Citizens of Tomorrow, Be Forewarned

I'm crying from laughing so hard, this improv is so damn hilarious omfg lol

Thank you youtube for having an actual good recommendation - their channel is Shoot From The Hip, I'm partial to their improvised plays

ALLO

Everyone is saying good things about my new book. Order it today.

YOU WROTE THE RULES. READ THEM. 

I don’t care if you’re not a huge fan of stand-up comedy, it should be a requirement that you watch Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette. It’s on Netflix, and it’s amazing.

me

The Half Hour S05E09 – Emily Heller

I’m… honestly not sure how much harder someone could @ me. Really not.

some dudes like to talk a big game about how comedy suffers when people are afraid to offend but man, Mitch Hedberg was a white dude working in the era of peak offensive edgelord and his shit holds the fuck up so while most comedians will never come up with anything as timeless as “if carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up” they could at least make an effort

• You know, I’m sick of following my dreams, man. I’m just going to ask where they’re going and hook up with ‘em later.

• That would be cool if you could eat a good food with a bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food when it got to your stomach. Like you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach, then they would get there, and the carrot would say, “It’s cool, he’s with me.”

• Once, I saw a duck walking down the street, so I went into Subway and ordered two pieces of bread, and they informed me that they could not do that. Like there was some special rule at Subway that two pieces of bread weren’t allowed to touch. So the woman asked me what I wanted on the sandwich, and I said, “I do not care, it is for a duck,” and she was like, “Oh, then it’s free.” I was not aware that ducks eat for free at Subway. It’s like, “Give me a chicken fajita sub, but don’t worry about ringing it up, it is for a duck.”

Let them know

“I’m happy because I discovered one of the keys to happiness. And it was simple. All you need to do is redefine what a miracle is for yourself. … All a miracle is, is the world letting you know it can still surprise you. That’s all it is, plain and simple, and if you adhere to that, you get to experience miracles all the time.” - Kyle Kinane

“Why Political Correctness Makes for Better Jokes”

I keep thinking about this. I’m just so refreshed and so relieved to hear this from my favourite comedian. He’s absolutely right and he articulates it so well, and says something that A LOT of modern comedians/comedy fans need to hear. A large part of modern comedy is stuck in this old-fashioned, un-progressive anger that disguises its terrible, hacky jokes as “edginess”, while viewing inclusivity, development and respect for humans as “censorship”. This comedy goes nowhere. It chases its own “edgy” tail, and continues being bad because it’s certain that it’s fighting this imaginary fight, a fight that only preserves the comedian’s self-interest of saying lazy, offensive shit. And here we have one of the most respected, funniest and hardest working comedians in the business considerately acknowledging there’s a problem - a problem most comedians won’t acknowledge - and working to fight this problem, and fighting to continue being a great comic, and more importantly, a great person. @paulftompkins is all about inclusivity and kindness, and he sacrifices none of his wit, and in my opinion, genius, by being a good person. He is how comedy should be.

comedy side of tumblr: what’s the difference between the “fuck your cartoon hotdog husband” kind of joke and the much-maligned *holds up spork* random kind of joke? i fucking love the fuck your cartoon hotdog husband kind of joke but i’m having a hard time thinking about it academically or whatever. i keep trying to articulate the Artistic Difference Between the Absurd and the Random in my brain but i’m afraid to reach a place of irreversible pretentiousness

sorry for writing an essay about this but this is something i think about a lot and it’s not necessarily an issue of pretentiousness, but observing trends in humor and how people react to them over time

absurdist humor is the more mature form of random humor i think

not that the humor itself is more mature because it isn’t but like, think about the main audience of people telling and sharing these jokes. most of these people in the 18-25 age bracket grew up on the internet, they grew up knowing “random” humor, a few years back we all collectively decided that “randommonkeycheese” type jokes were immature and just abandoned them

but if you observe the evolution of tumblr closely and notice the track through which it’s transformed and evolved, what you start to notice is that while the jokes themselves aren’t just *holds up spork* in nature, they are in intent and style, and that’s where the similarities lie

when you were 13 years old you reacted to jokes like that like, “haha wow holding up a spork?? what kind of random humor is this?? why would anyone just hold up a spork??” you though tit was funny because of the irreverence of it, not necessarily because the spork itself was funny. it was because the idea of someone holding up a spork was funny, maybe even the sound of the word spork was funny.

now that the audience of people who found humor in jokes like that has gotten older, the ways in which irreverent humor is shared have changed. inherently, though, they’re all the same. but when you see @dril tweets or read things like “fuck your cartoon hotdog husband”, it sets off the same kind of reaction it did when you were younger and discovering “random” humor. the main difference, though, is that it’s funny to different levels and degrees.

(this is a bit complicated to explain so sorry for the following paragraph)

when you read *holds up spork* or “CHEESE” you see one action, one word. one thing from which you can derive humor. which means it works on one level, and that means it’s not likely to be that funny again. but “fuck your cartoon hotdog husband” has at least four different levels of humor, because there’s at least four different ways in which someone can find it funny. maybe it’s the use of the word “fuck”, maybe it’s a cartoon husband, maybe it’s the idea that the husband is a hotdog, maybe it’s the aggressive tone of it. either way, the joke is more versatile and therefore has a greater audience outreach.

unlike “random” humor, which only works at one level, modern age absurdist internet humor works on multiple levels and frameworks of comedy and humor. i think this is why we all decided that “random” jokes weren’t funny. because they didn’t work beyond one level, and telling one means that you’ve told them all. absurdist humor offers more versatility and possibility, which makes it more accessible and less likely to die off as quickly as random humor did.

i’m sort of going on a tangent here but what i’m trying to convey is that at their core, absurdist humor on tumblr isn’t any different than a 12 year old in 2005 just saying CHEESE followed by a string of lol’s and rofl’s. it’s the same form of humor for a different audience and there are multiple levels to the jokes being told, which makes them more complex but doesn’t make them a different form of humor altogether.