In the early part of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe and the United States fumbled its response, a meme took over people’s social media timelines: a dog, surrounded by fire, calmly sipping coffee and declaring, “This is fine.” What began as a webcomic panel from 2013 was repurposed heavily, ballooning into a viral sensation used by everyone from the GOP’s Twitter account to Democratic Senators, finally transformed, almost prophetically, into the definitive expression of millennial and Gen Z emotional detachment through irony.
For millennials and Zoomers, humor has gone past being a simple coping mechanism and turned into a form of record keeping. Facing a reality marked by climate catastrophe, economic precarity, and endless war, and now, what many argue is the twilight of US hegemony, these generations have honed memes into the digital-age heirs to the late-night monologue and political cartoon. As institutions crumble and narratives fail, laughter and irony has become the language of the disillusioned.
Historically, humor has flourished in periods of imperial decline. Take for example Roman poet Juvenal, who mocked the degeneracy of his society and ruling elites. In Juvenal’s Satire 5, he offers a biting critique of social inequality by mocking the absurdities and humiliations entrenched into Roman society. He writes, “The patron dips his seafood in Venafran olive oil, but the Sallow cabbage they offer to poor you stinks of the lamp,” exposing the moral decay that is so often cloaked by the rituals of civility.
During the Great Depression, Americans crowded into vaudeville theaters to watch Charlie Chaplin, whose Little Tramp character lampooned the absurdities of poverty and power with overt and subversive brilliance. What arguably distinguishes today’s meme culture is its intimacy and crowdsourced nature. A joke posted on X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok can be born inside a homely apartment somewhere in small town America and go viral in London within hours. This is partly because the audience that latches onto these memes isn’t passive—but riffs on and reclaims them—turning simple commentary into its own kind of community.
Nowhere is this more evident than in how young Americans have responded to the crumbling myths of the United States, namely the American Dream; long seen as a promise of upwards mobility, it has been rebranded by this generation’s main inheritors as a false bill of goods. “To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one.” wrote philosopher Henri Bergson. “Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a social signification.”
Today, humor still serves a multitude of social, psychological, and political dimensions, despite how bleak the times have become. Because quite often, memes often double as a rejection of despair and complicity and a refusal to surrender to a world which is constantly demanding that we become numb to the horrors that surround us.
In 2023, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, memes became a kind of gallows humor and an expression of rage dressed in punchlines. Zoomers in particular have taken this digital satire to new levels. Despite being too young to remember 9/11 they are living through its political aftermath, and have no illusions about the moral authority of US empire, nor do they have an issue mocking even the most venerated historical events in recent US history.
In a reel posted on Instagram, an excavator in China in 2024 is methodically bringing down a building in a methodical demolition process. Then, we cut to rapid imagery of American planes and the words “America: 2001”—conspiratorial satire on the attacks on the Twin Towers. The cartoonish absurdity found in exceedingly popular 9/11 memes captures this generation’s surreal resignation. As scholar Rebecca Krefting argues in All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents, marginalized communities have long used comedy to critique systems of power. “Some jokes are tears in the fabric of our beliefs—they challenge myths about how fair and democratic our society is and the behaviors and practices we enact to maintain those fictions,” Krefting argues.
One can argue that laughing through collapse is a way to translate the unspeakable into something that can be shared. In the words of George Carlin, “it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and to cross it deliberately.” What we are witnessing now is an extension of this same political lineage, where humor isn’t a distraction but a kind of digital folklore. Today, that line is written in pixels and runs through the heart of a declining empire. Millennials and Gen Z are protesting, resisting, and confronting empire by whatever means at their disposal, and they also have the wit to chronicle its fall.
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