I’ve thought about this a lot. I think I’ve seen Ricky gervais talk about one aspect of it as well, being the difference between the subject and the object of a joke.
A lot of humour is taking the piss out of stuff, and a lot of that stuff is behaviours and stereotypes, or mocking those in power. It’s funnier when it goes upwards - spitting image was always funnier than someone making a joke about disabled kids.
And we’ve done a few things in society now, firstly we’ve created scared castes of people who cannot be mocked any more. You can’t make tranny jokes. You can’t make women jokes or sex jokes.
No race jokes - and before we all took the piss out of each other so it was roughly equal ops.
I remember a very fun night in the pub as a PhD student where we (a very international bunch) found that almost every culture has an equivalent of ‘an Englishmen Irishman and Scotsman walk into a bar..’ joke. And mother in law jokes. We spent a good hour roundly abusing each other’s racial stereotypes and being most amused by it. You cannot do that now. We came out of that with an appreciation of shared humour. That’s gone.
So there’s whole swathes of people you can’t take the piss out of even of you were all happily doing it to each other before.
You can’t mock the authorities because to do that you have to either mock them themselves (and they will be a protected caste) or their ideology (and neither side has any humour.)
And you can’t mock stereotypes because that requires you to form and acknowledge a stereotype and that’s bigotry and bigotry is the worst sin these days.
So we’ve created this bizarre situation where the mechanisms that underpin humour are forbidden. People are being trained out of even seeing the patterns, and nothing is funny any more.
I've been rewatching Mock the Week Frankie Boyle episodes and it's crazy how much has changed in 20 years, except the politics. They talk about sars 1, foot and mouth, migration, over crowded prisons, crap budgets. The same that is happening today. I wonder if the blocking or censoring of humour is to dissuade people to look back at 90s/early 2000's media because people will realise how little has changed for the better and how much worse things are.
Frankie's POV joke would have had him cancelled in 24 hours nowadays, even though he's a massive pro-gay lefty.
On one of the 'too hot for tv' episodes, they're riffing about paedophiles for a bit. A few minutes later they're talking about all criminals wearing Nike or Reebok classics and to stop burglaries, every who wears Reebok classics should be arrested.
Frankie says "I think everyone who wears sandals should be arrested, just to go back to the topic of paedophillia" and he is immediately shut down, even by Dara who usually lets him riff. Dara just says "no" looks at the production crew and moves straight on. I wonder who wears sandals that are paedophiles?
Humour has died though and you can't mock anyone. The vast majority of the population do not understand sarcasm or satire - i blame that on the american influence on culture, and even though everyone is supposed to be equal (some are more equal than others) humour is only allowed against one group. Even though it isn't humour or satire, it's straight up hate. Bernard Manning may have been racist, but at least his jokes were well constructed.
Maybe the root cause of everything is incompetence? We have become so dull, stupid, ignorant and useless at everything that we can no longer write, or recognise, satire, humour, wit and sarcasm? There's no question that people today are less intelligent than those 100 years ago.
