For awhile now I’ve wanted to write a newsletter on Gen Z humor, but I keep putting it off. Humor is hard to write about. It’s deeply uncool to dissect a joke, and even more uncool to insert oneself into a lively conversation among teens to ask, “What does that joke say about the state of your soul?”
Like most millennials, it is beginning to dawn on me that my generation is no longer on the cutting edge of culture. Which is to say: when a teenager shows me a meme or tik tok video, my laugh is not always genuine.
I taught middle school last year, and I’ve taken a few young guys under my Millennial wing in the past couple years. I’ve thought a lot about what makes these guys tick, as I listen to their stories and pay attention to the things they care about. It’s amazing what frequencies begin to open up if you listen. Their jokes don’t seem so alien anymore. Even all those dank memes are starting to make a strange sort of sense.
Unfortunately, the better I understand Gen Z humor, the sadder it makes me. If a young friend shows me one Youtube video, I laugh. If he shows me three more, I start to feel bummed, even if I get the joke—especially if I get the joke. Gen Z humor is very “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Sometimes I feel terribly sober about it all, like a designated driver at their end-of-the-world party.
Of course, that’s exactly the kind of alarmist sentiment that makes Gen Z cringe. I can already hear the complaints.
They’re like, ayoo what are you some kind of gen z expert?
And I’m like, i lowkey am
And they’re like, you’re deadass not
And I’m like, ok but lemme just try
And they’re like, bettt but why? maybe you should stick to old people humor my guy
And I’m like, i gotta shoot my shot
And they’re like, plz dont
And maybe they’re right. This is a conversation that I don’t hear other people having—and maybe for good reason. It’s possible to find articles explaining Gen Z slang, or even some incisive commentary on Gen Z humor, but I haven’t found anyone interrogating the meaning behind it all. For me that makes this prime Synthesizer material: I’m trying to describe the shrinking hub in a Venn diagram of barely overlapping curiosities.
To be clear, I like my Gen Z friends a lot. I genuinely enjoy their humor, even when it makes me sad—which, as it turns out, is a lot of the time. I want to explore that laughing sadness.
We’ll talk a little about the history of comedy, the end of the world, the misguided advice of Boomers, and my own angst about it all. There’s so much there, and I’m not sure my synthesizing chops are up to the task. This newsletter will include a ton of links, and it might be hard—perhaps impossible—for anyone who isn’t in my head to keep up. I’ll do my best to set a measured pace.
A few definitions and caveats before we dive in. When I talk about Gen Z (or zoomers, as they are called on the street), I am thinking of people born between 1997 and 2012. Usually I am thinking of teenage boys, since that’s who keeps sending me so many dang memes.
For my older readers, one of my aims is to act as an amateur translator for the Gen Z worldview—a precarious position for someone who can barely speak the language. All of my observations here should be taken in a spirit of curiosity, the musings of an outsider looking in. Expect many blind spots and generalizations. I’m sure Gen Z readers will say I’ve got it all wrong. I welcome that feedback.
One last caveat. This newsletter will include a lot of material (most of it in the links) that some readers may consider offensive. I’ve tried to make this newsletter legible on its own terms, even if you don’t click a single link, so feel free to breeze past them if you’d rather not be bombarded by f-bombs.
I should also warn you that this conversation could get pretty bleak before the end. I still think it’s a conversation worth having, and I promise not to leave you in the dumps.
In college I was part of an improv troupe. In the sweaty basement of a building called The Billy Graham Center we spent several hours each week practicing short-form and long-form improv and making a lot of jokes that the ghost of Billy Graham still hasn’t recovered from. We passed around an invisible red ball and sang Da Doo Ron Ron and made up scenes about a guy whose wives all died in mysterious tortilla-related incidents. (If you’re struggling to imagine all this, our improv practice was kind of like this, except with less cussing and more closeted gay Christians.)
I learned a lot in my short tenure as an improviser. I learned how to find the game in a scene and how to find the broom in an imaginary closet. I learned that jokes, like the lessons in this paragraph, come in threes. I learned that just because people are really funny, doesn’t mean they’re not also super-duper depressed.
But the biggest thing I learned—and this is something I still believe—is that there is truth in comedy. Truth in Comedy is the title of an old-school improv manual by Del Close and Charna Halpern, but the idea is common sense. It means that things are funny because they’re true.
Sometimes the truth is synonymous with the joke. Think of a celebrity impression or a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up routine, both of which rise or fall solely based on how much you feel their truth. If you laugh, it’s because the joke resonates. The truth is right there for the taking. Pilot announcements really are ridiculous. Sarah Palin really does sound like that.
