I just walked down my dorm hall and heard my hallmates singing Vines to each other. And that’s pretty normal. I could probably have joined in if I hadn’t been on my way to do those pesky assignments I’d kinda put off all day.
You probably could join in too, if you really think about it. Just how many Vine compilations are in your YouTube history/recommended right now? How many memes do you giggle over and share with your friends? What are your go-to silly reaction gifs in your group chats?
Most of us regularly consume and regurgitate memes and just general internet humor on a daily basis, and I personally don’t really feel like that is bad thing. But what I have noticed is that thanks to Vines, memes, and everything in between, my sense of humor has been almost conditioned to a new or developed set of rules.
So, here are just a few ways I’ve noticed me and my friends senses of humor have changed in thanks to the internet.
1. Timing is Everything
Vine probably was the main culprit behind this one, but regardless of what caused it, we can all appreciate it. Even the most simple and boring of videos or even real life moments can become uproariously funny if you give it just the right amount of time…and then wait a second after that. Pausing just a beat too long after saying pretty much anything can usually punch a quick giggle out of a least one person in a crowd of millennials/gen z’s. It’s almost like we all have little timers in our heads steadily ticking towards “This is suddenly funny for no real reason. Let’s laugh” o’clock.
2. Pain Is Comedy
The internet didn’t invent schadenfreude, but it sure gave us a great way to indulge in it without getting judged. Just a quick YouTube search will show that we find people falling down and off things, failing epically at potentially dangerous stunts, or just banging their heads on solid objects to be inexplicably hilarious.
But that’s not the extent of it. We even find other people’s emotional pain or confusion to be just the thing to tickle our collective funny bone. How many videos have you seen, or even shared, of confused people after medical procedures slurring through drugs and pain about something that seems very, very important to them right then while everyone around them just laughs? You wouldn’t really ever want to be in their shoes, and you may not even have laughed had you been there, but the internet has given us the perfect way to laugh at other people’s pain from literally around the globe.
Great to see some of those really positive effects of advanced technology, eh?
3. Poor Quality is Good Quality
A lot of us aren’t the kinds of people who go pay to see the latest big comedy, regardless of how big its budget may have been, how famous the stars in it might be, and how well thought out and executed the jokes could be. No, we let those (questionably) high quality films go straight to Redbox, because we’ve found out the secret: Low quality is sometimes the best quality.
I’ve seen entire rooms of people snort and belly laugh over memes or videos created with a grainy, shaky cell phone with positively atrocious audio and editing skills. We don’t need perfect lighting and a polished cast to gives us the laughs, in fact, the poor quality is often a key factor of the fun. I know all I need to be giggling for days is a slow zoom on a grainy photo of pretty much anyone’s random derp face with a poorly spelled caption in Comic Sans.
Of course, not everyone consumes media and the internet in the same way, so some of these may not have applied to you, but, in general, these are the rules of comedy that I believe the internet has either created or simply exacerbated. Now, I can only look forward, with perhaps just a bit of trepidation, to what the internet has in store for us next when it comes to the unusual and sometimes unexplainable world of humor.