We’ve already got an excellent thread on jokes that, nowadays, need explaining. What are some jokes circulating today that will need explaining to people who hear them in the future (say, 20 years or more from now)?
Obviously there will be a lot of jokes with references to current events that will eventually fade from memory. However, many of these references will be pretty easy to look up – for example, jokes about the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal might not make any sense to people born in the last 20 years, but as long as the joke mentions either Clinton or Lewinsky by name, it should take a dedicated reader only a few seconds of Googling to get the necessary background information. What jokes circulating today would this approach not work for?
As an example, here’s one of the most popular jokes circulating in Austria right now:
The three items in the photo are labelled “grain of rice”, “world’s smallest computer”, and “Austrian baby elephant”. The humour comes from the fact that for the last nine months, the government has been telling everyone to practise social distancing by standing at least “one baby elephant” away from each other, but many people have been ignoring this advice when queuing in the shops. Twenty years from now, young Austrians will probably be aware of, or could easily learn about, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, but this joke gives no explicit clues that it’s about the pandemic, and searching for “baby elephant” isn’t going to turn up anything relevant. No, I think that those future young adults will require a verbal explanation from someone who actually lived through the pandemic.
And now I’m wondering how “baby elephants” came to be the standard unit of distancing. I don’t think they’re any more common in Austria than here. Here, whenever I’ve seen a visualization of the needed distance (as opposed to just “six feet”), it’s been “far enough that you couldn’t touch fingertips with arms outstretched”. Which, I’d think, would be a familiar concept worldwide.
I wonder how many meme-type jokes will survive decades into the future?My guess is that something like “distracted boyfriend” will probably last forever, because it’s so obvious what’s going on.
Is there really anything to “understand” about Doge, beyond “here’s a picture of a cute dog”? I imagine that cute animal pics will be with us for a long time.
I’ve long wondered about how the proliferation of things like the Internet Archive, Know Your Meme, and literacy/mass media in general will impact how history on this period is done. It seems like there will be a staggering amount of data, even if only a tiny proportion survives, for them to work from. They should have a pretty solid idea of what our time was like.
Part of it is an attempt to make social distancing seem a bit more “fun”, and thus to get more people to cooperate. Picturing baby elephants between everyone in a line is, at least for some, a welcome bit of comic relief in a time that is fraught with danger and onerous personal restrictions. You don’t get the same sort of relief from an abstract reckoning of distance in feet or metres, or even from imagining outstretched arms.
As for why a baby elephant in particular was chosen, this may have been influenced by Kibali, a real elephant who was born in Vienna’s zoo shortly before the pandemic began and who was frequently featured in local media. The free tabloids were full of Kibali pictures, particularly on slow news days.
I think a lot of 2020 jokes may not make sense. We see 2020 to include toilet paper shortages, murder hornets, social distancing, masks, etc. Similar jokes about 1918 wouldn’t make sense.
In the future people will need an explanation for why people laugh about Kevin and the Tesla Space Station. That’s in the distant future though, the incident with Kevin and the space station hasn’t happened yet.
Related to this, I often wonder: What things do we do now that won’t make sense in the future (due to changing mores/technologies)… but we’ll still have linguistic ties to it?
(In other words, our great-grandkids will SAY it, but they won’t know why)
Example: I lent my little bare-bones car to my daughter. Manual transmission, manual everything. One of her friends asked “How do I get the window up?” “It’s that handle.” As her friend rotated it, she said “Ohhh, THIS is why people talk about cranking up the window on a car!”
Same with dialing a phone number.
But heck if I can think of a joke that uses tech that won’t make sense… oh, maybe the “Swipe Right” jokes I’ve heard on late night shows. Those may not make sense in ten years.
Really, almost any social media/pop culture jokes. “Unfriending” someone or “Voting them off the island”…
Around here the local “mascot animals” are our wild green sea turtles whose females come ashore to bury eggs in shallow pits on our beaches.
So at the boardwalk, pier, parks, etc., all along the beach the signs say to socially distance 6 feet. Or 3 turtles-worth. With a cute drawing of of 3 turtles with outstretched flippers almost touching and two people flanking the group.
