1/ A quick tweetstorm about evolution in humor (US-centric) from 90s (Seinfeld/Simpsons/Jay Leno) to today (Rick and Morty as exemplar)
Conversation
2/ It feels like modern (cable-TV era) humor began with identity humor, whether explicit (say Apu) or implicit (people in Florida who leave turn indicators on = old people). It was mostly self-directed in amirite style.
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3/ I like Apu but I was surprised to learn most 2nd-gen Indian-Americans don't. See Hari Kondabulu's "Problem with Apu". But in general, identity humor is just not funny because real humans are funnier than any particular reductive idea of any group of them.
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4/ The 90s seemed to be mostly about so-called "observational" humor, which you can think of as being about behavior qua behavior as opposed to behavior as a marker of identity.
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5/ "Florida turn signal" jokes are identity jokes about old people, but Seinfeld's joke about having to navigate a bank line like a rat in a maze is pure observational. It's about a behavior, no matter who does it.
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6/ I think the reason observational humor worked in the 90s is that it was largely _normie_ observational humor with no non-normies around to call out (for instance) ableist assumptions or simple ignorances that would make a joke stupid/uninteresting to the right kind of expert.
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7/ Example: the joke about grocery stores carrying peeled oranges in their own packaging a year or two ago was tagged as "ableist" because apparently people with some disabilities rely on such packaging to eat fruit. It is unwitting amirite normie identity humor not observational
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8/ The '00s were a bit of a comedy wasteland with the notable exception of South Park, which triggered the shift from observational to what I call false-consciousness humor. Humor poking fun at utopian delusions people have about their current or future conditions.
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9/ You can summarize the evolution across the 3 eras (identity, observational, false consciousness) as an evolution from virtue ethics, to deontological ethics, to consequentialist ethics as the foundation of the humor.
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10/ Virtue ethics --> Identity politics --> Identity humor
Deontological ethics --> PC politics --> behaviorist humor
Consequential ethics --> Utopian politics --> false consciousness humor
Replying to
11/ I should mention The Office here of course, my own humor north star. It fits in the gap between South Park and Rick and Morty. How?
What happens when you strip away all kinds of false consciousness a little too mercilessly? You get nihilistic humor of course.
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12/ Nihilistic humor, unlike the other 3, doesn't correlate with any particular ethics. Nor does it operate from any sort of implied moral high ground. It laughs at its own condition without even pretending to have escaped it, or trying to.
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