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From Vox
A bad year for the bad guys -
Amanda Northrop/Vox
In key countries around the world, 2022 was the year democracy proved it could fight back.
On the night of February 23, the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I attended a reading group with a number of prominent Washington foreign policy experts and journalists. We had convened to discuss the work of Carl Schmitt, an interwar German political theorist who believed — among other things — that politics is, at base, about violence. The fundamental political distinction, in Schmitt’s view, is between “friend and enemy”; the fundamental political act is killing one’s enemies. A peaceful democratic world is, in his mind, a fantasy; ultimately, politics would always return to brutality.
As we were wrapping up, Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared on television to announce a “special military operation” in Ukraine. The mood in the room was dark, full of foreboding; one of the world’s largest and most fearsome military powers appeared on the verge of gobbling up a smaller and weaker neighbor. A world some of us believed was governed by rules and democratic politics felt like it was giving way to Schmittian barbarism.
At the time, the Ukraine war seemed likely to be the first of several catastrophes for the democratic world in 2022. In Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, a looming presidential election was expected to lead to a democratic crisis — its own January 6 moment. The US midterm elections seemed almost certain to elevate supporters of Trump’s election liesto key electoral administration positions, raising the likelihood of another meltdown. This all came amid a decade-long decline in the number of democratic governments around the world, a global transformation that seemed to herald a new world order with China as its leading power.
But as the year winds to a close, the story has turned out to be quite different. Instead of showing weakness, democratic systems displayed resilience. Instead of showing strength, authoritarian systems displayed vulnerability. It was, all in all, a surprisingly good year for democracy.
In Ukraine, the initial Russian lightning strike was decisively repulsed. It has devolved into a grinding conflict in which Ukraine, despite brutal losses, managed to repulse the Russian attack and even retake significant amounts of territory — with major support from the democracies of Europe and North America.
In Brazil, right-wing populist President Jair Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid and left office quietly. His most aggressive effort to overturn the results, a lawsuit alleging fraud, ended in a hefty fine for his party for engaging in what the chief justice of the Supreme Electoral Court termed “bad faith litigation.”
These events pointed to an old truth, hard-won knowledge from the struggles of the 20th century: Democracy enjoys some fundamental advantages over its autocratic rivals.
Authoritarian systems have a tendency toward groupthink and ideological rigidity, frequently proving unwilling or unable to properly assess information and change course when existing policies prove disastrous. Democracy, meanwhile, tends to be widely supported by people who live under it, creating problems for authoritarian forces who are too blatant in their aims to subvert the system.
This does not mean that democracy will inevitably triumph in any specific country, let alone across the globe. Democracies have weaknesses, ones that authoritarian-inclined forces inside democratic states have repeatedly proven capable of exploiting. In 2022, elections in Hungary, Israel, and the Philippines all showed that the authoritarian challenge remains enduring and potent.
But when we look at the year’s events in the world’s largest and most influential countries, the story is on balance a positive one. The authoritarian governments that were supposed to outcompete democracy floundered, while some of the biggest democracies staved off major internal challenges.
In 2022, we lived through a relative rarity in recent memory: a decent year for democracy.
The Ukraine war exposed an authoritarian weakness
When the war in Ukraine began in February, many observers assumed that Russian victory would be all but assured. Moscow shared this assumption — which, somewhat ironically, evolved into a self-defeating prophecy.
The Russian invasion was designed around a lightning advance to Kyiv. The theory was that Russian mechanized forces could take Ukraine by surprise, seize the capital quickly, and push Ukraine’s armed forces to submit or withdraw from much of the country within the opening weeks. That’s not what happened: The Ukrainians exploited the vulnerabilities created by Russia’s attack — inadequate support for the front, poorly defended supply lines — and turned back the initial assault.
By the end of March, the war of regime change had already failed, forcing Russia to eventually dial down its ambitions. By the fall, Ukraine had begun further rolling back Russia’s gains, retaking roughly 55 percent of the territory seized by Russia in the invasion’s early days.
Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
Vladimir Putin is seen on a screen erected at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on September 30, as he speaks at a rally and concert marking the annexation of four regions of Ukraine Russian troops then occupied: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Why did the Russian plan fail? Part of the blame rests with Russia’s FSB intelligence service, which had falsely reported that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government had little public support and was likely to crack under pressure. But the biggest problem appears to be Putin himself.
“He actually really thought this would be a ‘special military operation’: They would be done in a few days, and it wouldn’t be a real war,” Michael Kofman, director of Russian studies at the CNA think tank, told me in March.
In recent months, our understanding of the Russian failures has only grown. This month, researchers at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think tank, published a report on the war based on a tranche of captured Russian orders provided by the Ukrainian government. “These plans,” RUSI finds, “were drawn up by a very small group of officials and the intent was directed by Putin.” Most of the Russian government was kept in the dark; there were no contingency plans in case things went wrong.
“The plan itself [never] envisaged any outcome other than its own success,” the RUSI researchers conclude.
These errors were a predictable consequence of the structure of Putin’s regime.
In a prescient prewar analysis published in Foreign Affairs, political scientists Seva Gunitsky and Adam Casey argue, “If he makes a miscalculation and launches a major invasion, it will likely be because of the personalist features of his regime” — meaning the degree to which power has been consolidated in the hands of one man. Personalism, they argue, exacerbates a fundamental tendency of authoritarian states toward policy miscalculations.
“Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning,” Gunitsky and Casey note.
The course of the war bore out this general theory. Because Putin has surrounded himself with cronies and yes-men, there was no one in the Russian government who was willing to criticize the invasion plan in any serious way — let alone challenge the president’s underlying theories of the Ukrainian state.
Of course, war is unpredictable. But from the vantage point of the present, it appears that Russia has fallen into a classic authoritarian trap — blundering its way into a policy disaster due to a system that insulated its leadership from reality.
How Iran blundered into revolt
Another authoritarian regime saw trouble this year: Iran, which has been rocked by a massive wave of nationwide anti-regime protests. And as in Russia, the authoritarian information problem is a major part of the story of how this came to be.
On September 13, a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly failing to properly cover her hair. According to eyewitnesses, Amini was severely beaten while she was in police custody. She died three days after her arrest.
As news of Amini’s death spread, Iranian women and girls began removing their hijabs in public and taking to the streets to protest. These teenage girls and young women inspired demonstrations across the country, pulling in anti-regime protesters from all sectors of Iranian society. So far, the government’s brutal crackdown — including public executions and the indiscriminate use of live ammunition against packed crowds of protesters — has yet to defuse the demonstrations.
AP Photo/Middle East Images
An Iranian women who has removed her headscarf protests in Tehran on October 1 in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police.
We can’t yet say that the regime is on the brink of collapse: A significant protest wave between 2018 and 2020 petered out with the Islamic Republic still intact. Yet the fact of repeated major protests speaks to deep and enduring public discontent.
