Everybody's a comedian… in cyberspace

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 31st, 2009

Scott Brown, blogging in/on/for Wired, writes:

We’ve heard a lot about how Google is making us dumber and more distracted and lazier. We’ve heard less about how it’s making us—maybe even forcing us to be—funnier. For today, thanks to the digital hive mind, comedy is colloquy, everything is “material,” and life is one big writer’s room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship– on blogs, on social-networking sites, in tweets, in funny video shorts, in Lolcats and talkbacks.

It’s brief. And we’re not sure what point it’s making. But it’s interesting that someone perceives that there’s pressure on the WWW to be funny.

We didn’t particularly enjoy the lede:

Once, billions of giggles ago, humans sat in dark rooms sipping watered-down mai tais while a person onstage—usually with a mic, usually with “issues,” sometimes with a watermelon and a sledgehammer—attempted to amuse us.

Firstly, and quite obviously, it’s getting tiresome, this meme that all comics have “issues” that they’re working out onstage.

Secondly (and we’re not noted for sticking up for comedy club owners, but), has anyone ever actually gotten a “watered-down” drink at a comedy club? It’s journo hacktastic shorthand for a sleazy joint. Let’s be real– on the sleazy scale, where do most comedy clubs fall? The watered-down drink cliché is from the sixties– rhetorical cousin to the sacroiliac joke or the gag that hinges on the listener’s familiarity with Freud (think Oedipal Complex). Has anyone under the under the age of dead actually experienced the watered-down drink? (You might have, if you’ve gone to a luau or a dinner theater, but that’s probably the only places on earth who still think that they can get away with that kind of thing. And really disreputable titty bars… like the kind that thrived on 14th street in D.C. until the late ’80s. But that’s it.)

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