In the very early stages of the Covid-19 panic, an audio clip started circulating virally online.
“My sister . . . her boyfriend’s brother works for the Ministry of Defence,” a male speaker said in a sober tone. “One of the things that they’re doing to prepare . . . is making a massive lasagne. At the moment, as we speak, they’re building the massive lasagne sheets . . . They’re putting the underground heating at Wembley on, that’s going to bake the lasagne, and then they’re putting the roof across and that’s going to recreate an oven, and then what they’re going to do is lift it up with drones and cut off little portions and drop them into people’s houses.”
The message, originally recorded by 29-year-old software salesman Billy McLean for a friends WhatsApp group, spilled on to multiple social media platforms and was reportedly heard by millions within hours. Its success speaks — most obviously — to the way anxious times call for a laugh. But it also hit a nerve: at a time of sketchy information and deep uncertainty, misinformation and conspiracy theories — very often sourced to a friend of a friend who works high up in government, and very often little less absurd than this one — circulate in exactly the same way. Will there have been some people sharing that clip who, for a bit, believed it?
One of the effects of social media, even before the crisis, has been a flattening out of distinctions of tone. Your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram feeds haphazardly juxtapose rage and laughter, serious news and parody. Online comedy is woven into the public conversation. It’s not always easy — particularly when things are being shared on the basis of a headline or a snatch of audio — to pick out the wacky parody from the wacky theory, the spoof from the real.
Indeed, you could say that humour isn’t just an add-on to the digital media environment, but its structural model. The most obvious analogue precursor of the way anything travels in social media is the circulation of jokes. They come to us through networks of friends, authorless or apocryphally attributed, and they prosper or founder according to the emotional response of their listeners. Do they get a laugh? Do they snag the attention?
We now live in an age when news and opinion have the same circulatory system as jokes. One of the most notable responses to Dominic Cummings’s Downing Street press conference was an instant flood of Specsavers memes mocking the UK prime minister’s adviser’s claim that he made an hour‑long round trip in his car as a means of testing his eyesight.
Humour — in the form of lampoons or political satire — has of course been part of our public discourse since Aristophanes and Juvenal. Juvenal’s satires sent up the weaknesses and hypocrisies of the ruling classes; Aristophanes set about everything from demagogues to the follies of philosophers and jurors. But in our own times, humour sometimes seems to be a major, if not the main, part of the public conversation. President Trump attacks his opponents with funny nicknames and retweets jokey/threatening memes. Conversely, an online humourist attacks Trump by not making jokes: “Presidential Trump” (under the handle @MatureTrumpTwts) specialises in quote-tweeting Potus.
When Trump tweeted: “So now it is reported that, after destroying his life & the life of his wonderful family (and many others also), the FBI, working in conjunction with the Justice Department, has ‘lost’ the records of General Michael Flynn. How convenient. I am strongly considering a Full Pardon!”, the account “translated” it to: “My tweets for the foreseeable future will solely focus on #COVID19 pertinent information and/or links to accurate and updated information to keep you safe. This is by far our collective top priority, so please join me in treating it that way.”
Another comedian, @meganamram, has been tweeting “Today was the day Donald Trump finally became president” once a day for months. And this stuff gets under the skin. Trump cares deeply about being spoofed: he railed continually against his portrayal by Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live. Meanwhile, still more bathetically, the Republican congressman Devin Nunes tried to sue over a parody Twitter account (@devincow) pretending to be a cow living on his farm in Iowa, which went exactly as well as you might expect.
The boundaries between the joke and the serious are blurred: the former can be a delivery mechanism for the latter, and vice versa. For example, there was something of the prank in the way in which 17-year-old Feroza Aziz got around moderators in a viral TikTok late last year. The American teen calmly delivered a make-up tutorial . . . in the course of which she started to talk about the Chinese government’s persecution of Uighur Muslims: “Then you’re going to put [the eyelash curler] down and use your phone . . . to search up what’s happening in China, how they’re getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, raping them, forcing them to eat pork, forcing them to drink, forcing them to convert.”
TikTok is coming into its own as a forum for edgy humour, especially among young people. The 30-year-old American writer Eva Victor has accrued more than 300,000 Twitter followers with her spoofy TikTok riffs — such as the one in which she played an archetypal “Karen” trying to get her reluctant boyfriend to come to “Straight Pride”: “I don’t understand what’s not computing. We have 364 days a year where we have unbelievable unspoken privilege, and then we have one day a year — one day! — where we get to celebrate having that privilege all year round. What doesn’t make sense to you?”
Also on TikTok, the comedian Sarah Cooper is credited with inventing a “new genre of comedy” with the videos in which she lip-syncs to particularly absurd passages of President Trump’s speeches. Her breakout video, “How To Medical”, showed her mugging and frowning over a soundtrack of Trump suggesting that people fight Covid-19 by injecting disinfectant. The Canadian critic Jeet Heer has written in The Nation: “The brilliance of Sarah Cooper’s comedy is that it gives us Trump’s words raw, along with a pantomimic commentary. If Trump has turned subtext into text, Cooper has added a layer of surtitles on top of the text.” It’s also funny as hell.
That said, as much as social media’s comic instincts address themselves to real-world concerns, they also lead away from them. There is a case to be made that being funny online can diffuse rather than sharpen political arguments. Why be seriously angry and ask difficult questions when there’s a hit-and-run joke to be made (or copied)? A quick laugh can be a get-out-of-jail-free card, and the joke travels in a way that the detailed analysis will struggle to.
Memes and catchphrases — “gammons”, “cockwombles” — may annoy their victims but they seldom shame them. As the late newspaperman John Junor said, “No one ever destroyed a man by sneering.” And for the canny politician, making a self-deprecating joke out of an embarrassment, as Boris Johnson often expertly does, can change the tenor of a public conversation.