Iranian women have been mounting a subtle campaign of resistance to the headscarf policy for decades. In the past, Iran’s government had allowed citizens to voice frustration with its policies by permitting them to vote for (relative) moderates in presidential elections, such as the 1997 victory of Mohammad Khatami. Though the presidency’s powers are limited, they’re also real, and Iranians took these elections seriously. In 2009, when the Islamic Republic was seen by many to have rigged the election to ensure incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory over reformer Mir Hussein Mousavi, millions took to Iran’s streets to protest. The next time around, in 2013, the clerics allowed a freer vote — leading to a victory by moderate Hassan Rouhani that set the stage for the 2015 nuclear deal.
The elections in 1997, 2009, and 2013 all indicated major public demand for reform — hopes that were partially accommodated (as in the nuclear deal) and more typically dashed (as in the repression of the 2009 protests). But in 2021, the low turnout seems to have been misread as acquiescence rather than a sign that the more liberal segments of the public had lost faith in making change through the system. Once in office, Raisi pursued a hardline agenda including escalated enforcement of headscarf rules, seemingly oblivious to the blowback it would bring.
The Iranian protests illustrate a different facet of the authoritarian information problem: its difficulty identifying festering problems and adjusting policy before there’s a crisis. Societies are big and complicated; figuring out what’s going wrong and how to solve it are tremendously difficult tasks.
The core institutions of democracy, including a free press and regular elections, create mechanisms for policymakers to get input from people and adjust accordingly. Authoritarian governments like Iran’s, by contrast, repress dissenting opinions and criticisms of their policies — leading them to blunder into crisis without even knowing it, or to arrogantly assume that they can force unpopular policies onto the public.
AFP via Getty Images
Iranian demonstrators take to the streets of Tehran on September 21, a week after Mahsa Amini died while in police custody.
One of the most famous demonstrations of this effect comes from Amartya Sen, an economist and philosopher at Harvard. Sen’s work on famines showed that such humanitarian disasters are not, as commonly thought, typically caused by food supply shocks like drought. Instead, they are caused by political structures: No democracy has ever experienced a famine; democratic leaders’ incentives and informational structures make them more likely to act than their authoritarian peers.
“A free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threatened by famines can have,” Sen writes in his 1999 book Development as Freedom.
Obviously, a political uprising is a very different event from a famine. But from the Islamic Republic’s point of view, it is similarly disastrous. While the regime may well survive this latest round of protest — its capacity for repression should not be underestimated — the Iranian people have shown that its government’s repeated underestimation of their anger comes with significant costs.
China aimed to fix authoritarianism’s problems. It failed.
In Development as Freedom, one of Sen’s key examples of authoritarianism causing famine is the Great Leap Forward in China. Between 1958 and 1961, Communist Party Chair Mao Zedong embarked on a series of disastrous agricultural reforms that led to the deaths of roughly 30 million people — the deadliest famine in all of human history.
In theory, China’s move toward a more free-market economy starting in 1979 should have created the conditions to prevent a repeat of this catastrophe: allowing its leadership to get informational signals from the market without political liberalization. Sen, for his part, was skeptical. “When things go reasonably well [in China], democracy might not be greatly missed, but as and when big policy mistakes are made, that lacuna can be quite disastrous,” he writes.
For some time, China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic looked like it might prove him wrong. But by the end of 2022, it became clear that China’s Covid policy had turned disastrous for reasons predicted by Sen’s theory.
Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Workers in personal protective equipment walk past a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Shanghai, China, on June 10, as the city locked down for Covid-19 mass testing.
After China failed to contain the first outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019, leading to a global pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acted swiftly and aggressively to contain the spread inside the country. Until this year, it appeared to have done a better job of keeping death rates down than the wealthy democracies in Europe and North America. The policy seemed so effective, in fact, that President Xi Jinping had turned it into a major feature of his government’s propaganda — proof of the superiority of Chinese-style state capitalism to Western liberal democracy.
But China’s “zero Covid” policy always had significant problems. The harsh nature of its lockdowns, where people were confined to their homes and entire offices shut down, infuriated citizens and damaged China’s economy. China’s dogmatic insistence on the success of its own model led it to limit vaccination campaigns and refuse Western mRNA vaccines, which have proven superior to China’s homegrown SinoVac.
From the CCP’s point of view, these were acceptable downsides to a policy that mostly contained disease spread — right up until the omicron variant began sweeping through China earlier this year. The more infectious variant required even more severe lockdowns to prevent mass death: In March, most residents of Shanghai, one of the world’s largest cities, were confined to their homes for weeks.
Public frustration began to mount. During the height of Shanghai’s lockdown, people were filmed screaming their frustration out their windows.
‘Control your desire for freedom’: A drone in Shanghai has been broadcasting this message to residents in response to thousands screaming from their balconies over a strict COVID-19 lockdown. pic.twitter.com/QucTFMEqnA
Things came to a head after November 24, when a fire broke out at an apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, home to the brutally repressed Uyghur Muslim minority. The building was on lockdown at the time; at least 10 people died, a death toll that many Chinese believe could have been avoided if the government hadn’t been denying building residents freedom of movement.
The fire in Urumqi had the same galvanizing effect as the death of Mahsa Amini in Iran. As news spread, a wave of protests swept the country. And those protesters took the once-unthinkable step of linking their frustrations with Covid policy to the regime itself: blaming Xi for the tragedy in Urumqi and calling for elections.
The protests in China have not been large enough to threaten the regime. But they are forcing the government to act: In early December, China announced that it would ease some of the most hated Covid restrictions (like mass testing requirements and mandatory hospitalization after infection). It’s a major win for the protesters, but also one that sets up China for a significant outbreak this winter.
Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Demonstrators chant slogans against China’s zero-Covid policies in Shanghai, China, on November 27.
Together, the failure of zero Covid and the emergence of anti-CCP protest demonstrated that China’s regime has not really solved the information problem that plagues authoritarian regimes. And more and more Chinese citizens are recognizing that blame for policy failures rightfully belongs with the regime.
And then they said something else, something telling.
“We stand with the women of Iran.”
The United States and Brazil proved democracy’s resilience
Democracies are not perfect. Their leaders make terrible policy mistakes and persist in sticking with them — think the war in Iraq, the Trump administration’s handling of Covid-19, or dozens of other recent examples in the United States.
But democratic governments have a built-in feature for addressing the fallout of these mistakes: People get to vote. When a leader makes a mistake, voters can elect a new one. This transfers the polity’s loyalty from a leader or a ruling elite to the system itself. Thus, individual disasters are generally less system-threatening for democracies than they are for autocracies.
In the past decade, democratic citizens’ fundamental loyalty to the electoral system has been severely tested. Across the democratic world, voters have begun to express significant discontent with the status quo, electing leaders who threaten to subvert and even topple democracy from within. Today, such elected authoritarians have won power in important countries like India — posing a greater threat to democracy’s future than Russia or even China.
