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Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Outlook • Perspective

Why is millennial humor so weird?

Comedy that appeals to young people can be surreal and dark — and completely meaningless.

By Elizabeth Bruenig
Opinion columnist
August 11, 2017

11

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are the creators of “Tim & Eric,” a surrealist comedy show on Adult Swim. (Mark Davis/Getty Images
for YouTube)

In a sepia-toned portrait that looks like a dark relic of the Soviet era, five figures stand frowning in profile:
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and finally a computer-generated hot dog
wearing green headphones. The image, created by Twitter user @SadTimesDrunk, appeared on Twitter in
mid-July, where it circulated among various casual users before finding its way to my feed. The wiener is
not a socialist icon; in fact, he is a breakdancing sausage from a Snapchat filter. His inclusion in a lineup
of the U.S.S.R.’s patron saints doesn’t mean anything. Maybe nothing does.

I am not a nihilist, but a mood of grim, jolly absurdism comes over me often, as it seems to come over
many of my young peers. To visit millennial comedy, advertising and memes is to spend time in a dream
world where ideas twist and suddenly vanish; where loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with
each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left;
where beloved children’s character Winnie the Pooh is depicted in a fan-made comic strip as a 9/11
truther, and grown men in a parody ad dance to shrill synth beats while eating Totino’s pizza rolls out of a
tiny pink backpack. In this weird world of the surreal and bizarre, horror mingles with humor, and young
people have space to play with emotions that seem more and more to proceed from ordinary life — the
creeping suspicion that the world just doesn’t make sense.

[The top 25 memes of the Web’s first 25 years]

When it comes to doubting the essential meaningfulness of the world, millennials have their reasons.
Studies show that traditional sources of meaning, such as religion and family formation, are less relevant
to the lives of young people than they were to our parents. The moral structure they produced has been
vastly loosened and replaced with a soft, untheorized tendency toward niceness — smarminess, really, as
journalist Tom Scocca put it in 2013. Long-lasting careers seem out of reach; millennials are told to go to
college so they can make money, but mostly they just amass debt and then job-hop in hopes of paying it
off. In the meantime, they put off getting married, having kids, buying houses and so on. And waiting feels
like — well, waiting. Millennials are not engaged at work (71 percent confessed this to Gallup), they have
lost faith in our political system (only 19 percent say a military takeover is unacceptable), and many are
lonely (57 percent reported such in a recent Match.com survey). Millennials aren’t strictly pessimistic by
any means, but the occasional tussle with feelings of emptiness and despair seems de rigueur for my
generation.

Meet the average millennial

The millennial generation is now the largest, most ethnically diverse generation in American history. (Daron Taylor/The Washington
Post)

Yet the world is full of noise: Information is both more accessible (and perhaps more oppressively
omnipresent) than ever and also less reliable; people select their own facts, and business-funded think
tanks produce reports indistinguishable from hard data, except that they are not remotely true. Brands
pose as friends on social media, especially to millennials, and if the line between real and artificial isn’t
obliterated, it certainly seems to matter less than it once did.

Amid these trends, a particular style of expression has spread among young people. Rather than trying to
restore meaning and sense where they’ve gone missing, the style aims to play with the moods and
emotions of an illegible world. In a way, it’s a digital update to the surreal and absurd genres of art and
literature that characterized the tumultuous early 20th century.

[That time when “that time when” took over the Internet]

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim are a pair of comedians whose work exists in the zone of the weird and
grotesque, veering wildly between horror and humor. They made their debut on Adult Swim, basic cable’s
top programming among 18-to-34-year-olds, back in 2006 and are due to release a new season of their
series “Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories ” this fall. Their skits run the gamut from slightly to extremely
surreal, with low-fi, retro graphics; distorted audio; and disjointed editing adding to the eerie feel. In one
sketch, Tim and Eric compete in an increasingly deranged commercial to sell prices — fine European
prices, premium prices, American-made prices, extremely small prices — no products, just prices. “It feels
interesting to live in that surreal moment versus the horror of reality sometimes,” Wareheim told me,
citing the prolonged, agonizingly uncomfortable shots and freakish close-ups in their show. There’s a
sense of dull dread running through Heidecker and Wareheim’s work, but there’s also relief, an invitation
to laugh at the awkward and absurd. “It’s an expression of that fear and anxiety,” Wareheim said, referring
to one of their many skits focused on the tension of daily life. “But I just feel like it’s fun to watch our
show, and you are transported to another dimension of similar things, but it’s not real, so you’re just like
‘ahh’ . . . it’s a pleasant surreal world.”

