Why is Gen Z Humor So Weird?

[Soulbass]

I jumped into Discord on 2016.
In 2020 I went back to gaming (when covid pandemic kicked in) eventually I got exposed to internet culture.
As a late millennial, I wasn't sure at first what makes this humor and generation different and unique.

 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Soulbass

[thisintegrated]

Because they're too abstract and creative for the boomers to understand.

But really depends on the community and personality type.

If you want simpler humor, you'll want to find some sensors.

 

If you wanna know what makes the zoomers unique, it's:

1. 99% will never afford a house, and competition on Tinder is nothing like the competition older generations had.  This despair sometimes shapes their humor to something dark and morbid.

2. Grew up with the internet, and FB memes which were funny 10 years ago are no longer enough, so zoomers try to make "dank" memes which are more complex and harder for FB mums to understand.

 

and whatever video you linked.. is not representative of zoomer humor.

Edited November 8, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Ulax]

@Soulbass What did you find different about it personally?

[King Merk]

Being born in 96 I’m kind of on the cusp of being a millennial and gen z.

I fucking love gen z humor. It’s more niched and so unique.

Internet culture is great. Thanks for sharing this vid

[ThePoint]

8 hours ago, thisintegrated said:

1. 99% will never afford a house

@thisintegrated Why and how? What makes you think this?

8 hours ago, Soulbass said:

Growing up with oversaturation means that Zoomers aren't facing the same challenges (hence mental health issues...)

@Soulbass In what ways does that link to mental health issues?

8 hours ago, Soulbass said:

It's like you guys are 10 years late to the party, and you're being told that you'll have to work 400x harder to make it.

Which guys? Gen Z?

[Carl-Richard]

Postmodernity, meta-irony.

[Michael569]

I had this conversation with my cousin who is in his early 20s and his response was basically "because you have to be like that if you want to fit in". 

It's all about status in the group, image and personal branding. Because the competition is so vicious pretty much for anything (girls/guys,  jobs, social media attention, being the alpha or the diva in the group and different roles in the social circles) they have to play that game because the only other option is to be the outlier and get labelled weird which means no pussy, no fame and no social recognition. People get different roles assigned and they need to work hard to maintain those roles in the social circle. 

But not all are playing this game. In many countries, teenagers do not use Instagram on massive scale so you would see a completely different mentality compared to the young people in US or Australia. 

It's a cultural shift that cannot be stopped and one day it will start morphing into something else. To a Millenial, this makes some sense but it is weird. To Gen X this is hard to understand unless their kids pull them in. To Baby Boomers, this is a mental asylum because many of them lived in post-WW2 world and the values of today's people seem to them unacceptable in a sort of "this is what my father died fighting Wermacht for?" way. 

What I'm curious is to see Gen Z grow older and whether there will be a new boom of teen reflection on some of the content they produced and whether they will become as judgemental of  Generation Alpha  as we Millenials were of them. 

Edited November 8, 2022 by Michael569

[Yarco]

It just takes a while to wrap your head around. If you're a millennial, there are a few other millennial comedians like Sam Hyde or Jreg who can help bridge the gap between irony and meta-irony.

The big thing is getting over the "I can't tell if they're joking or not" -- The answer is always yes to both.

[thisintegrated]

5 hours ago, ThePoint said:

@thisintegrated Why and how? What makes you think this?

Boomers could buy a house with a few months salary.  Now their houses are worth millions and they look down on the "lazy" zoomers for not having kids and starting families.  

Edited November 8, 2022 by thisintegrated

[soos_mite_ah]

A lot of it has to do with the constant chaos that American Gen Z has had to deal with from 9/11, the War on Terror, the 2008 Recession, active school shooter drills, economic issues ranging from not  being able to afford a house and how overpriced college is, the total joke that was the 2016 and 2020 elections, and now the pandemic and overturning of abortion laws. Much of these happened to Gen Z when they were teenagers or young adults, so it was their formative years. As a result of this constant chaos, you get a chaotic sense of humor that is often used to make sense of these events and cope by acknowledging the absurdity of it all. The absurdity itself becomes a type of humor. 

This kind of humor rooted in absurdity and chaos is a reflection of the times and it isn't something that is new or exclusive to Gen Z. In fact, it even has it's own term, dadaism. This type of humor also came about with the generation of young people who had to live/fight through World War II since many of them were small children during World War I, the Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression. Here is a video on dadaism and how it explains Gen Z humor: 

 

[Matt23]

Too much media.

Lack of coherent and stable social narratives and values. 

...

I dunno.

[integral]

Part of the humour is that they are mocking memes, it’s memes about memes, or where the content in the meme is other memes.

Edited November 9, 2022 by integral

[integral]

Don’t feel bad only carl understands this.

Edited November 9, 2022 by integral

[integral]

[integral]

[MarkKol]

I saw this today:

Someone identified as a cat so they started demanding a litter box to be placed in school bathrooms

Older folks are losing their marbles seeing how crazy our generation can be