Sometimes the truth is a layer or two beneath the surface. On the surface level this bit about Mick Jagger is just an amusing anecdote about John Mulaney’s time at SNL. The real reason it works, however, is that every beat of the story touches on a human foible: celebrity, manners, gossip, power dynamics.
Sometimes the truth in comedy is harder to locate. “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” a Monty Python sketch that is just as funny today as it was in 1970, may not seem to have any truth in it at all. And if you’re thinking of “truth in comedy” as some kind of moral to the story, you’re right—there’s no secret moral here. Rather, the truth is what makes the joke “work.” It is the human experience at the center of all that silliness: in this case, the human experience of men who dress up in suits and take themselves very seriously.
Imagine how lame this sketch would be if it took place in a different setting—say, a circus tent or an insane asylum. The genius of “The Ministry of Silly Walks” is that it occurs in a bureaucrat’s office, where the truth of the scene can really sing. We have a man protesting that “with government backing” he could make his walk very silly (!), and we have another man regaling him with a litany of political programs—all while they prance about the room. It’s just… amazing. If you’ve never seen it, treat yo self.
The truth in comedy is not always easily named, but it is always there. Although, we should note that it is not always strictly true. Truth in comedy is subjective truth, not God’s honest truth—it is felt truth. And it’s not about finding the hidden medicine in a joke. It’s about responding with a shock of laughter to our shared human experience.
The word “shared” is key here. When we cross into another culture, the truth only makes its audience laugh if it is a universal truth, not only applicable to certain people in a certain place and time. Death is always funny. Ditto sex, and farts. (I too have a body; I too am embarrassed by its startling sounds and smells.)
When people don’t laugh at a joke, it’s usually because they don’t share its felt truth. This is most apparent across generational divides. Humor flows downstream: while most kids understand their parents’ jokes, the opposite doesn’t usually hold true. I can watch Andy Griffith and still find it funny, but my parents wouldn’t really get Tim Robinson.
Humor flows downstream, and with the advent of the Internet and smartphones and social media, the current is moving faster than ever. While the early days of television were a lazy river with familiar iterations on a family theme—Leave It to Beaver isn’t so different from Family Matters, even though they aired 30 years apart—humor is now hurtling forward at the pace of Twitter. Its language and structure is continually morphing, and it’s almost impossible to keep up.
So it’s not surprising that adults are baffled by kids these days. Such is the way of things, now more than ever. But if my theory holds, we shouldn’t consider this merely a difference of comedic styling—although there is that—but a difference of felt truth.
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So what is the felt truth in Gen Z humor?
I could name several things off the top of my head, but I want to exercise some self-control and stick with two. These are the two I see over and over again, just beneath the surface of so many memes and videos and stand-up routines. Sometimes they are only subtext, but often they’re right there on the surface. Once I saw them I couldn’t unsee them. So much of the strangeness of Gen Z humor suddenly clicked into place.
The two truths are:
The world is ending
And it doesn’t mean anything
Now, these are some pretty devastating truths, and I should remind you—they are felt truths, not ultimate reality. But for people who sypathize with these two statements, albeit sub-consciously, the difference between felt truth and ultimate reality is negligible. It’s funny because it’s true.
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I realize I’ve been throwing around the term “Gen Z humor” like it’s some kind of household brand we’re all familiar with. Maybe you’re scratching your head like, “What even is Gen Z humor?”
It’s hard to give a solid definition, but I’d say Gen Z humor is most strongly characterized by its absurdist streak and its sharp tonal shifts. It is self-referential, nihilistic, prematurely sentimental, clever, dark, and tends to combust meaning on contact. Of course, a lot of Gen Z humor is passed down from previous generations; they appreciate a good prank video or dad pun as much as the next guy. But Gen Z humor is most its own when it is most absurd.
The best examination I’ve found is this article that is aptly named, “The Shocking and Absurdist Humor of Gen Z.” (It’s worth noting that this article was written in 2019, before COVID or the invasion of Ukraine.) I think William Mercado is spot-on when he writes:
The most common form of Gen Z humor is pessimism in the face of a crumbling world. Older generations might try to call out the kids for always being on their phones and never paying attention to the world around them, but I would argue that no one pays attention more than Gen Z. Memes about the state of the world will range from WWIII draft memes to the impending climate change apocalypse. These kids understand the world we live in and the very real dangers that the world faces and have chosen to combat this sense of impending doom with absurd and shocking humor.