In 2022, two of the world’s largest democracies, the United States and Brazil, held pivotal elections that very well could have accelerated this global process of democratic decay. But in both cases, the systems held firm — showing, for all its problems, that modern democracy retains protective antibodies that can activate when the system comes under duress.
The US midterms were expected to be the beginning of a new crisis for American democracy. Republicans seemed poised for a “red tsunami,” one that would sweep election deniers and conspiracy theorists into governor’s mansions and election administration posts in swing states across the country. The worry was that they would then be in position to hand the 2024 election to their patron, Donald Trump, regardless of the will of the voters.
Some of them were quite explicit about their undemocratic aims. Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, openly proclaimed that Republicans “will never lose another election” in the state if he won in 2022.
But in Wisconsin and the other five key presidential swing states — Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona — Michels and his fellow election deniers were defeated. In each of these states, the governor’s mansion and secretary of state position will be controlled by someone who (correctly) believes that the 2020 election was on the level. American democracy dodged a bullet.
Since the election, I’ve been interviewing victorious candidates in these races and Democratic operatives who worked on them. They all tell a similar story: Casting their opponents as enemies of democracy, and themselves as neutral defenders of the right to vote, worked.
“There was a very hidden silver lining to the ascent of Donald Trump and Trumpism,” says Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s incoming secretary of state. “People are now genuinely aware of the fact that democracy depends on people of integrity and honor administering it.”
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels speaks to guests during a rally hosted by former President Donald Trump in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on August 5.
Early data analyses suggested that Democrats won key races not by turning out more of their own partisans but by persuading independents and even some Republicans to vote for them. Among these voters, democracy appeared to be an important issue: One survey, from Impact Research, found that 64 percent of Republicans who voted for Democrats cited conspiracies about the 2020 election as a top issue for them in 2022.
The group Run for Something, a progressive outfit that identifies and supports candidates for local office, worked with 32 candidates in tight, swingy races — some of whom competed against election deniers, some of whom did not. Their internal data, shared with Vox, showed that election deniers were easier to beat. Run for Something candidates won about 77 percent of races where their candidate competed against an election denier, as opposed to 53 percent of those where they didn’t.
“What we found from our own polling is that people want to feel like elections are being run fairly, regardless of partisanship,” says Ross Morales Rocketto, Run for Something’s co-founder.
In the face of a serious challenge from candidates who aimed to subvert its mechanisms, American voters turned out to protect the system.
The 2022 Brazilian presidential election revealed a different aspect of democratic resilience: the way that it generates buy-in from not only ordinary citizens, but elites as well.
In the runup to the election, Bolsonaro and his allies had repeatedly laid the groundwork for allegations of fraud in the event of his defeat. When the October 30 results showed a narrow victory for his opponent, Lula, the defeated president’s supporters took to the streets in cities across the country. Many worried that the stage was set for a Southern Hemisphere repeat of January 6 — potentially with buy-in from the armed forces.
But that’s not what happened. Almost immediately, leading Brazilian authorities, including many of Bolsonaro’s partners, worked to reinforce the legitimacy of the outcome.
“The Senate President, the Attorney General, Supreme Court justices and the heads of the electoral agency went on television together and announced the winner,” explains Jack Nicas, the New York Times’s Brazil bureau chief. “The House Speaker, perhaps the president’s most important ally, then read a statement reiterating that the voters had spoken. Other right-wing politicians quickly followed suit.”
Bolsonaro, silent for two days after the election, ultimately went onstage and acknowledged that he would be leaving office. While he did not admit that he had legitimately lost the election, he agreed to abide by constitutional procedures and depart if that’s what the law required. His lawsuit contesting the results was swiftly smacked down by the courts.
Bruna Prado/AP
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro presides over the formal graduation of the latest class of naval cadets in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on December 10, just weeks before his government is due to relinquish power to the incoming government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on January 1.
Eraldo Peres/AP
Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, right, holds his election certificate with Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes in Brasilia, Brazil, on December 12. The Supreme Electoral Court certified Da Silva’s election win for the 2023-2026 presidential term.
The Brazilian case is, if anything, a more dramatic example of democratic resilience than the United States. In a younger democracy where the military had ruled from 1964 to 1985, a majority of voters turned out to vote down a candidate who had all but openly promised to trigger a crisis if he lost. And when the time came, Brazilian elites banded together to ensure that the election results were respected.
“All of Bolsonaro’s escape valves were shut off,” Brian Winter, vice president of the Council of the Americas think tank, told the AP. “He was prevailed upon from all sides not to contest the results and burn down the house on his way out.”
Not a perfect year, but an encouraging one
Despite the positive developments in 2022, the global crisis of democracy is hardly over. Electoral authoritarianism continued to show its strength in countries around the world.
In Hungary, the paradigmatic case of a democracy that had backslid into authoritarianism, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government defeated a united opposition ticket in the country’s April election. The election demonstrated that the system he had built, where elections are not nakedly rigged but held under extremely unfair conditions, is quite resilient.
In the Philippines, authoritarian-inclined President Rodrigo Duterte abided by term-limit rules and departed office as scheduled. But the ticket that won the May election does not inspire confidence: Bongbong Marcos, the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and Sara Duterte, the outgoing president’s daughter. The Duterte-Marcos ticket won in part by exploiting a rising nostalgia for the Philippines’s autocratic past: a sense that democracy was chaotic and destabilizing, and that strongman rule could restore order.
Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., right, poses for photos with his new vice president, Sara Duterte, after Marcos took his oath as the next president in Manila, Philippines, on June 30.
In Israel, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won the country’s November election with the support of extremist parties, including the neo-fascist Jewish Power faction. Netanyahu, currently on trial for corruption charges that include allegations of using state power to buy favorable press coverage, will soon likely have enough votes in parliament to pass a law giving the legislature power to override court rulings with a simple majority vote. This bill could pave the way for legislation shielding him from having to serve jail time, if convicted; it would certainly strip power away from the Supreme Court, one of the key Israeli institutions protecting minority rights and basic democratic principles from the new coalition.
These elections fit a broader pattern of democratic decline stretching back years. A March report from V-Dem, an institution that aims to quantitatively assess the health of democracies around the world, found that democracy had reached its weakest point globally since 1989.
The most common regime type around the world, per V-Dem, is not any species of democracy (as it was just a few years ago). Today, the report finds, a 44-percent plurality of governments worldwide are “electoral autocracies” — defined as regimes with “institutions emulating democracy but falling substantially below the threshold for democracy in terms of authenticity or quality.”
The events of 2022 do not mean that things are turning around. The long-term threat to democracy remains very real.
What they do show is that there are also significant sources of democratic resilience and authoritarian weakness — ones on display in some of the most influential states on the planet. If nothing else, 2022 reminded us that reviving democracy is a choice, and that, this year at least, enough people around the world chose it.
The very serious science of humor -
How studying what tickles our funny bone can help explain who we are.
