THE JOKE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING

A funny thing happened. They called it a joke. Once upon a time, that was enough.

Before all this incessant scrolling, the joke was the thing. The whole thing. Someone had a good one, they told it to you, you laughed, you passed it along like a baton, and eventually it ran out of steam and retired gracefully.

Your dad gleefully forwarded it from his AOL account, with seventeen other email addresses still visible at the top. Your uncle told it at Thanksgiving, slightly wrong, and it was still funny. The joke had a life cycle. It was born, it traveled, it died. Beautiful, really.

Then we got the meme, which was like the joke’s cooler, lazier cousin. Less commitment. No setup — just a jpeg of a dog at a computer looking vaguely betrayed by the concept of Mondays. One caption doing all the work, no performance required. You sent it, someone sent one back, everyone felt understood. The meme had edges. You could see where it started and stopped.

It was, almost wistfully, an era of relative innocence.

Then someone handed the joke a phone that could record things and, well, everything got a wee bit complicated.

Six seconds. Then fifteen. Then a minute and a half of a woman holding a Stanley cup, listing the five types of people she is “no longer entertaining this year,” as if she’s the State Department. And you watched it — of course you watched it — and you sent it to four people with “THIS IS US” in all caps and crying emojis, which is a thing we do now instead of talking.

Someone in the group chat sends one back at 11:07 p.m. — another reenactment, no context except “WATCH TILL THE END.” Which is not a suggestion. It’s a summons.

You watched till the end.

Then, of course, there was another.

And this, my friends, is where the joke stops being a joke and becomes an ecosystem. It mutates. The bit becomes a trend, the trend gets remixed, the remix spawns a backlash, and within days it’s everywhere and already tired — repeated and performed until it stops feeling like a joke and starts feeling like a group project you never signed up for.

One false tap and you’re no longer watching things your friends sent — you’re somewhere else entirely, served by an algorithm that clocked you pausing for ten seconds three weeks ago and has been quietly building a case about who you are ever since.

Somewhere along the way, Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” quietly pushed a software update. Fifteen minutes became fifteen seconds, and instead of everyone getting famous once, everyone gets a tiny, looping spotlight on repeat, until you can’t tell the difference between being famous and being briefly, aggressively watchable. Remember the “We do not care” club? Of course you don’t. That was, what, three weeks ago? Exactly.

Suddenly funny isn’t something that happens to you, it’s something happening around you. Constantly! At a pace that cannot be interrupted without the vague feeling that you are missing something important that will also be over by the time you find it.

None of it is bad, not exactly. Most of it is actually pretty good. The people are talented, the timing is sharp, and occasionally something genuinely stops you cold and you think: that is a joke. A real one! It lands. And then nine more things trail it so quickly that you can’t quite remember what it was.

You check the comments, looking for one sane person who seems even mildly unsettled by any of this. One voice of proportion. A single “wait, is this fine?”

Nope. Not a one. Thousands of people love it. Every single one, every single time. Everyone is delighted. Everyone is completely at ease with something that will vanish in seconds and be replaced by something funnier before the feeling even registers.

And for a quick second, you wonder if this is what it looks like to lose any shared sense of scale. Not all at once. Just slowly. While being highly entertained.

Look, I have been highly entertained! I have also been taking notes.

I am pleased to report that literacy is not dead. It is, however, wildly underutilized.

I started this blog in 2018. I sat down — voluntarily, purposefully, with intention — and wrote paragraphs. Multiple. In sequence. With transitions. I expected people to begin at the beginning and arrive at the end without anything jumping in or spinning by or a text appearing mid‑sentence that reads “this is SO you,” attached to a reel of a woman rage‑cleaning her kitchen at 10:43 p.m. while her entire family walks through the shot like nothing is happening.

I am, have been, and apparently always will be a woman with a punchline, a notebook, and a stubborn belief that attention spans can still handle paragraphs.

The joke has left the building. But I’m still in here, writing it down, with a beginning and a middle and an end and everything.

You made it. I’m proud of us both.