The Deal With Gen Z Humor

Arianna Langford

Staff Writer

Skibidi toilet rizz, Grimace shakes, Luigi Mangione, devious licks, SpongeBob, and 9/11. All these things have, at one point or another, been associated with Gen Z humor, along with countless other things that would be impossible to limit to this publication.

Why have members of Gen Z found them funny? Or, more importantly, what exactly is Gen Z humor?

These are difficult questions to answer, even among members of the generation whose birthdates typically range from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. In fact, there’s a lot of disagreement.

“That’s not Gen Z humor. We don’t joke about that,” said Tiana Jrejj ’27 about the “skibidi toilet” trend. “We’ve gotten comfortable making jokes about suicide, death, and self-deprecation.” Others, like Daniel Liberty ‘26, say that “we’re so unfunny… Skibidi toilet is stupid, but we find it so funny.”

There are many different ideas of what Gen Z finds funny, but maybe they don’t have to compete with each other.

At Assumption University, the definition of Gen Z humor has now become the subject of academic study with Professor Christopher Gilbert’s special topics course, “American Humor and Gen Z.”

Through studying academic texts, stand-up comedy shows, memes, and war propaganda, Gilbert urges students to discover where humor comes from, how it has changed generationally, and where it’s going. By studying these various sources, Gilbert shows students how to ground their discussion of humor in specific vocabulary, ranging from commonly known terms like “dark humor” to terms like “comic license,” which describes who is allowed to joke about what.

“Humor, for me, has always served as a measure of what matters in a certain historical moment, political moment, and cultural moment.” Gilbert said.

This is why Gilbert allowed American Humor students to choose memes or online trends to study that they found most popular among their generation, including memes about the murder of the United Healthcare CEO. “Humor gives us a good idea of what topics of public concern are worth attending to.” Gilbert reflected.

Through this lens, Gen Z’s jokes about the CEO’s demise seem to reflect their public concern with insurance prices and anti-establishment ideals.

Recently, American Humor students explored how Gen Z humor has “ruptured” from its generational predecessors or how other generations misunderstand it. Students wrote and presented many different ideas to the class.

Some discussed how Gen Z humor is fractured across social media, with many different online communities with different codes about what is funny. Others discussed that Gen Z’s comfort with self-deprecation, use of dark humor to embrace the chaos of life, code-switching between online and real-life personas, or use of humor as a “carnival” or break from the stresses of life are all ways it is different from past generations.

There are so many different interpretations that add layers to the way we may view Gen Z humor.

Although it’s hard to generalize all these layers into a single definition of Gen Z humor, Gilbert thinks there is an overarching pattern. “With humor, you do get a sense of ‘amor fati,’ or love of fate.” Gilbert said.

Humor is often used to embrace all aspects of life, good and bad. Gen Z is different, though. “Gen Z, broadly, has a collective sense of humor where ‘amor fati,’ loving the fate, is far less about embracing it than being resigned to it. It’s a sense of humor as an embrace of resignation.”

“As we’ve talked about in Humor class,  when you say we have a sense of humor that embraces absurdity or embraces something like resignation, it’s because the American dream is dead, [or] the idea of scientific truth doesn’t seem to hold anymore, [or] the idea of the expectation that we’re going to do better than our parents doesn’t seem to be a shared good. Gen Z humor is a way of embracing [fate] and saying there’s nothing we can do, so screw it,” Gilbert said.

So, is Gen Z just hopeless? Well, not exactly.

Gilbert’s goal in teaching the American Humor course is to show how humor can be a tool for self-agency. “Nowadays, senses of humor are being put to all kinds of different political and cultural ends,” Gilbert said. “For some political beings, this leads to an ideology of enjoying tearing the government down or taking delight from seeing everything crumble.”

When you become resigned about what’s happening in the world because you think you have no control over things, your agency disappears. “So, to recognize that a sense of humor is also a source of agency is important.”

American Humor students have taken this agency and run with it, showing how every skibidi toilet, Obama pyramid, coconut tree, or piece of brainrot is just a way to give meaning to a world that seems to be becoming less and less meaningful every day. As Gilbert put it, “it is laughing into the abyss instead of screaming into it.”