Crisis & Humor

If it weren’t for humor, I cannot imagine where our country would be right now. It’s been a year of disappointment after disappointment, crisis after crisis, hardship, stress, and loss. There’s a reason why shows like SNL have been around for decades now. We need to laugh in order to live. We need to blow off steam in this time of trauma. Personally, humor is something that is very important to me. I dream of working in comedy and writing satire. I think it’s essential to make light of even the hardest situations. It’s how we cope and process what we go through.

I’ve relied heavily on humor throughout the last couple of months. I’m not alone, and this is evident through the political cartoons, articled from sources like The Onion, stand-up comedy, SNL, and, my personal favorite, the thoughts that are shared on platforms such as Twitter.

It’s a bizarre yet unbelievably fun time to be coming of age. Gen Z is unstoppable when it comes to making light of situations. We’re quick as a whip, yet so informed. I always take to Twitter after elections, debates, interviews, and after any big news is released. My generation is so good at pinpointing what is wrong and unjust about a certain situation, and they’re so good at doing this in the funniest ways possible. I have gathered a few Twitter memes that have made me laugh over the last couple of weeks. Some were made by people my age, some were made by adults, and some were made by…flies?

This is a meme that one of my friends created immediately following the news of Donald Trump’s COVID diagnosis. This news sent the world of social media and news into an absolute frenzy, though the diagnosis and disease itself were short lived. This meme made me laugh because of the obvious parallel to the debate that had happened just hours before, during which Trump downplayed the severity of the virus as he has done for months. Honestly, the events and timing that have occurred this year have outdone themselves time and time again. This meme is personifying the coronavirus and making the diagnosis seem more like a personal attack against Trump. Nothing about COVID is inherently funny; it has taken lives and turned our world as we knew it upside down. However, we can let ourselves take a deep breath sometimes and see things differently. A lot of us felt like Trump really “deserved” to get sick at that point, just because he’d downplayed the severity of COVID so much. When it happened, my generation had a field day.

This is one of the funniest tweets I have ever seen. Wanda Sykes tweeted this, as the timestamp indicates, just a few hours after the first presidential debate. During the debate, Trump had made some false, odd claims to warn against voting by mail. He said that the ballots may never make it to the places they’re supposed to, and that they will probably just end up in… a creek. Nobody quite knew what to do with this. Not only was it wrong for the president to be discouraging voting in any way, but this claim just left people confused. Here, we see an example of a comedian using her platform in an unscripted, authentic, yet still hilarious way. By tweeting this, Wanda Sykes is indicating just how ridiculous she finds the claim that was made by speaking as if she agreed with him. Sarcasm is used perfectly here. Instead of just coming out and frankly saying how ridiculous she found the claim, Wanda Sykes lightened the situation by talking about it this way.

Finally, I just had to include this tweet that was tweeted just 20 minutes after the debate was over. Right away, someone had already created an account for the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head during the debate. This account gained thousands of followers in a matter of minutes. The following lasted for weeks, and after the diagnosis of Trump, the “fly” tweeted this little blurb. That is the beauty of social media during this time, in my opinion. The debate left everyone stressed and worried. We flock to things like this that make us laugh because they make us feel better. They allow us to breathe.

Humor allows us to make light of situations that may otherwise destroy us with our weight. It reminds us that we’re not alone, and that people all over the country feel just as discouraged and helpless as we do in the current state of affairs.