Beans
I’m going to be honest with you all. Over the past few years, my sense of humor has decayed far beyond the point of no return.
It all started in eighth grade when I bought a book by the name of Hyperbole and a Half. The author of Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh, details her experience with depression from childhood to adulthood via vivid comic retellings of various mishaps in her life. One specific strip hit especially hard for me — the piece about the decay of Brosh’s sense of humor.
This is the “profound excerpt” in question:
So, uh, yeah. Little 14-year-old me read that excerpt and laughed for ten minutes straight. And every time I go back to it, I have the exact same reaction. It gets hard trying to laugh through the perplexed stares I get from my peers who never seem to understand what I find so funny about this excerpt.
And to be honest, I don’t get it either.
This trend of uncontrollable laughter has become a pervasive force in my life. Almost always, my laughter is intense, prolonged, and unwelcomed. Something about the experience often feels transcendent. It feels like a dissociative moment in which my soul leaves my body. Usually, when you laugh, it’s because something’s funny. But when you laugh uncontrollably at something stupid, something nobody else finds funny, it can leave you feeling exhausted and self-conscious.
Usually, these laughing bouts happen to me when I have a meta-moment in which I think about the absurdity of life. Something so inconceivably unfortunate or mundane and meaningless often sparks this response. Unable to digest the information, I laugh instead.
For evidence’s sake, I am going to create a list of moments when I’ve experienced this uncontrollable laughter.
B e a n s . “Beans” is a word that just sounds incredibly funny to me. The heaviness of the “b” combined with the mosquito-like tension and brightness of the “eans” make for a delightfully funny-sounding word. “Beans” is now my nickname amongst several of my friends, my username on multiple social media platforms, a filler word I use, and the word that floods my brain when I randomly get distracted from the task at hand. If I were to show you my calculus notebook, you’d probably be shocked and a little worried about the number of times I’ve randomly doodled and scribbled the word “b e a n s” across the margins of the pages.
When I got a 0/9 on a math quiz my sophomore year. Before I moved here the summer after freshman year, I thought I was a pretty stellar math student. I was also the type to cry when I got a B on a math exam. When I received that 0/9, I didn’t shed a single tear. Yeah, it was the equivalent of an F, but once you’ve passed a certain level of hopelessness, you’ve performed too poorly to even be sad. And in my opinion, once you’ve surpassed that threshold of failure, once you’ve done too poorly to comprehend your own emotions, everything suddenly becomes funny.
When talking about online learning. Allow me to speak from the heart for a moment here. When I say I’ve absorbed n o t h i n g in terms of academic coursework this past year, I mean I’ve absorbed n o t h i n g. Zilch. Zero. Nada. And a lot of that is my own doing. I’m not going to lie — I’ve treated online school like a podcast at times and prepared breakfast to the tune of someone explaining integrals in calculus. I’ve taken first block classes from bed more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve caught myself slipping into a brief slumber midway through class every now and again. And while I take responsibility for my lack of focus, I also think it would be unfair to dismiss the flaws of LHS’s remote learning and the impact that it’s had on motivation levels and mental health… but I digress. When my friend said, “sometimes I skip classes because the class is getting in the way of my learning,” I know we all felt that. Or most of us, anyway. And you bet I laughed for a solid 10 minutes after that statement. Yeah, it’s sad (really, really sad), but it’s also so inconceivably unfortunate to the point where I couldn’t even be mad at myself or the world anymore. I could only laugh.
Allow me to swiftly pivot to the broader scope of what is known as Gen Z humor. Now, I’m not going to say that Gen Z is MiSuNdErStOoD or that we’re victims of jUdGeMeNt, but…
Never mind, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
Remember that time at the start of 2020 when we all thought WWIII was on its way because Trump sent missiles to Iran? Remember the memes we got out of that? While Boomers, Gen X-ers, and even Gen Z-ers were avidly watching the news to see what the next move for the world would be, many Gen Z-ers also had our hands on our phones, scrolling through our Instagram feeds that were flooded with memes about getting drafted. It’s true — humor is how we cope. But part of the issue with having a blurred area between meme-ery and political or journalistic discourse is that many meme idols end up becoming attributed to political identities.
Remember what happened to Pepe the Frog? I loved Pepe. I really did. But thanks to the cesspool 4-Chan (who’s surprised?) and the enigmas that are racist teenagers, Pepe became a symbol for white supremacy. In a world in which everything is weaponized — either good things turned sour by bigots, or mistakes turned to cancellations by social justice warriors on Twitter Gen Z has taken the safe route by making nonsensical memes like this one from 2018:
Rather than creating content that has the potential to stray far from its original meaning or intention, we’ve resorted to risk-averse humor that means nothing at all.
In essence, this is why we can’t have nice things memes.
by LINA JAAFAR