The Meme Is Not Funny Anymore Because You Are Not in the Room

Going back through the forum archive last year, I read a thread that I remember as one of the funniest things I have ever seen. It is not funny. It is a series of short posts by people whose names I recognise, referencing something that had happened two days earlier, with a rhythm that clearly worked at the time. Reading it cold, there is essentially nothing there.

This bothered me more than it should have, and I have concluded it is a general property rather than a disappointment about one thread.

Almost all internet humour is contextual in a very specific way: it is funny because of what everyone present knows and does not need to say. The joke is the compression. A three-word reply that lands is doing work that would take a paragraph to explain, and the pleasure is partly in the recognition that everyone got it instantly. Remove the shared context and what remains is three words.

This is why explaining a meme kills it, which everyone knows, and why the explanation is nonetheless accurate — the explanation reconstructs the context, laboriously, and the compression is gone along with the timing.

It also explains something I had misread for years as a decline in quality. Every community I have been in has a group of long-standing members who feel that it used to be funnier. I felt this myself, strongly, around year four. I now think what changes is not the humour but your position relative to it: early on you are in the small group that shares the context, and as a place grows the humour is generated by and for people whose context you do not share. The jokes did not get worse. You moved out of the room.

The uncomfortable corollary is that this happens to everyone and is not reversible by trying. I spent about a year making an effort to keep up with what the newer members found funny, and the effort was visible and slightly embarrassing, and it did not produce the thing, because the thing requires having been there rather than having read about it.

What I would say in defence of old material that does not survive: it was not supposed to. A joke made for forty people on a Tuesday was doing its job that Tuesday, and the fact that it is inert in an archive is not a verdict on it. We have an instinct that good things should last, and it is imported from a different kind of culture — books, films, things made to be encountered cold by strangers. Most of what happens in a community is not that, and judging it by that standard produces a permanent, mistaken sense that everything used to be better.

I do still open that thread occasionally. It is not funny and I can see the shape of it being funny, the way you can see that a room was arranged for a party.