To find mirth in the world is to be human.
No culture is unfamiliar with humor, according to Joseph Polimeni, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba. For someone who analyzes humor, Polimeni tells me he’s still surprised by its complexity: How words and phrases and jokes have different meanings to everyone, but we all have the instinct to laugh. Just as humans have an innate ability to understand language, Polimeni says, so, too, do they have a reflex for comprehending everyday comedy. Sure, there are people who are better suited at making others laugh, but “almost everybody,” Polimeni tells me, can appreciate a quip.
As much as humor is universal, how it works is, to most people, a mystery. We seek out laughs in nearly every form of media, from film and TV to memes and TikToks. At the box office, popular comedies rakeinbig bucks. Funny people are idolized in pop culture.
A desire for hilarity influences who we choose to spend time with, too. Why else, when scrolling through profiles on dating apps, would so many say they hope to date someone who’s funny (or at least claim to be “fluent in sarcasm”)? According to the 2022 Singles in America survey from online dating service Match, 92 percent of singles seek a partner who can make them laugh. (Does this explain Pete Davidson’s appeal?)
The things that make us laugh today, from knock-knock jokes to satire, don’t quite resemble our ancestors’ version of humor. “Play is probably one of the original building blocks of humor,” Polimeni says. Many animals partake in it — dogs, otters, monkeys, rats, horses, fish, kangaroos — and humans’ early predecessors, similar to modern-day chimpanzees and primates, likely engaged in play, too, like mock fighting and tickling.
Over time, laughter-inducing play transformed into practical uses: Laughter and amusement signified a situation was safe, and positive emotions could be used to help cheer others up. Then, around 40,000 to 45,000 years ago, Polimeni says, humor evolved to serve more modern applications: to smooth over awkward social situations, to laugh at others’ mishaps. Humor would have aided early humans in having difficult or contentious conversations — topics like “Are you helping me enough?” “Do you like me?” “Why did you accidentally hit me? Or was it on purpose?” — without getting angry at one another, Polimeni says.
If softening the blow of a potentially sticky conversation with a chuckle and a smile could help people deal with conflict, then it makes sense that humor and laughter matured for the purposes of social cooperation, as Polimeniand others suggest. Having an audience appreciate your humor has profound social benefits. Successfully landing a joke raises a person’s status while also lowering the status of anyone who’s the butt of a joke. Those in on the joke feel a greater sense of camaraderie, too.
Still, few people would find data and the minute dissection of jokes amusing. Yet an entire field of research exists aiming to analyze and quantify humor and how we use it. Scholars are trying to demystify something intangible and crucial to relationships and well-being, even as what we find funny is always evolving and taking new forms. Humor is an omnipresent chameleon, a misunderstood shape-shifter, and to figure out how it works is to take the temperature of society, culture, and our psychology.
But how does humor actually work? What makes things funny? For centuries, scholars and great thinkers attempted to clarify the conundrum that is humor. Philosophers and humor academics largely subscribed to three schools of thought when explaining why we find amusement in life: the superiority theory, relief theory, and incongruity theory. The superiority theory, explained by the likes of Plato and Aristotle, is one of the oldest. It posits that things are funny when we feel superior to others or to prior, lowly versions of ourselves. Think: mocking humor or self-deprecating humor. Sigmund Freud’s interpretation, known as the relief theory, is that the act of laughter releases pent-up nervous energy or tension, such as when laughing at taboo or sexual topics. The third, and most widely accepted, explanation of humor is the incongruity theory. Philosophers James Beattie, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, and others postulated that we find amusement in things that are at odds with our expectations, a contradiction between the setup and the punchline. In contemporary humor, the joke teller sets the scene in the buildup; the part that makes us laugh is often a pivot away from the path we thought we were on.
These arguments don’t mean we’d find humor in “accidentally killing your mother-in-law,” Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his coauthor Joel Warner wrote in their 2014 book The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny. Unintended murder “would be incongruous, assert superiority, and release pent-up aggressive tensions, but it’s hardly a gut-buster.”
Gore, however, does garner a few laughs in the right context. I’m in the audience of a Denver theater watching improv comedians craft a layered and detailed narrative about vulnerability and love and gaping flesh wounds. Next to me, in the dark, mostly empty house of RISE Comedy, Caleb Warren is laughing. (As with some things that are funny, you really did have to be there.)
Warren, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, studies what makes us laugh for a living. He, along with his collaborator, Peter McGraw, convened this performance so I can see their work in action. The pair think they’ve got humor down to a science, and with volunteer improvisers as kind and willing test subjects, Warren and McGraw attempted to take the magic out of comedy: to describe to me, in painstaking detail, why the comedians’ jokes — why talk of flesh wounds — might make us laugh.
McGraw, who is trained in quantitative psychology, focusing on judgment and decision-making, teaches courses including undergraduate consumer behavior, MBA-level marketing management, and behavioral economics to PhD students. Warren was one of those PhD students during the latter part of the early aughts — one who struggled academically, but was one of the smartest in the room, McGraw says. Warren remembers McGraw teaching a lesson about moral violations: “victimless yet offensive actions (such as eating one’s dead pet dog),” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it. While reading Haidt’s paper, Warren mostly thought the scenarios were funny. Around the same time, McGraw was giving a talk on moral violations and an audience member posed a question: If moral violations are supposed to elicit disgust, why are we laughing? McGraw didn’t really have an answer. He also couldn’t stop thinking about it. McGraw brought the puzzle to Warren and the pair quickly began exploring why we laugh at things that are morally wrong.
The theories of superiority, relief, and incongruity did an okay job at explaining humor, they thought. But it would make much more sense if there were one framework, one bow to neatly wrap around the humor experience. McGraw and Warren say they believed another theory, by linguist Thomas Veatch, got closer to solving the puzzle. Take the joke that inspired Veatch’s line of thinking as McGraw later recounted to me: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because it was dead. Veatch claimed “that humor occurs when someone perceives a situation is a violation of a ‘subjective moral principle’ while simultaneously realizing that the situation is normal,” McGraw and Warner wrote. The violation? The dead monkey. The “normal” situation? Any dead creature would tumble from a tree, as gravity is wont to do. The major issue with Veatch’s proposition: The word “normal” hardly applies to some situations we find funny — absurd, surreal humor, for example. Tweaking Veatch’s theory, McGraw and Warren devised their own: They called it the Benign Violation Theory.
“We were looking to apply another theory at first,” Warren says. Reserved and cautious when choosing his words, Warren is not quite an unlikely candidate to be an expert on humor, but he toes the line. “We weren’t really looking to create our own.”
“Not at all,” McGraw says. McGraw is boisterous and chatty, a natural presenter with a boyish verve, fortunate qualities to have considering the sheer volume of interviews and talks he’s given on humor.
“There’s plenty of models out there to choose from,” he says. “We were struggling finding one that was good enough to answer the question [of what makes things funny], plus all these other questions that were popping into our head as we went.”
