[16] Alternative names for this group proposed include Generation We,[17] Global Generation, Generation Next[18] and the Net Generation.[19]
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And it only gets worse:
Generation Z (also known as Centennials, iGeneration, iGen, Post-Millennials or the Homeland Generation in the United States)
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Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote several books on the subject of generations and are widely credited with coining the term Millennials.[1] Howe has said "No one knows who will name the next generation after the Millennials".[1] In 2005, their company sponsored an online contest in which respondents voted overwhelmingly for the name Homeland Generation. That was not long after the September 11th terrorist attacks, and one fallout of the disaster was that Americans may have felt more safe staying at home.
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In 2012, Ad Age magazine thought that iGen was "the name that best fits and will best lead to understanding of this generation".
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MTV has labeled the generation "The Founders", based on the results of a survey they conducted in March 2015. MTV President Sean Atkins commented, "they have this self-awareness that systems have been broken, but they can't be the generation that says we'll break it even more."
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Frank N. Magid Associates, an advertising and marketing agency, nicknamed this cohort "The Pluralist Generation" or 'Plurals'.[12] Turner Broadcasting System also advocated calling the post-millennial generation 'Plurals'.[13][14]
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In Japan, the cohort is described as "Neo-Digital Natives", a step beyond the previous cohort described as "Digital Natives". Digital Natives primarily communicate by text or voice, while neo-digital natives use video or movies.
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And worse:
Matt Carmichael, former director of data strategy at Advertising Age, noted in 2015 that many groups were "competing to come up with the clever name" for the generation following Generation Z.[85] Mark McCrindle has suggested "Generation Alpha" and "Generation Glass" as names for the cohort following Generation Z.
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#RESIST!
 
C

CrimzonSamurai

Member
Atom Heart Mother said:
I've grown tired of the "weird" humor. Tim and Eric, MDE, etc. Shit's boring to me now. I find myself retreating back to Trailer Park Boys or Seinfeld nowadays for a laugh. Eric Andre is still funny, though. Tim and Eric is a huge hit and miss, sadly.
Click to expand...

I mean TPB and Seinfeld both contain absurdist elements. TPB especially, with things like the mountain lion, the fact they keep getting out of jail in short spurts of time (I can't imagine that the Canadian legal system is that lenient) especially given some of the stuff they go to jail for in the later seasons, Randy being allergic to shirts, Lahey chugging an entire fifth of dark rum multiple times per day and not dying. Etc.

Seinfeld is more absurd in the way that these 4 characters get into these situations on a regular basis. Not to mention things like the "clone friends" episode. It's Always Sunny took the same basic premise and went HAM with it.
 
R

Regiruler

Member
I find the fanfic 30 Hs hilarious, my younger brother couldn't stand it.

The majority of millennias aren't participating in this, I don't think.
broncobuster said:
Hell is a place on Earth.
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Know your meme has some pretty funny galleries.

Unfortunately these days people also use it to hold a ton of softcore pornography because the site documents subcultures as well.
 
benjipwns

benjipwns

Banned
CrimzonSamurai said:
Seinfeld is more absurd in the way that these 4 characters get into these situations on a regular basis. Not to mention things like the "clone friends" episode. It's Always Sunny took the same basic premise and went HAM with it.
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Is Bob Sacamano one of Frank's many aliases? Maybe Gino's? Think about it.
 
Lamel

Lamel

Banned
Honestly if there's one thing millennials do really well it's internet humor. Older generations fuckin suck at memes.
 
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