He includes this meme, which wears its “the world is ending” truth on its sleeve:
If people don’t get Gen Z humor, it is probably because they don’t resonate with this worldview. But they shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it. As Mercado writes, “Gen Zers are smart and they know that their generation might very well be the last generation to live in the world as they know it.”
Yikes.
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My favorite Youtube find in the last year is SNL’s “Please Don’t Destroy,” a comedy trio whose videos started going viral at the start of the pandemic. I’m partial to their pre-SNL stuff, like this bit about a vaccine called Dumbreka or this one about roasts, which includes my absolute favorite line: “Let’s see what old Satan hath wrought up today!” Their videos are absurd and chaotic in a way I find enjoyable (in moderation), and they also run on our two truths: the world is ending, and it doesn’t mean anything.
I could point to this in a bunch of their sketches, but it’s most obvious in “Future Selves.” In this SNL short, the three friends are visited by their future selves, who try to warn them about the catastrophic effects of climate change, which have made the planet uninhabitable. The younger trio interrupts them to ask about their personal lives. Are we rich? Are we married?
No dice. Their future selves are failures. One is divorced. Another’s house burned down on his birthday while he was trying to sail around the world. The future selves keep trying to warn them that the world is ending, but young Martin cuts them off: “I don’t care. If you’re what I’m working towards, I’d honestly rather just die now.”
The world is ending, and it doesn’t mean anything. Might as well just die.
I can already hear some readers pushing back. Okay, you cherry picked this video to prove your point. But is this “truth in comedy” really so pervasive?
Well… yeah, I think so. Granted, this video makes its worldview obvious, but a lot of their other sketches are variations on the same theme. This one is, “Our dreams are ending and it doesn’t mean anything.” This one is, “My life is ending and it doesn’t mean anything.” Even sketches that are pure absurdism—“Hard Seltzer” or “Tin Foil Garbage Can”—only work because they find a thread of meaning or convention and then tug at it until it disintegrates.
I have to admit, even though I think Please Don’t Destroy is brilliant, I start to feel nauseous after a few videos. I believe the world is full of meaning, so I get queasy when exposed to too much nihilism—even when it’s dressed up in a clown costume.
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When I say that Gen Z feels the world is ending, I don’t only mean that they are nervous about climate change or World War III. I mean that their world has been deconstructed and deconstructed and deconstructed, until there is nothing left to take apart.
How did we get here? Where did all the meaning go? There are many cultural shifts we could trace, but I’ll stay in my lane and keep focusing on humor as an emergent property of cultural changes.
Think about The Office. I’ll assume you’ve watched every episode several times like I have and dispense with the recap. What I want you to notice is how we experience meaning in relation to the many life cycles of The Office. From the outset, we are already standing a bit askance from reality. This is, after all, a mockumentary, which means that we are approaching narrative form in an ironic way. Jim smirks at the camera, and we smirk with him. We are not fully present in the scenes; we are in on the joke.
Next, introduce the Internet. Every episode of The Office is processed through a hive of users and takes on a second life in the form of memes. To accommodate these endless iterations, the original context and story must fade from view. Narrative meaning is extracted so that we can impose a vibe. A moment from a character’s story arc becomes that feeling you have sometimes:
Cool haha relatable—at least for guitarists. But we’re still thinking like Millennials. Yes, the meaning we started with is de-saturated, but we can still find another remove. Remember how I mentioned dank memes earlier? The next life cycle of the meme is a good example of what I meant:
I can feel some readers getting lost. What? Waluigi? Gen Z humor makes no sense! But remember, I prepared you for this. Sharp tonal shifts. Dark humor. The absurd. We’re envisioning a situation in which Jesus is dying on the cross, and while everyone blames Judas, Waluigi—the arch-rival in Mario—is the mastermind behind it all. Lolz. But we can pull this thread a little further:
And scene. After a joke like this, where else is there to go? We’ve reached ground zero. There’s nothing left to laugh about, once meaning has been dissected to the bones. The life cycle of The Office is just like the life cycle of any joke these days, the same life cycle as any news story, which iterates and re-iterates and gets picked apart until we’re fiddling with scraps. This is the skill we’ve mastered, and it leaves humor at a dead end.
When I say that one of the primary truths in Gen Z humor is that the world is ending, I mean that they have inherited a world in which meaning has steadily been picked apart. Forms are inverted. The snake eats its own tail. Maybe there is meaning in the world, but we stand apart from it in suspicion and amusement.
