Gen Z’s Humor: Coping Mechanism or Unchecked Cynicism?
By Cecilia Floros
I don’t think there has ever been anything so quintessentially Gen Z as our sense of humor. Sarcastic, absurdist, and sometimes depressing, the way Gen Z uses humor as a coping mechanism is definitely nothing new; the youth have been laughing at our forebear’s worldviews for generations now. Liberated flappers of the 1920s with their pageboy haircuts and knee-length skirts thought that their parents, who grew up in the mid-to-late Victorian era, were conservative and stuffy. Teenagers in the 1970s, with their huge bell bottom Wranglers and their anti-war sensibilities could not have been more different from their parents, who were teens in the 1950s, when the concept of the ‘teenager’ was still completely new. However, we twentysomethings certainly take it all to a new level.
Jaded Jokes
Humor as a coping mechanism is one of the most widespread phenomena that can be observed throughout all of humanity and history. My mind jumps to political cartoons from American newspapers, poking fun at everything from 19th-century NYC robber barons to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal in 1974. When something bad happens, it’s comforting to quickly turn it on its head to make it a lighthearted joke, instead of something you’d lay on the floor and spiral about for hours. In a world where I receive the most heinous New York Times alerts on my phone about 7 times daily, it seems like the only way to function is to make at least some things funny, or at the very least, ironic. Gen Z, in particular, has mastered the quick, dry, post-ironic jibe that’ll go viral on TikTok mere minutes after the news story itself breaks. While people have been making fun of their tough realities to cope for generations, Gen Z is different in that we have the entire world at our fingertips almost instantly. We don’t have to wait for the next day’s paper or the next week’s SNL episode to see a joke making fun of a ridiculous politician. We can do it ourselves, and we can do it now. And best believe, we do
Post-Irony and Media Fatigue
Since we live in a world where humanity’s atrocities are a mere Google search or Instagram scroll away, a lot of people understandably have experienced media fatigue at some point. Media fatigue is when one feels extreme overwhelm and exhaustion after consuming media, which is usually the news or social media content. It’s much harder to pull yourself away from your screen’s newsfeed to disconnect, as compared to a daily newspaper or a nightly radio broadcast, which is what the large majority of past generations had as their media. Our constant access to news makes it stupidly easy for us to overload our minds, and post-ironic memes are Gen Z’s method of choice for coping. As the generation who grew up with the Internet, widespread school shootings, the aftermath of 9/11, the 2008 recession and its repercussions, intense diet culture, the threat of climate change, and so much more, Gen Z has found itself using humor spread thickly on those very issues to make our day-to-day lives bearable. Unlike my parents, who didn’t have TVs in their homes until they were teenagers, I can expose myself to every awful event that happened today with a swipe of my finger across the little supercomputer that I keep in my pocket at all times. As the youth who are now entering young adulthood, we feel the responsibility to change the world on our backs at all times, like a cinder block that threatens to crush us at any moment.
Empathy Among Gen Zers: Weary, but Quietly Strong?
Social media and the Internet in general has allowed us to see the world’s horrors served up on a silver platter, but maybe there could be a bit of a positive consequence: we can see so many other people’s lived experiences so easily and quickly on the day to day, so I want to believe that Gen Zers will become more and more empathetic as we grow into full-blown adults who are running the world. Many of us are drained; listless when it comes to reading that next notification of a horrible event taking place. We feel hopeless. The suffering is everywhere, all the time, and we feel like there’s nothing we can do to truly make a difference. Humor as a coping mechanism can only go so far before it transforms into numb, dazed defeat. We’ve observed so much anguish almost firsthand through our phone screens as we’ve grown up. How do we stop that from letting us shut down emotionally? Time away from social media is one of the most important ways we as Gen Z, and all of humanity in general, can allow for time to decompress and get back in touch with ourselves, and our goals for how we can take direct action in our real lives. While we oftentimes feel like it’s impossible to pry ourselves away from the news, it’s imperative that we practice kindness, empathy, and generosity in our day-to-day lives, both toward ourselves and others, outside of the screen. Volunteer at your local library. Help out at a food bank, or a soup kitchen near you. Begin a gratitude practice that you do every night after you put your phone down. Tell your friends how much you love them. Make conversation with a stranger, or hold open a door for somebody whose hands are full. When change feels impossible, return back to yourself and what you can do, outside of the screen.
