I've been scrolling through TikTok and Instagram for a while now, and honestly I laugh way less than I did watching YouTube videos from 10 years ago. Old-school memes like Doge or Rage Comics have me way more hooked. Has humor really changed that much or am I just getting old?
I don't think it's just familiarity, because there are new memes that go viral and people laugh pretty hard at them. What happens is that humor back in the 2000s was more absurd and less polished - Rage Comics were literally drawings made in Paint, and that visual clumsiness was part of the joke. Now memes are hyperoptimized, with professional editing and references aimed at very specific audiences. Sometimes that perfection kills the joke because it strips away the spontaneity, the improvisation. Plus, back in the 2000s memes took time to circulate, so when you saw them they had more impact; now they come out a hundred per second and your brain gets used to it quick.
What if it's just that you already know that humor and find it predictable now? The 2000s memes had something surprising about them because it was all new - that kind of rough visual style of Doge or Rage Comics hit because there was nothing like it before. Now humor on social media is a lot faster, more allusive, it depends on you keeping up with trends in real time, and that sometimes bores more than it entertains. It's not that you're getting old, it's that the old humor hits different because you see it through the eyes of someone who's already been through all that and it makes you nostalgic, whereas current memes need that surprise factor they already lost years ago.
I get something similar, but I think there's a factor nobody mentions: 2000s memes were *slow*. People would share them with you by email, you'd see them on a forum, you'd take time to process them. Now the algorithm throws 50 memes at you per minute and your brain is in "next, next, next" mode without actually stopping on anything 😅 It's like the difference between reading a well-told joke and having someone machine-gun a bunch of one-liners at you. Plus, those old memes had a certain genuine innocence that you can tell is forced nowadays - people now overthink what's going to go viral instead of just making something weird because they thought it was funny.
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