How meme culture changed comedy writing.

Do memes live rent-free in your head? The Workaholic writers’ room famously kept whiteboards of “over-done jokes” that were verboten. From edge to edge, you can find bits of brain decay dating back several years like rings on the brittle stump of pop culture: “Too soon?” “Laughy McLaugherson.” “We have fun.” “That’s not a thing.” “Little help?” “HARD PASS.” This is important: the Workaholics writers room white boards with over done jokes pic.twitter.com/fbFgtn9ovW — This Is Important Podcast (@podimportant) March 11, 2021 Scribbled into a word cloud, they read like a Too Many Chefs for comedy writing, both revealing and then scorching the very land on which the derivative writing used to stand. Once you read them, you can’t go back. Ten years ago, you would have called them cliches. Now, it feels semantically trickier. Memes are by definition cliches—derived from Richard Dawkins’ observation that cultural behaviors replicate themselves in the Darwinian manner that successful genes propagate themselves. Mimesis is iteration until death, a process that takes around six months, per the research of Carlo M. Valensise et al (2022) into meme entropy. So it’s funny in a human centipede kind of way that retired-joke lists are now cropping up in online meme accounts. Take, for example, the below, which was reposted by @taylorlorenz3.0 : I don’t feel especially guilty of dropping “touch grass” or “it’s giving X” into my blog posts, but I’m sensitive enough to my audience that I know sometimes the obvious catchphrase would more easily add just the right dash of salt/pepper to spice up my lackluster writing than something esoteric. Meme culture has changed something about how we write and perceive a joke. There’s more anticipation, greater participation by the general public, and fewer ends to which a set-up can find its way. “I think the rise of meme culture has given people the vocabulary to be funny in a really fun way at times. And it’s allowed people new ways to be publicly funny without creating standup/sketch/improv/essays,” says Josh Gondelman, a comedian and writer of TV, books , magazines, and his own delightful […]

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