Pack It In Everybody, Some Middle-Aged White Guy Said Comedy is Dead

I don’t know if you’ve all gotten the memo, but apparently comedy on the whole is on its last legs as a bastion of art and truth.

Oh, you haven’t heard? Yeah, all of a sudden people don’t like it when you act like the sexuality and gender spectrums don’t exist, and that just completely exhausts the stockpile of jokes that we can make, like a questionably-acquired oil well.

Comedy is not dead, but it does need some renovations. The first step: acknowledge that the generation currently in high school is full of hilarious kids. Memes are in their renaissance, and they’ve managed to thrive on an app designed on the premise that you only need 7 seconds to make someone ugly-snort-laugh.

I would argue that memes have entered the same beautiful, weird postmodern stage as our visual art. We’ve got a recorded period of established motifs, formats, and media that now stands as the classical era of memes, AKA the Elder Memes. These are your Bad Luck Brian’s and Rage comics. Then it started to get a bit more meta with stuff like “I heard you like ____ so here’s ____”, and now we’re deep-frying images of SpongeBob SquarePants holding a revolver saying a quote from Waiting for Godot. That’s what the kids have done with memes, and I could not be prouder. My generation is too busy “living their best life” and “taking some time for themselves” and “trying to be a stand-up comedian.” It’s all up to the children now, and I’m not worried at all.