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In the early days of television, sitcoms followed a modernist conception of the world. They had clear acts that led to neat resolutions. Most stories were set within a nuclear family, with likeable characters (heroes) who overcame obstacles to achieve their dreams. The formal element was so strong that we even had a laugh track to tell us when to laugh.
As they grew to reflect a postmodern worldview, however, the formal elements loosened. We left the nuclear families of so many early sitcoms and entered the workplace. The laugh track disappeared. By the time The Office aired, an anti-hero was in the lead role, and characters started breaking the fourth wall to look directly at the camera. There was a degree of self-awareness that broke down the forms and structures of conventional comedy and rebuilt them in innovative ways.
And then the Internet happened. We had already broken down the fourth wall; now, the camera turns around and faces the audience. The crowd is on display, a tiny black dot on our phones filming our jokes and stories and mimetic dances. The consumers become the consumed. The viewers become the viewed.
Who is watching all this content? We are, sure, but we aren’t the primary audience. When we post and share and like and search, we are responding to algorithms that are always viewing our behavior and then fine-tuning levers to optimize us for profit. For many kids growing up today, their phone is the most consistent witness to their lives. In contrast to almost all young adults throughout history, whose stories were witnessed by the loving eyes of their communities, teenagers today are witnessed by a digital eye that beholds them as human capital.
We know this, but it’s very hard to let the immensity of that fact settle in. Imagine: what does it do to a population when, from the moment they are born, their days are fed into an algorithm that treats them as content to be parsed and churned for profit? How would they begin to think of themselves?
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Clearly I’ve given this a lot of thought—maybe too much thought. Why read into jokes like this, and why be so pessimistic about it all?
One of my aims in writing this is to notice the strangeness of what has come to seem normal. If one of your friends started making tons of jokes about suicide, or consistently poked fun at her body weight, at some point you would feel concerned. Even if they assured you that there was nothing behind it, the joke would cease to be funny.
I guess I’m trying to raise a question: Is Gen Z doing okay? I’m worried that they’re really not.
You know that thing where you’re going about your day and then you happen across an article from a long-time forester who's like, “All my forestry buddies and I are noticing the same super alarming signs lately. Forests aren't supposed to be like this, but most people don’t care because they aren’t in a position to notice how bad things have gotten.” Or that other thing where you hear an interview with a bee expert who is like, “Why are all the bees dying? This is, like, a really bad sign!”
Anyway I feel like one of those alarmed practitioners. In recent years I have spent hours and hours listening to teenagers share about their lives. I have commiserated with public school teachers and mental health professionals and social workers who work with teens. Not one of them has said that kids are doing alright; all of them say that things seem to be getting worse.
What’s weird to me is that everybody knows this, but we act as if it’s normal. My Gen Z friends are more likely than anyone to tell me, “Yeah, I have a lot of anxiety.” Or, “Yeah, I spend too much time on my phone.” They know they are growing up in a rough time—that we live in a society—but they get uncomfortable if you take their woes too seriously. I can’t tell you how many times a teenager has told me a horrific detail about their lives, only to shrug and say, “It’s okay.” Even if the world is ending, it’s hard to grieve if you can’t see the meaning in it.
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“But isn't this what every generation goes through?” you will ask. “Being young is rough, no matter what generation you’re a part of.” There’s some truth in that outlook. Every generation has its own stuff to deal with, and every generation must learn how to live in the world in its unique time.
That being said, I still think there is reason for greater concern with Gen Z. Older folks are fond of reminding younger folks that our forefathers suffered far worse than they have—so pull yourself up by your bootstraps and grow a pair. After all, the Greatest Generation faced down Hitler and put an end to the Holocaust. What right do these young snowflakes have to complain about trauma?
I don’t believe that is fair. Let’s return to our two felt truths of Gen Z humor:
The world is ending
And it doesn’t mean anything
If we just had the first part of that equation, things wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, I think it is older folks’ resistance to that felt truth that makes younger folk so annoyed, even at their Millennial older siblings. Gen Z sees the writing on the wall for our dusty old meaning-making machines; they have a gift for calling bullshit on our beloved institutions… and I kind of love them for it?
The end of the world—well, it’s not the end of the world. An apocalypse can be the occasion for breath-taking revelation. Anyone who’s read Victor Frankl knows that people can suffer unimaginable pain if they keep believing that there is meaning to be found in the midst of it. Traumatic events are not uniformly traumatizing. A lot depends on whether you feel alone, whether you can see the shape of your own story. Is the world a dizzying chasm of non-sequitors, or is it the habitation of a presence that sees and hears us and knows us by name?
