My Two-cents: Is Comedy Dead?
It’s become a weekly ritual of mine to watch the new SNL episode on Sunday nights. I love comedy. I love movies, I love tv-shows, I love witty humor. I have a horrible habit of quoting hilarious movies that no one has seen. I love keeping up with current pop culture. I love sarcasm. I would consider myself The Onion’s biggest fan. I love idioms. I love clever writing. I love droll jokes. And most especially, I love humor poked at today’s current pop culture and political climate. So, SNL is right up my alley. It might just be my entire alley. But, as I was watching SNL this week, I thought to myself: is this all that it used to be? I remember watching SNL with my dad growing up, laughing out loud till I would cry at some of the jokes. My dad was also an avid SNL fan, being he worked in television and was a mass com major in college. Any classic SNL skit – he’d seen it. He could quote them off the top of his head. I was quite impressed by this as a kid. Funny off-topic story about my dad – he told me that in college he use to watch Jeopardy an hour early on the Sioux City channel, and then go watch it again on the Vermillion station with his friends in the dorms. He would crush every question. His friends were amazed. They told him he should seriously consider trying out for the show. When he started answering questions about ballet correctly, though, they started to get suspicious. But anyways – back to my original tangent – old SNL had generations of watchers quoting skits for decades – something I rarely do with the current season. What's up with that?
Is comedy declining? One side of the political spectrum would tell you that it’s because people are "too damn sensitive" nowadays. I’m not here to discuss that, because I like my potential job prospects in the future, and I would like to keep it that way. I really don’t feel like getting canceled. (At least not this early in life. I’ll probs wait until I’m at LEAST 30 and employed for that.) But I will say, I think society has tended to lean on the heavy side of over-analyzing meaning in things. Which is neither good nor bad, it just is. Analyzing things isn’t bad. But I think the most important thing to analyze with humor is the intent of the joke. And as a society, we have gone away from looking at the writer's inherent intent and tuned in more on the individual presumption of the joke. Just food for thought.
Now, for the real culprit of the problem. I think the biggest humor thief nowadays is the speed at which content travels. Is SNL really not funny anymore, or have we just seen the jokes they're trying to make circle four different social media platforms by the time they make it to Saturday night? SNL has always built itself on poking fun at society. But nowadays, so does every other social media platform. Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, etc. By the time SNL gets their hands on the material, it’s cliched. We are a society of trends – and we always have been – but nowadays trends move so damn fast it can be hard to keep up. I think comedy can be split into two components: content and delivery. And if the material is out-of-style before you get around to it, how do you deliver it? Jokes, like most things, have to evolve in order to stay in touch with the times. And currently, we are living in a time of 24-hour news cycles. We have Ron Burgendy to thank for that one. Damn you, Ron. Stay classy though, San Diego (there was the unnecessary movie reference I was referring to in the first paragraph). So the next generation of skit writers and stand-up comedians are going to have to come up with new strategies to poke humor in a way that doesn't seem like beating a dead horse. (Or in this case, a dead joke).
^ Amy Poehler, my inspiration and role model.
