GenZ and its "Sense of Humor"

Bob Mankoff, former cartoon editor of The New Yorker

It’s Labor Day weekend, so we don’t labor. This post is just one big laugh riot. Next week I’ll be back to world domination.

This article was intended to debunk the “creative organizations” theme that Big Consulting companies (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, et al) push. Maybe I’ll do that next, but I got sidetracked by a talk by Bob Mankoff, who was the cartoon editor of The New Yorker for many years. I was actually at that talk, and you can see me in the video! More below.

I started out watching a TEDx talk (where else would you look for fashionable wisdom?) intending to deconstruct it:

But this part sent me to the Bob Mankoff video, which I include below:

One of my favorite things, whenever I get the New Yorker, and I’m sure anyone who reads the New Yorker knows, the first thing you do is to open up the back cover and you look at the cartoon caption contest.

The cartoon caption contest always puts things together that are not obvious. Often they exert out of scale, or things that would be very surprising to have in a same frame. And your job is to come up with a really creative way to connect these things in really interesting and surprising ways.

So here’s a caption for this cartoon. It is, "We’ll start you out here, then give you more responsibilities as you gain experience." (Laughter)

Now of course, you can come up with an endless number of other solutions.

You could, maybe, but she doesn’t. She hits on a very small part of what makes something funny, and Mr. Mankoff explores it in infinitely more depth.

Anyhow, here’s the video, and you can watch all the way to the end and laugh out loud a bunch of times. I got to the talk early with a friend since I was helping out with the visit, and he made fun of her for eating a salad. I think that’s what he’s referring to at 20:05. Go ahead: watch all of it. You won’t be sorry.

Of course, if you do watch it all, then some of my commentary will be redundant. So don’t watch it all. No, do watch it all. Whatever.

There’s me at 25:16 and 36:22. I asked a.question at 40:07.

Humor is often cruel, at first glance. Here’s one of his examples:

The old man is getting shorter as he ages, unlike children who are getting taller. (There, I explained a joke, which you should never do. Bad!)

[LAUGHTER] ROBERT MANKOFF: So that's fairly benign, you would think. But is it benign-- once again, I want to point out the dispositional nature of humor, which means your attitudes and your opinions will determine the context of humor and how you react to it. So that seems fairly benign, but let's look at the response.

[LAUGHTER]

ROBERT MANKOFF: So, cordially, Robert Byron. Actually, he's making a joke. You see, he's mashing up, right. He himself is mashing up. He actually is being funny himself, because he's saying cordially, Robert Byron, after something is completely non-cordial. OK.

Political Correctness and Being “Offended”

It was always the case that people were “offended” by a joke at first, but then they laughed. Now they’re so serious they can’t even laugh. Jerry Seinfeld talked about that on late night TV.

By way of illustrating offensiveness, here’s another New Yorker cartoon:

[LAUGHTER]

So I like that little pause. That was a good laugh, I want that on record. Because we had the regular laugh, the real laugh, the emotional laugh, ha ha ha, then we had the ooh. Which says I drive a Prius, I'm good. I believe in global warming, you wouldn't believe the organic foods, everything. Honestly, that first part was a mistake. Something I regret.

[LAUGHTER]

This is why GenZ “humor” (if we can be generous and call it that) is so incomprehensible to us old folks. If you don’t allow simulated cruelty, you don’t have much left as a vehicle for humor.

This is a survey I did online to see-- this shows you, actually, the real diversity of opinion. So people could rate it to 10, and 109 people liked it. So really, the majority of people liked, just about. Or a lot, anyway. But look at this person who did not like it. They voted only three and said I like animals.

Look how much they liked them. One, two. You can't like animals more than five exclamation points. If you do, it's unhealthy. Look at this person.

I don't like to see animals suffer, even in cartoons. So I am solicitous to these people.

I wrote back and I said they don't suffer. We use anesthetic ink.

LAUGHTER

GenZ seems to believe, as a matter of religion, that no one must ever be made fun of. (Except people they don’t like, as we’ll see later.)

Seems just like the results of my-- so, this is actually, when humor is not affected by contagion and the contagion of laughter, the diversity of opinion is very great. But it depends on what you're-- actually, things that you feel really strongly about, you usually will not think is funny. When you have really, really strong beliefs, then humor, to you, seems like some sort of blasphemy.

But It’s OK to Be Mean to People You Don’t Like

Here’s Jimmy Kimmel, being mean about Marjorie Taylor Greene

(Skip to 5:06)

Marjorie Taylor Green I think she's just jealous none of the men in town want to take her to see Beetlejuice I don't know but I love that the woman who looks like a High School linebacker in a dress is telling other women to be feminine.

[LAUGHTER]

And this is good too: an hour before Klan Mom posted that she called for the judge that fined Donald Trump in New York to be disrobed.

[LAUGHTER]

Judge Angaran should be disrobed, thrown out. Yeah, get him naked and throw him out.

[LAUGHTER]

You know Marge, I think, is still working pretty hard trying to be Trump's running mate even though he doesn't seem to be interested in that. She even followed him to South Carolina today:

[GREENE] you can hear the excitement here in the crowd they're cheering and they're excited to see President come.

[LAUGHTER]

Yes, they want to see President want excited to see President. She learned to speak English from Cookie Monster

[LAUGHTER]

Can you imagine this hip young L.A. audience laughing about an earnest young Mexican woman’s English, if she was endorsing Kamala Harris? It’s OK to be mean and laugh at people, but only if they’re on the other side from you.

Bob Mankoff Again

Where do you draw the line between doing this and offending? And my real answer to that, my real feeling about that is, offending is an overrated offense. It's just, OK, someone was offended. What happened? Did anybody die? OK, a person was offended. Then what happened right after that? Did they have lunch? Did they go about the rest of their day? Could they go to sleep at night? In other words, the only thing that happened is they were offended. So I don't think it's a big deal, but in a perfect world, we could offend more people.

That’s it. Humor is always appropriate, but next week it’s back to having it only accidentally.

Epilogue: More Pointless Humor

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm showed me these late night TV appearances, so now you’re going to have to see them, too. They have essentially nothing to do with the theme of this article, but as I said, this is No-Labor Day.

I’d never seen a Sam Rockwell entrance,

Hardest working man in show business.