Is Your Sense of Humour Broken Too?
Laughter is the best medicine until you’re the only one laughing and people look at you like you need medicine.
Out of habit, recently, I shared something I found absolutely hilarious. A tweet:
You don’t need me to explain the punchline do you? Some people laughed with me, and some others didn’t quite like the sound of it. Orphanhood is linked to trauma, and this joke makes light of the sore spot.
But I laughed.
It is said that one thing that sets Generation Z apart is a strange sense of humour. To other age groups, it seems like our sense of humour is broken.
If I texted you this statement I lifted from here: “tHE CheESE STiCK HATH AwaKENed.”
Would you laugh?
A typical Gen Z reply would be ‘LOL WUT?’
While someone else would probably need a context to the cheese stick in question, a Gen Z would first be tickled at the way it is written. That style of writing is a specific tone. A tone you subconsciously learn from hours of media consumption.
However, I did start wondering, maybe our sense of humour IS broken.
Then I remembered this brilliant chart I had once seen, created by Grant Snider. An amusing representation titled ‘The Hierarchy of Humor’.
At bottom of the humour food chain, we see things everyone is familiar with like ‘knock knock’ jokes or puns. For instance, this image is a pun.
You no doubt understand it. Maybe you chuckled or just smiled and thought ‘’that’s clever’’; but you understand, even if you’re not a doctor.
When we move a step up and find practical jokes; like the one in this video that still cracks me up.
Higher on the hierarchy are logical jokes like the famous ‘why did the chicken cross the street?’ line. These things make you laugh not at their content but at yourself, because of the effort you put into thinking up some grandiose answer.
Modern art makes an appearance for good reason. But closer to the top is my bull’s eye — dark humour.
Look at the Grim Reaper, sitting casually, and I think, smoking a pipe (smoking doesn’t kill if you’re already dead folks). For Mr Snider, dark humour shares the same level as self-depreciation. This level finds humour in things that, one could say, are inherently negative.
The key question is why. Why would a mind be pushed to find humour in the very absence of a good? And why does it seem like an entire generation finds laughter closer to the top?
(psst! If you’re enjoying this article, consider hitting that follow button.)
I’m no psychologist (yet!) but my most educated guess would be that it has something to do with how we cope with trauma. As luck would have it, Corinna M Perchtold and her scholarly pals seem to be thinking the same thing here.
While Perchtold’s uses the term ‘dark humour’ as something which necessarily contains malicious intent (the pro-slap Oscar watchers find their argument here), that view is completely distinct from what I am trying to establish in this article. She and her team prove that humour is a form of cognitive reappraisal i.e the act of reevaluating one’s thoughts in response to a stressful situation.
So, just like Kevin Hart continually makes self-deprecating short jokes to embrace something many people are bullied about; people may make dark humour jokes to feel better about stressful situations or trauma.
Isn’t it beautiful 🥺? A young man’s tattoo of his absent father.
If I sent that picture to a Gen Z, the reply I am likely to get is ‘💀’. Which translates to ‘dead’.
It might interest you to know that the skull emoji ‘💀’ and loudly crying emoji ‘😭’ are symbols many members of my generation use to express humour.
I have this theory that members of Gen Z are experiencing collective trauma. We have the greatest access to information, good and bad. Global misfortunes stare us boldly in the face. We see videos of suffering and wake up to the news of someone we know taking their own lives. And all these while striving to be useful members of society in systems that are exploited by the rich and broken by corruption.
So maybe our sense of humour isn’t broken. Perhaps it’s just another dimension that chaos awakens.
But then, maybe I’m ‘reaching’. Or maybe some of us are really laughing ourselves away from psychological death.
LOL.
If you liked this article you should read this next 💀.
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Dedicated to my baby gworl Tarinipre. Your writing inspired me to write. Happy Birthday!