Other shows, such as Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty ” and Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman, ” follow in this
vein, imagining, as New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum put it, “bleakness and joy” in a “teeming, surreal
alternative universe.” Advertising aimed at young people, too, exhibits the trend. Consider a 2012 candy
ad in which two teenagers stand nervously under the bleachers; one picks “Skittles pox” off the other’s
pasty skin, then pops them in her mouth. Unlike the subcultural stoner comedy of yesteryear or the giddily
absurd humor of classics like Monty Python, this breed of millennial surrealism is both mainstream and
tangibly dark — it aims for wide swaths of young people, leaning in to feelings of worry, failure and dread.

[Someone is wrong on the Internet. That’s where I come in.]

Meanwhile, online culture allows more people to get in on the action, producing their own contributions
to the meaningless, loopy, sometimes-sinister whirling gyre of the moment in the form of memes. In the
simplest terms, memes are any pieces of cultural information that spread among groups by imitation,
changing bit by bit along the way. In other words, distortion is a key attribute of this form, a warping effect
that occurs as each instance of a meme grows more distant from its origin, sometimes losing any meaning
whatsoever. Gallows humor about the late Cincinnati Zoo gorilla Harambe, for instance, has transformed
into a whole genre of jokes only tenuously related to the original ape. For millennials, memes form the
backdrop of life.

Adam Downer is a 26-year-old associate staff editor at Know Your Meme, an online encyclopedia of the
form where the oldest staffer tops out at about age 32, Downer told me. He spends his days scouring the
Net for memes, documenting their origins and, when possible, explaining to readers what they mean.
Since 2008, Know Your Meme’s staff has indexed some 11,228 memes and adds new entries to its
database every day. The strangest meme he ever worked on, Downer says, was a bizarre mind-virus called
“Hey Beter.” The meme consists of four panels, the first including the phrase “Hey Beter,” a riff on “Hey
Peter,” referring to the main character of the comedy cartoon series “Family Guy.” What comes next seems
to make even less sense: In one iteration, the Sesame Street character Elmo (wearing a “suck my a--” T-
shirt) calls out to Peter, then asks him to spell “whomst’ve,” then blasts him with blue lasers. In the final
panel, readers are advised to “follow for a free iphone 5.” (There is no prize.) “That one was inexplicably
popular,” Downer told me. “I think it got popular because it was this giant emptiness of meaning. It was
this giant race to the bottom of irony.”

Surrealism and its anarchic cousin dadaism are nothing new; neither is absurdism or weirdness in art.
“The absurd,” Albert Camus wrote in 1942, “is born of this confrontation between the human need [for
happiness and reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Absurdity is the compulsion to go
looking for meaning that simply isn’t there. Today’s surrealism draws aspects of all of these threads
together with humor, creating an aesthetic world where (in common Internet parlance) “lol, nothing
matters,” but things may turn out all right anyway.

[Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. It’s not there fault.]

After all, the weird — even the exceedingly weird — doesn’t have to be purely distressing. Consider the
long-running Old Spice deodorant commercials in which a handsome hunk on a boat presents “ladies”
with an oyster containing “two tickets to that thing you love,” which quickly become diamonds as he
teleports onto a horse. (“I’m on a horse,” he coolly informs the 54 million people who have watched the
clip on YouTube.) In his book “The Weird and the Eerie,” author Mark Fisher points out that, in most
cases, “the response to the apparition of a grotesque object will involve laughter as much as revulsion.”
And the weird, Fisher goes on, “is a signal that the concepts and frameworks which we have previously
employed are now obsolete.” By staking out a playful space to meditate on emotions that are usually
upsetting (like the dread and anxiety of living in a thoroughly postmodern world), millennial surrealism
intermixes relief with stress and levity with lunacy.

There may be no mixture better suited for getting through ordinary life. In July, researchers at Harvard
University announced that they had managed to store a gif inside living bacteria by altering the
bacterium’s DNA. For scientists, the strange little success heralded important achievements in gene
modification. Twitter user Honkimus Maximus welcomed the news with a meme depicting the “Simpsons”
character Mr. Burns googly-eyed and sedate, receiving an injection of memes directly into his veins. “S O
O N,” Maximus captioned the image. It already feels like now.

Twitter: @ebruenig

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Elizabeth Bruenig
Elizabeth Bruenig is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. Follow 

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