6:24pm January 9, 2012

Humor that freaks me out

Okay I slept a bit.

Now I’m wondering something.

There’s a certain kind of humor that freaks me out. It’s very popular with Internet-using people in their mid thirties and younger. It’s not that I don’t find it funny. It’s that I find a lot of it funny but I’m waiting for an axe to drop on my head out of nowhere.

I can’t tell if I can trace this back to a woman I used to know. I’ll call her Cindy. Cindy loved this kind of humor. Cindy loved it so much that she made tons of it herself, all the time. If she wanted to, she could write a humor blog and people everywhere would love it and many would not know (also possibly not care) the extent to which she was a complete asshole who happily ruins people’s lives (this is not an exaggeration) if she can get a laugh and some drama out of it.

She was one of the bullies who pretended to be my friend. She pretended to be lots of people’s friends. Then she would tell stories of them behind their back with distinctly mean-spirited twists. She would call such things funny, I don’t. Certainly witty and snarky or something approaching what lots of people call that. But always with a truly nasty barb stuck in.

If she could leverage the power (which she can’t) she would, with lots of glee, do things to me that would easily get me killed. She would spin this into something quite funny to people like her, and people might laugh. She has tried things like this with other people. Hell, she has a job where she has that kind of power.

To her, she’s a big important person and I’m nobody. Not sure if I’m alone in that distinction or not – she has this need to be the center of the universe, so possibly she sees everyone that way. Certainly I have seen her and her friends go out of their way to custom-tailor lies to split apart friends and lovers and even families for a laugh or to get something from them. (When I say her friends, I mean people who have entered into an alliance for some purposes but often do this to each other too.)

Anyway I think what freaks me out about the kind of humor this is, isn’t just that it reminds me of her. It’s a kind of humor where you can almost taste the self-satisfied feeling of the person who has just come up with something impressively witty.(*) The self-satisfied feeling comes close to ruining it for me sometimes. But it’s also this feeling I get like “Can I stand to get close to this humor by liking it, only to possibly find out that the person making it would mock me or someone like me in the most mean-spirited way possible if they got the chance? And then affect my relationships with people all over again just because they could. And induce their fans to do the same.” It doesn’t help when the people engaging in the absolute worst forms of this humor openly proclaim their desire to mock people just because. And if any of them express pangs of conscience, several others can be counted on to tell them to keep it to themselves because it’s ruining their mockery.

It’s not that I expect any of them to suddenly target me. They don’t know me and I don’t intend them to. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s confusing mean and cool and funny. It’s the people whose lives they may really be ruining without any of the rest of us aware. It’s the glorification of that whole kind of personality. It’s not having a firm line between funny and cruel. And I’m not talking like how the line gets blurred in slapstick. I love certain kinds of slapstick, especially at my own expense. I’m talking about a kind of nasty, snarky wit popular among late Gen Xers and younger. And the feeling, as I’m reading, that I’m witnessing something that could easily become a niche for some people I’ve known who don’t really have much of a conscience.

So it’s like I laugh – sometimes – and then I get too wary to enjoy myself. Not all the humor has those barbs, but it’s at minimum got the potential, and that makes my skin crawl.

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(*) And you just know that if people like it, they will repeat it endlessly with the same self-satisfied tone. And yes written language works that way too, don’t ask me how.

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