The pair co-authored a 2010 paper that explained their framework: For people to find things funny, three boxes must be checked: A situation (anything from someone falling down the stairs, a story, someone flubbing their words) is a violation of society’s mores, the situation is benign, and both happen simultaneously. One of the studies included in their paper asked participants — University of Colorado students — whether certain statements made them laugh. “Before he passed away, Keith’s father told his son to cremate his body. Then he told Keith to do whatever he wished with the remains. Keith decided to snort his dead father’s ashes,” was one passage respondents found both wrong and funny. The violation in this scenario is clearly the snorting of the ashes. The benign part is that the snorting was technically okay since Keith’s dad said he could do whatever he wanted with the ashes. Over the years of studying humor, Warren tells me, his sense of humor has progressively skewed darker and become borderline disturbing. In one study, for example, he asked participants to watch drug awareness PSAs because he got a kick out of them. The subjects did not agree.
McGraw launched the Humor Research Lab in 2009. The lab itself is hardly funny; it’s a bland office space in the University of Colorado Boulder’s business school, with fluorescent lights and a series of cubicles and Dell desktops, and no beakers full of red clown noses or whoopee cushions to speak of. On the day of my visit, the lab was empty, but during times of research and data collection, student volunteers were shepherded into the room to take surveys, watch videos, or observe other potentially humorous media on the screens.
Prior to the early 2010s, humor research was scattershot and largely based in philosophy or linguistics. Rod Martin, a now-retired professor of clinical psychology at the University of Western Ontario, stood alone in applying scientific rigor to the field. Martin, literally, wrote the book on the psychology of humor, appropriately titled The Psychology of Humor, a copy of which sits on the bookshelf in McGraw’s office. (Martin declined to be interviewed for this story.)
From the 1980s until he retired in 2016, Martin studied aspects of humor, like the effects of humor on physical health and stress (in short, humor is good for the mind and the body and helps us cope). In 2003, Martin and a graduate student developed the Humor Styles Questionnaire to account for individual differences in sense of humor. Just as some people use humor to tease or belittle, others may take amusement in the weirdness of the mundane and can often make themselves laugh.
To learn a bit more about how I approach humor in my life — how I use humor to amuse myself, relate to other people, tear myself down — I took the Humor Styles Questionnaire. The assessment asks participants to rank how much they agree with statements such as, “If I am feeling upset or unhappy I usually try to think of something funny about the situation to make myself feel better” and “I let people laugh at me or make fun at my expense more than I should.” The results are a series of scores in four different types of humor: affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, aggressive humor, and self-defeating humor. Those with high levels of affiliative humor tell jokes to make others laugh. Self-enhancing humor is the skill of staying upbeat and humorous even when stressed. People with an aggressive humor style use comedy to tease and manipulate others. Finally, self-defeating humorists make themselves the butt of the joke.
I scored extremely high in self-defeating and affiliative humor, quite high in aggressive humor, and below average in self-enhancing humor. I shared my results with Gil Greengross, a lecturer in psychology at Prifysgol Aberystwyth University in Wales whose dissertation adviser was Martin, the guy who created the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Greengross became enthralled with humor as an academic subject matter when he realized how little is understood about what makes us laugh. If aliens were to touch down on Earth and examine how humans communicate, he tells me, “but then, every minute or two someone burst out laughing,” the aliens might wonder what that expression means and what it signals. So he decided to find out. Over Zoom, when Greengross hears how highly I score in self-defeating humor, a nervous smile creeps across his bespectacled face.
“Oh really? Self-defeating your highest?” he says. “That’s not very good for your mental health, to make fun of yourself. But again, it depends how you use it. Self-deprecating humor can be very useful for people if you use it in moderation. So it all depends on how often. Do you feel that you joke a lot about yourself?”
I tell him that I do. “Because I am often talking to people I don’t know for my job. So I find that it’s a way to ingratiate myself. And I often am talking to like, way smarter people, like you, and so I’m like, ‘Tell it to me like I’m a dumb person because I am dumb.’”
“I mean, you don’t have to demean yourself,” Greengross tells me, sounding a little like a disappointed father. “I don’t think that you’re less intelligent than me.”
The person I feel most qualified to joke about is myself. Perhaps incorrectly, I believe belittling myself may make people like me more, but that’s a conversation best reserved for my therapist, not Greengross. He tells me to use self-deprecating humor as a way to make me appear more romantically attractive to outsiders, which works, his studies have found.
Because everyone varies in their approaches to comedy — and some people seem preternaturally gifted in the laugh department — what accounts for such differences? What makes one person funnier than another?
It’s partly hereditary, says Greengross, who is currently studying humor in twins to see how genetics play a role. “Basically all psychological traits have some heritable component,” he says. But it’s also our environment: peers, friends, family. Humor is a thing that is subliminally studied simply by living and adapting to culture. We observe those around us and infer clues about what is appropriate based on what others laugh about, their reactions to jokes.
Take movies or comedy specials that haven’t aged particularly well. These media speak to a time and a culture that may have found the violations benign enough to laugh about. “We probably are learning what we find funny, but we’re learning about what is socially acceptable,” says Shelia Kennison, a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University. “What are the funniest kinds of jokes? What should you laugh at? What should you not laugh at? And maybe you still find things funny that you shouldn’t laugh at. But you learn how to appear to be socially following the norms.”
When these broad social norms aren’t adhered to, that’s when jokes fall flat — or worse, offend. Think: racist, sexist, and ableist humor. However, the cultural perspectives and mores influencing joke appropriateness are never fixed. As time and tastes progress, so do audiences and what they consider acceptable to laugh at. Comedians like Dave Chappelle, who once had broad appeal, are maligned for their regressive material today. According to Kennison, audiences have moved beyond what Chappelle thinks is appropriate. “Dave Chappelle is a very cerebral comedian and I think he purposely wants people to think in ways they’re not comfortable thinking,” she says. “So I think he knew he probably was going to lose people.” But for the audience members who stay with him, they may feel more permission to parrot his ideologies. The more people hear racist or sexist jokes, the more comfortable they are with expressing these thoughts in other forums. Because the internet constantly exposes people to harmful humor — through memes, trolling, anonymous posting — bad actors only have more opportunities.
To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart, Greengross says. Because humorousness is associated with higher levels of emotional and cognitive intelligence, effective comedians understand the right context in which to tell jokes. “You wouldn’t go [to] a feminist conference and start telling sexist jokes, right?” Greengross says. “That would be poor emotional intelligence.” A funny person is also a bit of a risk taker, accepting that a quip might rub people the wrong way. Natural comedians tend to be more open to new experiences, too, Greengross says.
