Absurd and Dark: The millennial humour love affair

- Khushboo Hanjura.
Millennial humour is a strange, dream world of obscurity, where young people have created
a space for themselves for communicating with each other in the wake of current cultural
and political climate. The traditional ideas of comedy and humour have been rejected and
set aside. The central idea behind the millennial humour is to generate content which
resonates with the emotions and feelings of despair and emptiness and to use it as a comic
tool and a coping mechanism to cater to our daily existential crisis.

The revolution of humour in the millennial generation lies in stark contrast with how the
older generation used to view comedy in daily life, as a more light-hearted representation of
the general quirks and eccentricities revolving the day-to-day routine.

The next natural question to be answered here is that what has caused this disparity to
come to picture?

The role of social media can definitely not be sidelined. We live in an era where each
moment of our lives is micro-blogged and shared across different channels, only to know
how everybody is having the best time of their lives (even if they are not) and how that
makes it even more important for us to go out there and have fun or whatever that means!
Information about what others are doing in their lives is not only more accessible but also
blatantly omnipresent as well.
This has given rise to a form of self-expression, through dark humour which the current
generation uses as a means to cope up with the social pressure which the society, their
parents and peers have put on them. Self-deprecating memes are a way of coming together,
a vital mode of communication through self-expression especially to show empathy by
becoming more self-reflective and retrospective and letting others know how they are not
alone in whatever difficulties are being faced by them. ‘Tagging in memes’ has become an
official mode of communication between millennials. Important social media channels to
this generation, like Facebook and Instagram, since long time, have been seeing the rise of
memes, which are used as visual tools to circulate information and ideas so that they retain
in people’s minds. Not only that, many individuals, companies and political organizations
have realized that memes form the backdrop of the social life of people and therefore they
use them as a visual rhetoric to increase their monetary gains and generate social clout.

Even in harsh times, like the Trump victory, or the rather averse topic of climate change and
mental health, the social media savvy users were busy in showcasing their worry and dread
through tangibly dank memes, like below.
These peculiarities and abstractness of the millennial generation has made them the most
wanted consumer segment by the entertainment industry, including the television networks
which are literally trampling over each other to have the biggest pie off the table. Their TV
viewing behaviours and tastes have paved way for a lot of TV series to come into picture
and have record-breaking success stories to share. Rick and Morty, for example has been
classified as one of the darkest shows on television, which has been able to struck a chord
with the audience. Similarly other shows like Breaking Bad, another extremely popular
American show, although classified as a drama series, has displayed how humour can be
found in extremely absurd and macabre situations.

The wave of travelling of absurd information in the form of this new (also weird to a few)
artistic expression, is something which lies at odds with the more traditional ways of
communication through humour. Our sense of humour occasionally tussles with the
negative emotions and tries to pin-point that the world, generally does not make sense and
therefore nothing is meant to be taken seriously, not even the adversities.