Scott Brown on Wired: “Humor is the Lingua Franca of the Internet”.

Because “funny” is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world. You can’t update your Facebook status without a self-deprecating quip. You can’t respond to a Gawker post unless you’ve got something equally snarky to add. Snark, of course, is Web comedy’s most renewable resource. [...] And if you’re still worried about bombing in what is, basically, the world’s biggest, cruelest comedy club, don’t be. I assure you, you’re getting funnier all the time, simply by dint of being plugged into the collective e-conscious and keeping up with the high-bandwidth badinage.

Marshall McLuhan’s first and second laws of media ask what does the new medium enhance or make obsolete in a culture. An instant and participatory medium like the Internet has replaced jokes of the traditional variety (“a Finn, a Norwegian and a Swede walk into a bar…”) by something more instant, more contemporary. Today’s jokes are YouTube clips, PhotoShop manipulations, Facebook comments and the like. In the old days, jokes could be retold over and over, some jokes were deemed “classic” because they were more general and based on timeless notions. But now, jokes have a shelf-life that is measured in weeks, even days.

Granted, “reactionary” jokes are not a new phenomenon (just think of political cartoons and talk show monologues), but the Internet has made them common currency among us regular folk. A good “snark”, as Brown calls it, will not be limited to the cocktail party it was uttered, it can catch on and become sort of the joke of the week. Internet memes are a great example of this. But as said, these kinds of jokes don’t last long, and because of their contextual and contemporary nature, they rarely if ever become classic jokes that stand the test of time.