I don't think you needed to tell anyone that you are one! I knew and bet you some more on here too!
Ricky. Here's a rant. I should make this into a thread. It's succinct. Hits. Accurate. Another couple of adjectives if you would like...
Something shifted in how we relate to comedy and the easy explanation is that everyone became too sensitive, or too politically correct, or too eager to be offended. "People just canāt take a joke anymore", everyoneās looking for a reason to be upset, the woke mob ruined comedy, etc
Thereās definitely something to this, but I don't think the core issue is that everyone got too sensitive
I think the core issue is that comedy requires a shared sense of reality and we simply donāt have one anymore
For comedy to work broadly, you need broadly shared context. You need a population that more or less agrees on whatās true, whatās ridiculous, whatās taboo, whatās sacred, and so on
The comedianās job is to dance along the edges of those agreements, pointing out the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we pretend and whatās real. But if there are no shared agreements to begin with, there are no edges to dance along
People are living in genuinely different information environments, consuming different media, following different accounts, absorbing different narratives about whatās happening in the world and what it means
We have sorted ourselves (or the algorithm has sorted us?) into micro-realities so efficiently that we no longer share enough common ground to laugh at the same things
I'm not really sure what we do about it