All that is to say, I am not too concerned with Gen Z’s fixation on societal collapse. What concerns me is the second part: It doesn’t mean anything.
When we compare Gen Z to someone living through WWII—and I’ve heard people do this on numerous occasions—we are being unfair. Yes, the cataclysmic events of that generation were more destructive than 9/11 or COVID lockdowns, but the young people of those days were also living in a meaning-rich world. Think of how much residual meaning we’ve lost since then: the resilient networks of neighbors and faith communities, the flawed but tightly knit families, a common enemy to rally against, the shared value systems. I’m sure that all of that inherited meaning instilled a lot of grit for hard times.
Today that continuity is broken. Choose any neighborhood today and you’ll find a bunch of individuals who can barely agree on what is happening, let alone what it all means. I see people making valiant efforts to connect the dots of their stories, and Gen Z in particular has a real knack for making narrative out of shattered fragments. Their humor is actually a testament to that skill.
We old folks should cut them some slack if they seem less resilient than we might like.
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I have had the honor of sitting with friends when their world was ending, and of helping them to stumble backward into the meaning of it all. And I’ve had friends do the same for me, more times than I can count. Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we laugh to keep from crying—and that’s okay too.
We laugh for a lot of different reasons. I laugh when I feel uncomfortable, or when I am startled. I laugh at dumb memes and dick jokes. Sometimes I laugh when I’m despairing, a socially acceptable way of whistling in the dark. And then there are times—and these are my favorite—when I laugh as an open challenge to the end of the world. The laugh starts in the pit of my stomach, bubbles up like a spring, knocks my head back, races ahead of me into the new earth.
I’m working on a follow-up to this newsletter, which will offer hopeful and helpful suggestions on relating to kids these days. Despite all the dour musings, I really do have a lot of hope, and I’m excited to share it with you. In the meantime, feel free to respond with your own thoughts about Gen Z and their wacky humor. I’d love to hear from you!
I really enjoyed reading this. Generally I don't try and bring many arguments to the table; I mostly try to listen and learn lately. But my personality must punch through, and perhaps this is more deeply tied to the Gen-Z truths than I realize, so I'll just throw this annoying wrench into the mix and briefly forgo responding to the rest:
You, at the end, talked about tightly knit faith communities and neighborhoods during WWII. As an outsider to Christianity, I always wonder if these faith communities are more destructive or helpful to people, or if it's only quantifiable from an individual perspective. Specifically in this case, I think about how Germany was overwhelmingly a Christian nation at the time. And I can't help but ponder what it looked like for those faith communities to come together and be resilient in the face of war.
And this leads me backwards to an event that influenced how WWII played out: the American invasion of the Philippines. President William McKinley wrote that (the Christian) God wanted him to invade the Philippines, and what followed was one of the most evil and brutal acts of war the US had taken part in, wherein, among other (much worse) things, the US modernized concentration camps, which is argued to have influenced how Germany set up theirs.
Fast forward to Hitler and the German state using Christianity to justify both their war and the Holocaust, it's clear to me that Christianity is one of the great fundamental powers used for the evil of that time (and obviously countless times before and since). So when I think about the faith communities in the US and Germany during WWII, I don't understand how you can refer to their "lost residual meaning " and when you say "shared value system" I think of the shared value system between Germany and the US, like two peas in a pod.
Despite these ponderings, I'll reiterate that I enjoyed reading this and love how clearly you nailed Gen-Z humor and its roots. I just can't take to the conclusion you come to. I understand the Gen-Z belief that nothing matters quite deeply, and though I believe that is likely, I also enjoy creating meaning for myself. Perhaps Christianity does see a True fundamental meaning. Perhaps it, like me, creates meaning for its own purpose, but I have a hard time empathizing with it because it wrecks havoc.
Joshua, what an insightful article. Thank you for taking time to process your thoughts on this and share it with others. You have an incredible writing gift and reading you is a joy. (My favorite AndSons article is the one you wrote several years ago about visiting Ukraine...I've re-read it a few times...don't tell Sam and Blaine that it's my fav).
In this season of life I don't have a lot of discretionary time, but I do make time for the Mount Vigil podcast, and I'm glad I heard you on that today and that I could find you on substack and subscribe. I'll look forward to reading what you write next, as well as going through the archives. Keep up the really great thinking, synthesizing, and writing. You are making a difference in my life, and I'm sure in more people's lives than you realize.