There are plenty of comedic questions still left unanswered. One of the most puzzling mysteries, according to McGraw and Warren, is how to make people funnier. “That’s so difficult,” McGraw says, “I spent a year on [it] and then quit.” Teaching everyone to be more amusing would be great for the people who are already naturally comedic — they’d be hilarious — and increasingly awkward for everyone else since they’d just be offensive instead. The pair attempted to bring the conundrum of improving humor capabilities to Humor Research Lab but ended up with two papers on entirely different subjects and dropped the idea.
Warren is also interested in why some things that the Benign Violation Theory says should amuse people don’t, like riding a roller coaster, engaging in kinky sex, or eating spicy food — thrilling experiences that, for the most part, aren’t life-threatening, meaning they’re benign violations. Why, for some people, are these adventures titillating, or horrifying, but for others laughter-inducing? Currently, Warren is studying why people use jokes when they’re accused of wrongdoing and why people may find posts describing severe violations funny but won’t share that content with others.
Much of the research into humor attempts to dive into people’s minds, questioning participants about their perception of what is funny, or how they conjure witticisms. Neuroscientist Ori Amir took a different approach. Growing up in Israel, Amir’s father was a comedian and would critique his jokes, he tells me over Zoom, tufts of curly auburn hair poking out from underneath a flat-brimmed baseball hat. “Only one of my jokes ever got an A-plus,” says Amir, who, in addition to his scholarly career, is a standup comedian. “Unfortunately, that joke is very heavily reliant on understanding of Hebrew expressions.”
When Amir was a doctoral student at the University of Southern California he successfully took a peek under comedy’s hood, examining the brains of professional and amateur comedians using fMRI scans. The goal: Figure out what parts of the brain are used when coming up with and appreciating humor. What he found, published in a 2016 study, was that two areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe, are active while making a joke. The temporal lobe plays double duty; it lights up both when a person hears and processes a joke and when they make a joke. Understanding a joke is a quicker process in the brain — illustrated by a quick spike of brain activation — than the process of conceiving one, which appears as a gradual increase of activity. (It’s important to note that while fMRI scans can easily determine parts of the brain where activity occurs, interpreting the function of said areas is decidedly less clear.)
What was surprising to Amir was the funnier the joke (as rated by independent graders), the less activity there was in the prefrontal cortex of the person who created it. What Amir determined was the neuroscience equivalent to “get out of your head” — that we’re funniest when we’re not trying so hard to be funny. Amir suspects some people might be predisposed to have less activity in this area, but practice in the art of comedy can help further quiet the noise in the prefrontal cortex. In Amir’s study, the professional comedian participants had less going on in the prefrontal cortex than non-comics.
The magical thing about humor in everyday life is its ease, its ubiquitousness. The more you think about being the funniest person in the room, the more likely you’ll fail. It’s the effortlessness at which the funniest of us can fire off witticisms, the ways in which we intuit how to amuse those we know best.
Pages and pages of scientific literature are dedicated to uncomfortable experiences, such as regret, McGraw tells me, and not something uplifting, like humor. For McGraw, dedicating a decade of his career to a phenomenon that is all at once joyful, entertaining, status-enhancing, artistic, bond-building, and communicative is to shed light on an essential part of human existence we all know is there. From Warren’s perspective, humor is the guiding hand teaching us what’s right, what’s wrong, how to navigate the world. “Someone who jokes a lot as a child, or even as an adult,” Warren says, “they tend to have a better sense of the culture, a better sense of social norms, a better sense of how to understand people.”
I tell Warren this is my exact experience with humor. As an awkward and shy kid, I began to test the boundaries of friendship, of social appropriateness, through silly jokes. Every laugh was permission to proceed. Illogical or hurtful quips were learning moments. The symbiotic relationship between humor and ourselves is endlessly fascinating; as individuals grow, culture shifts, and so does the way we talk and joke about the world around us.
At the risk of turning something sexy into a chapter in a science book, humor research helps explain who we are, the forces that shape us, and the ways we move culture. It’s the reason why McGraw and Warren included a section in many of their papers titled “Humor Is Important.” McGraw lists some of the reasons why: Humor is a huge facet of the entertainment industry, an important coping mechanism, a driver of who our friends and romantic partners are, a weapon to bully and belittle, a vehicle to promote and destroy ideas.
“So, like, yeah, this is incredibly important,” he says wryly. “It’s a fascinating puzzle.”
Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe” -
Alex Gilbeaux for Vox
Remember when “epic bacon” was the height of comedy?
Thirteen years ago, a man was sitting at the Denver airport. Bored, he turned his attention to his favorite website: “I see a lot of people on laptops around using the free wifi,” he wrote on the popular subreddit r/AskReddit. “Just on the off chance, any fellow Redditors here?”
What followed was a lively exchange among the platform’s most ardent superusers deciding how best to identify a fellow Reddit obsessive in the “real world.” The phrase they landed on combined several pieces of mid-aughts message board slang and coded inside jokes, yet, crucially, was otherwise meaningless: “The narwhal bacons at midnight.”
Today, this phrase is more likely to elicit groans and sighs rather than excitable recognition from anyone who was active on Reddit in 2009. That’s because “the narwhal bacons at midnight” has become a relic of an era nearly everyone who spends time on the internet feels deeply embarrassed by, whether they participated in it or not. Count it among the similarly mortifying phenomena of ironic finger mustache tattoos, job listings for “software ninjas,” the wildly popular YouTube channel Epic Meal Time, rage comics, idolizing Ron Swanson, Advice Animal memes, and dogespeak (“much feels” “very art”) and in particular the tone they’re associated with — hyperbolic, cutesy to the point of smarminess, and stuffed with seemingly “random” nouns. In short, it’s cringe.
Know Your Meme
“Cringe” is a shortened form of “cringey,” which itself is a shortened form of “cringeworthy,” referring to the embarrassment (often the secondhand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché. Cringe content — whether created in earnest or as parodies of earnest cringe content — makes up an astonishingly large portion of the social internet; it combines everything from hysterical Twitter scolds to Instagram thirst traps to the entirety of the TikTok Discover page. Cringe may only exist in the eye of the beholder, but the “epic bacon” extended universe that dominated from the mid-aughts to the mid-2010s is its inarguable emblem.
How did “epic bacon” go from a dominant mode of communicating online to a parody of washed 30- and 40-somethings who still talk about their Hogwarts houses? The answer is more complicated than “millennials got old.” The internet got bigger and easier to join; algorithms determined more of what we saw and did on it; groups of people learned how to wield irony as a weapon on a macro scale; the pace at which culture evolved sped up so that only those who spent all their time online could parse through the layers. The paradoxes inherent in the system got a lot trickier to navigate. “Bacon” simply couldn’t contain it all, no matter how epic.
First, a note on the whole “generational warfare” thing: It is not real, and it is not entirely useful beyond “young people are always going to make fun of old people and old people will always complain about them in return.” When people refer to “Gen Z humor” or “TikTok humor,” what they’re really talking about is the chaotic, meaningless-seeming mishmashes of various references that are impenetrable to anyone not chronically online. But that’s just an extension of what the Washington Post once dubbed “millennial humor,” which should actually be called “Gen X humor,” considering the ages of the first internet forum posters who realized that weird, meaningless references made for good comedy. Instead, in her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch has what I think is a far better way of categorizing internet users: She divides people according to when they truly “got online.”
