Is it just me, or has anyone else note a distinct drop in the amount of humour on the internet recently? I didn’t say the quality, just the amount.
I am reminded of a joke (which you don’t need to hear, but I’ll print it below) that involves a group of lifers in a maximum-security prison who get together every week for a comedy hour. However, since everybody knows everybody else’s jokes, they save time by having a list. A guy doesn’t have to tell the whole thing, he just says the number on the list, and everybody bursts out laughing.
Internet humour has been like that for the last four years. No matter what kind of joke people wanted to present, whether it was rabid, sexist, witty, scatological, racial, or even political, everyone put a picture of Trump at the top, and all the readers automatically burst out laughing. Or foaming at the mouth. Didn’t matter which.
The problem with such a comedic windfall is that perpetrators sort of forgot that creating humour requires creativity and a lot of plain hard work.
Now that Trump is rapidly fading (as he richly deserves) there is a great hole left behind, as lazy comedians gradually realize that they have to start working for a living again.
Trump posed a great danger to the nation. Thus he was a great target for the humourists. Now we need a new target, and somehow the COVID outbreak isn’t very funny.
The anti-vaxers and the anti-maskers pose an even greater threat to our security. Might I suggest a change of topic?
The rest of the joke goes like this:
A new prisoner in the max security section goes to the comedy night and is surprised that nobody actually tells any jokes, just says the numbers. When it is all explained to him, he thinks that’s pretty easy. He asks to perform the following week. He gets the list, studies it, and picks his favourite three.
Come the performance night, he gets up on the stage, smiles nervously at his audience, and lays the first one on them:
“Thirty-four.”
A few chuckles.
Surprised but determined, he hits them with the next one.
“Seventy-three.”
Polite laughter.
Now he’s disappointed, but he forges bravely on.
“Here’s my favourite of all, folks. One hundred and five!”
A couple of guffaws, then nothing.
He steps off the stage to a tepid round of applause, and asks the guard, “What the hell went wrong? Those were the best of the lot.”
The guard merely shrugged. “Well, some people can tell a joke, and some can’t.”
Sort of reminds me of the internet these days.