Perhaps in reaction to all that boundary-blurring, social media has also seen a strand of very pure and innocent humour, whimsy and silliness emerge — a tonic in this age of anxiety. Moose Allain (@mooseallain) is an illustrator who routinely posts puns and wordplay for his 125,000 Twitter followers. “I gave up commenting on politics a few years ago because I couldn’t be doing with the arguments,” he says. “People say it’s great because you’re a bit of light relief.” He describes his online career as “a byproduct” of his work: “While I was drawing, my mind would be free to wander around and think up bits of wordplay and jokes and things. I’ve always done it, but once I had a medium to put them out on, it just seemed the perfect match. People seem to like silly puns and things — the weaker the better.”
A typical Allain tweet might, say, be a picture of a glum-looking man checking his watch in front of an empty plate with the caption: “Bañana — the banana that never comes.” Or a man holding open a door as a depressed-looking owl waddles through it saying: “What’s the point?” Above it the caption reads: “I let out an owl of despair.”
One of the pleasures of online wit is that the stars of it are seldom professional or seeking to make money. “I’m not necessarily doing it because I want to have a lot of retweets or likes,” says Allain. “A lot of my stuff, if it reaches one or two people, and they come back and say I loved that, that’s enough for me.” For most of the internet humour microcelebrities, it’s a pastime rather than a job — more than one told me that they don’t think the skillset particularly overlaps with that of the professional comic. The funny tweet is what an earlier generation of theorists might have called an acte gratuit. Acte gratweet, perhaps.
Another Twitter comedian, “Mutable Joe” (@mutablejoe), who has built up a following of nearly 50,000 since May 2009, describes himself as “a respectable member of society with a moderately successful career in IT and a wife and three children”. He says his tweets are “just something to make the day a bit brighter or vent”. Joe specialises not so much in gags as in tone of voice. “There should be a millennial edition of Monopoly where you just walk round the board paying rent, never able to buy anything” is one example; or “to make videoconferencing at work less dull, construct an elaborate family life that all occurs just off screen”.
“On Twitter at least,” he says, “I think the resource constraints dictate the kind of things that work. There’s very little space for any build-up to a punchline. I’m not sure it was ever intended this way but Twitter is this bizarre Philip K Dick machine that plugs you into a howling stream of non sequiturs and reading a timeline is an incredible feat of rapid context switching from one voice to another . . . Many of the funniest tweets . . . work exactly because they hit you out of the blue in a sea of other tweets, as if you’d overheard something ridiculous during a regular dull conversation.”
I asked him if being funny is platform-specific. “Facebook generally has people you know so you have to be wary, Instagram is all imagery and looking good, TikTok involves showing your real face and LinkedIn is, well, shit. Twitter is, I think, where people feel most free to express themselves in a fairly brutally honest — and therefore funnier — way because of the relative anonymity.” He adds: “I think the more time they spend online, the more people develop a persona and this becomes a way to circumvent the lack of context. Having established this ‘character’, you can say things that aren’t that funny in isolation but funny because you said them.”
Sir Michael (@michael1979) is a good example of this sort of character comedy. His posts are often picture- or screenshot-led, showing conversations in which the author’s persona innocently flummoxes and enrages his interlocutors on social media message groups. “He’s a very disagreeable, sanctimonious and hapless man from a tiny village in rural Ireland who falls out with everyone and who doesn’t possess the self- awareness to realise how lonely he is,” says his creator.
One prank, for instance, involved him putting out flyers with his phone number inviting people to text for a free haircut. Once he had a victim hooked in, he would explain, over a lengthy series of text messages, his demented scheme for tricking a barber (Michael gets haircut; victim gets haircut and, as Michael leaves, promises to pay for them both when his own haircut is finished; Michael returns in wig and false beard, asks for a haircut and promises to pay for all three haircuts once his cut is finished; victim goes out and returns in disguise etc. “Hopefully, if we do this for long enough, the barber will lose track and forget to charge us for our original haircuts.”) The result — a series of baffled, exasperated and finally hostile messages from the victim — is triumphantly posted as screenshots on Twitter. Grim silence, a block or ejection from a chatroom is the end result of most of his sallies.
It is a character that he has been writing for many years, which means, “I know how he talks and thinks and I could drop him into any scenario and know how he’d react . . . In that respect, it’s like any writing [of a character] — if you know what his/her motivations are, telling stories you want to tell becomes a lot easier.”
In Moose’s view: “For most people at least, I don’t think this developing a voice is something deliberate or conscious, it just sort of happens the more you type in the box.”
Bob Mortimer’s “Train Guy” video skits (Mortimer is one of relatively few professional comics who have translated directly to social media) fall squarely into that category. The premise is simple and relatable: an obnoxious commuter brays implausible management buzzwords into his phone at top volume.
It’s something like The Office delivered in TikTok-length bursts. And appropriately for its subject, Train Guy crosses platforms; someone even made a soundboard where contextless snatches of the audio could be played ad lib. Train Guy gives us the simple pleasure of Mortimer’s lavishly charming silliness — and is, perhaps in a pure form, an example of the way in which comedy on social media, much as it can be a delivery mechanism for satire, a sly form of commentary or a structuring principle for political communication, can also just be there to give us all a big, hooting and much-needed laugh.
That’s no small thing. As Sir Michael’s creator puts it: “Twitter seems an unserious place. And yet, it’s where we all go to discuss and learn about the most serious issues in the world. So we end up with unserious people (and I very much include myself in that) finding ways to cope with living through an unbelievably horrible and terrifying time.”
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June 05, 2020 at 05:03PM
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How to be funny online - Financial Times
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