The first group, which she calls “Old Internet People” were on the early forums and message boards of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Usenet, Something Awful, or 4chan (back before it carried the alt-right connotations it does now), for instance. They’re the ones who laid the foundations for internet vernacular as we know it; they tested the limits for what was and wasn’t acceptable on the web and usually interacted in complete anonymity. The internet, then, was for connecting with strangers who cared about the same topics as you did, people who might become close friends but whose real names you might never know.
A few years later, there came a much, much larger group of users that McCulloch calls “Full Internet People,” or those who got online at the dawn of more user-friendly technology like AOL, AIM, MSN Messenger, MySpace, or LiveJournal in the early-to-mid 2000s. They’re people, like McCulloch and me, who mostly used the internet to connect with people we already knew in real life and saw it as a novelty.
Internet humor, as developed by this group, was defined by that novelty: the excitement of doing regular things — talking to friends, reading interesting stories, watching something funny — except that you were online. YouTube, Reddit, and the zillions of hyper-niche goof-off websites (Fuck My Life, where users would post funny but unfortunate anecdotes; Texts From Last Night, a place to put screenshots of drunk texts; the cat meme factory I Can Has Cheezburger; Awkward Family Photos, to name a few) didn’t yet have baked-in cultural norms you were expected to adhere to; people were creating them in the moment. And however dorky these places were, they still held something of a “secret club” vibe.
Recall, for example, the era where calling oneself a “nerd” suddenly became something of a humblebrag, which happened around the same time that comic book superheroes made for box office gold. The usage may have started with Silicon Valley techies, but it was popularized by early users of the technologies they created, people who defined themselves online by their obsessive interests. “[Internet] culture celebrates being a nerd — it’s nerdy and random for the sake of being nerdy and random, making references for the sake of references,” says Don Caldwell, the editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme, where he’s been cataloging viral internet phenomena for the past 12 years.
This might explain the performative formality of much of “LOLspeak,” or the winkingly silly tone of early internet discourse; consider phrases like “you, sir, have won the internet” or “[tips fedora]” or its inverse, the performative infantilization of “oh hai!” or the later “doggo.” “The narwhal bacons at midnight” is perhaps the prime example of such humor: quirky and weird but ultimately wholesome. That there is zero edge to LOLspeak is part of what makes it cringe, in the same way watching people who are bad at improv do improv is cringe. There is an earnestness, a lack of self-awareness, an element of theater-kiddom to it. “We’re dealing with a time on the early internet before people had to navigate through a million layers of irony to understand a meme,” Caldwell says.
Instead, the natural gatekeeping within communities came from the fact that you were there at all, not necessarily the impenetrability of the memes. The conversations that were happening on Reddit were not, for the most part, simultaneously happening on YouTube or Twitter or Tumblr, but a new user to any of these platforms likely wouldn’t have too much trouble parsing the language. You needn’t be part of the old guard of Something Awful admins to understand a rage comic or wojak meme, for instance, and you don’t have to be chronically online to laugh at ultra-viral internet videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger,” “End of Ze World,” or 2006’s iconic “Shoes,” a song about a shopping-obsessed teen girl whose parents just don’t understand. These sorts of internet shorts didn’t look like anything else in mainstream media at the time; they were, physically and spiritually, online.
But by the time “being online” became the default mode (by 2011, most Americans were on Facebook), “being online” just wasn’t special enough. Which brings us to the third group coined by McCulloch: the “Post Internet People,” or folks who came to the internet after the cultural significance of the social media monoliths we live with now — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and the like — had already been well-established. This group arrived at an internet with few borders, an internet their parents (or children, if they were older) were likely already on, and a place where they were accustomed to lack of anonymity (and found their own ways of getting around it). “All of these references and jokes that were once maintained and secured within micro-communities were now entering the spaces where our parents hung out,” says Caldwell. “By 2014, platforms like Facebook and YouTube were so ubiquitous that all the Animal Advice memes and jokes had been shared to death. Anybody who was extremely online was jaded by the mainstreaming of online humor.”
2014 was a turning point for internet culture. It was the year of Gamergate, the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, the year of the BuzzFeed quiz, the Ice Bucket Challenge, the year that someone on r/OutOfTheLoop, a subreddit devoted to poking fun at out-of-touch Reddit users, said of “the narwhal bacons at midnight”: “This is like looking back at our childhood and cringing at the stupid stuff we did.” By that point, “epic bacon” had become a punchline on College Humor, a symbol of a more innocent time before the internet’s most active users had seen what it could become.
The next phase of internet comedy, however, had long been underway. In the early aughts, legendary posters on the Something Awful forum “Fuck You and Die” had developed a mode of humor that practically defied description: “It was, ultimately, just being subversive,” a former admin told Vice. “There’s a lot of contrarianism, there’s a lot of trying to antagonize each other. It was a little bit of being crude, being shocking, things like that. But it was never any one thing.” People would pretend to be “illiterate, really serious” teenagers and insult each other, “but it was not a thing where you were calling the SWAT team to people’s houses,” another admin said. Essentially, it was shitposting, or the act of publishing irrelevant or intentionally bad content.
By the early 2010s, many of Something Awful’s most devoted members had decamped for either Twitter (usually if they were more left-leaning) to create what has since become referred to as “Weird Twitter” or 4chan (if they leaned right), says Nathan Allebach, a creative director and content creator who covers internet history. On both sites, posters used troll humor that acted as a method of gatekeeping anyone who wasn’t in on the joke, but only one of those sites was the recruiting ground for a deeply misogynistic and violent backlash against women on the internet (even though much of what ensued would play out on Twitter). Gamergate, the yearlong harassment campaign aimed at prominent women in the video game industry and anyone who appeared to support them, was a watershed moment for what later became known as the alt-right, and provided a blueprint for silencing others with mass harassment and troll campaigns.
“im not owned! im not owned!!”, i continue to insist as i slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob
The tactics mobilized by Gamergate have been honed by countless bad-faith campaigns since then, but also by fan armies who have the power to derail any topic by flooding it with paeans to their favorite pop star or band. Not all of it has been in order to silence critics; standoms have jammed predatory police apps by submitting fancams of K-pop stars and thwarted trending white supremacist hashtags, creating a new type of humor in its wake.
