Internet Humor

     
       In today's day and age, humor is often very difficult to understand and many people have drastically differing sense of humor, based on political views, their social status, ethnicity, and a variety of other factors. Humor nowadays has the tendency to be extremely careful now, without trying to offend anyone, but it also has evolved into strange memes that don't make sense by any means but still are funny in some way. Humor has changed drastically in the age of technology, and allowed for it to have little to no boundaries, but at the same time, having many boundaries.
      With the introduction of technology, humor has truly evolved every single year in the past decade. At the beginning of the 2000s, computers were still clunky and there wasn't widespread humor online, except perhaps for humorous profiles on MySpace. Then, 2008, 2009, came around, and memes were introduced. Memes are defined as "a humorous image", and there were many of these sort of "humorous images" in the early 2000s. Common ones included the triumphant(?) baby, the reaction faces (troll face), the dramatic chipmunk, judgemental Willy Wonka, boromir from lord of the rings, and the best of the best, the Rick Roll meme. These memes were extremely common and widespread. For many, they were difficult to understand if one wasn't immersed in the culture of internet humor. A gap between young and old truly became more visible with the introduction of internet humor. Memes began to form a culture that centered around the inexplainable humor on the internet. "You just had to get it" was a common mantra regarding memes. However, the older memes of the early 2000s seem easy to understand in comparison to the memes of today.
     In 2018, humor has become very difficult to navigate. One has to be extremely careful to not be offensive, which is both good and bad. It is not funny to be ableist, racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, but sometimes it seems as though it is impossible to make any joke at all because it would offend someone. This has caused a very drastic difference in humor based on one's belief and their background. People on the conservative side tend to laugh at offensive things, while people on the more liberal side are more careful with their humor and laugh at drastically different things. However, at the same time, there are no boundaries to what is accepted as "funny" anymore. Strange memes that make no grammatical sense and seem slightly psychedelic in quality have become funny, and this has led to many memes comparing old memes and the strange humor of today. The humor of memes today seems so complex yet so simple, and impossible to explain why the memes are funny. They just are funny, and no one really knows why. Perhaps because they usually center around being "relatable" but in a drastic sense, which makes anyone laugh and say, "same". Again, this culture of memes has become even more deeply ingrained in today's day and age, so much so that one has to really stay on top of things to understand which memes are funny and follow the rapid flow of what is funny and what no longer is. Humor has evolved and continues to evolve, and it remains to be seen how humor will change and what will be accepted as funny in the future.