It’s easy to argue, as plentyhave, that the ironification of internet culture has been a net negative for society. But the tough thing about criticizing shitposting is that the more you rail against it, the funnier it gets. Rather than making everything around it feel meaningless, what tends to happen is that the very systems internet irony criticizes begin to use it for profit. In 2017, Allebach’s marketing agency was working with the frozen meat brand Steak-Umms. His job? Make Steak-Umms sound cool on Twitter. So he did what other food companies — Wendy’s, Moon Pie, Hostess — were experimenting with at the time, which was to play with the conventions of “Weird Twitter.” Suddenly we were living in a world in which, say, SunnyD was tweeting stuff like “I can’t do this anymore” with absolutely zero context. Thus, the weird, surrealist humor becomes cringe in its own way, ripe for the kind of parody it’s designed to be immune to.
There is an entire genre on TikTok devoted to mocking people who still use “epic bacon” humor (one of its most prolific posters, @blizz988, even has a Cameo account where you can custom order his parodies of straight white millennial dudes who love Marvel, Funko Pops, and caption their Instagrams with “so I did a thing”). “Current internet humor is more or less mockery,” says Allebach. “It’s an easy way to create more and more content based around a stereotype.”
As passé and smarmy as “epic bacon” or “doggo floofer” LOLspeak is, it’s not as if some people don’t still find it funny. Very few modes of humor ever truly die on the web; they just lose relevance. Just as they did with Antoine Dodson’s “Bed Intruder Song” more than a decade ago, YouTube parodists The Gregory Brothers are still to this day creating auto-tuned bangers out of cute viral moments. (The “It’s Corn!” song about the Corn Kid? That was them.) This is undeniably “epic bacon” behavior, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.
The internet, or, more specifically, the act of consuming vast amounts of algorithmically driven content, has broken and hardened us; it has made us feel as if we are laughing at things from five or 10 or even one year ago, that means we are embarrassing and washed. The pace of the internet is now long past “imagine explaining this to a pilgrim”; we’re at “imagine explaining this to someone three weeks ago.” Good comedy, though, shouldn’t have to adhere to the frenetic pace at which the internet runs. “You might build an entirely new community out of what you feel like is a niche genre of comedy, but really it was probably done 10 years ago and people forgot or grew out of it,” says Allebach. “All the stuff that tries to be different ultimately ends up being the same. Once you hit the postmodern, ironic style we’ve already run through, everything just cycles around again.”
It’s worth asking what, really, is the value of comedy that must be constantly discarded and reinvented in order to remain funny? Perhaps, looking back, we should consider “millennial cringe” as less of an embarrassing phase we’d rather forget and more like the last gasp of what humor on the internet looked like before it became impossible to keep up with it.
From The Hindu: Sports
Messi finally wins World Cup; what’s next for Argentina? - Messi said he will stick around for a while longer, even if another World Cup might be too much to ask
FIFA World Cup | With Mbappé and Deschamps, France's future looks just fine - The defeat in the 2022 FIFA World Cup final will sting, but the foundations of France's national football team are solid with just under four years to go until the next World Cup in 2026
Kuldeep firmly back in contention as regular spinner in Test squad - A combination of injuries, loss of form and lack of support from team managements had left him in the wilderness
FIFA World Cup final 2022: Google search records highest-ever traffic in 25 years - Without revealing the exact figures, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the search engine garnered its highest-ever traffic in 25 years during the FIFA World Cup final match between Argentina and France
Morning Digest | Messi’s Argentina keeps its date with destiny; citizenship path to be eased for 6 minority groups from 3 nations, and more - Here’s a select list of stories to read before you start your day
From The Hindu: National News
Unnao rape case | Kuldeep Singh Sengar moves Delhi HC for interim bail - The court was informed that Sengar was seeking interim bail for two months to attend his daughter's wedding which is to take place on February 8
1971 India-Pakistan war | Bhairon Singh Rathore, hero of Longewala, passes away in Jodhpur at 81 - Bhairon Singh Rathore's role was essayed by actor Suniel Shetty in the 1997 movie ‘Border’
Indian Army will not let China change status quo along LAC ‘unilaterally’: Jaishankar - EAM Jaishankar said that India continues to import from China because there was no adequate focus on the manufacturing secto
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Three of a family drown as car falls into river in Thrissur - Car plunges into Karuvannur river while Rajendra Babu was reversing it to give way for another vehicle
From BBC: Europe
Ukraine war: Overnight strikes hit Kyiv as Putin visits Belarus - The unusual night attack causes blackouts across the city, but no one is killed, Kyiv officials say.
Netherlands slavery: Saying sorry leaves Dutch divided - The Netherlands government is expected to apologise for slavery with a speech by the prime minister.
World Cup 2022: Elation in Argentina, sorrow in France - fans react - The party goes off in Buenos Aires as Argentina celebrates but in Paris there is disappointment.
Ukraine war: Putin meets generals as Russian missiles pound cities - Senior Ukrainian commanders say Russia could be planning a new attack early next year.
Berlin AquaDom aquarium: Police not seeking suspects over explosion - Berlin police say a tweet asking for help in tracking down suspects linked to the incident is fake.
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An electric Kia that’s faster than a Lamborghini? The 2023 EV6 GT, driven - The performance Kia EV has playful handling and easy sub-12 second quarter-miles. - link
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From Jokes Subreddit
Heavenly Ducks -
Three women die together in an accident and go to heaven. When they get there, St. Peter says, “We only have one rule here in heaven: Don’t step on the ducks!” So they enter heaven, and sure enough, there are ducks all over the place. It is almost impossible not to step on a duck, And although they try their best to avoid them, the first woman accidentally steps on one. Along comes St. Peter with the ugliest man she ever saw. St. Peter chains them together and says, ‘Your punishment for stepping on a duck is to spend eternity chained to this ugly man!’ The next day, the second woman steps accidentally on a duck and along comes St. Peter, who doesn’t miss a thing. With him is another extremely ugly man. He chains them together with the same admonishment as for the first woman. The third woman has observed all this and, not wanting to be chained for all eternity to an ugly man, is very, VERY careful where she steps. She manages to go months Without stepping on any ducks. But one day St. Peter comes up to her with the most handsome man she has ever laid eyes on. Very tall, long eyelashes, muscular. St. Peter chains them together without saying a word. The happy woman says, “I wonder what I did to deserve being Chained to you for all of eternity?” The guy says, “I don’t know about you, but I stepped on a duck.”
A man and his wife are travelling through the United States, when they notice a sign telling them that the town they are entering is called Kissimee. -
They quickly start arguing about the correct way to pronounce it. “KISS-a-me,” says the husband. “That’s wrong,” says the wife, “The right way to say it is kis-A-me.” “Not necessarily,” says the husband, “It could also be kis-a-ME.”
Their argument continues as they enter town, and decide to stop to buy some lunch. After finding a suitable parking place, they head inside to the front counter to order their food.
The husband decides that this is a good opportunity to be proven right, and settle the argument with his wife. “Excuse me,” he says to the waitress at the counter, “My wife and I can’t figure out the right way to pronounce the name of this place. Will you please tell us where we are, and say it slowly so that we get it right?”
“Sure,” says the waitress. “Buuurrrgerrrr Kiiinnnnggg.”
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