These commenters are too eager to dismiss an entire medium of art based on a few examples. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. Every time an SNL sketch flops, pundits proclaim the death of the 50-year-old institution. However, this is not a true critique of the form. It just didn’t make you laugh at that particular moment. That doesn’t mean that someone else didn’t laugh at it, or that they might produce a successful sketch next week. Comedians should be allowed to make bad art because swinging and missing is part of the art form, and it helps it evolve.
Failure is a necessary process in comedy. If you’ve ever been to a live stand-up show, you know this. A key part of the artform is testing out jokes in front of an audience and seeing which ones stick. They shape their act based on the laughs they get and the energy in the room. If a certain joke is met with silence, it is reworked and reshaped or scrapped in favor of something else. Even the most successful and famous comedians sometimes tell jokes that don't land. A comedian who bombs is not a bad comedian. They’re just a comedian.
It’s easy to look back on old sketches from SNL and claim that it was better “back then.” (Whatever “back then” means to you, whether it's the era of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler or John Belushi and Gilda Radner.) But there’s a survivorship bias at play here. Think about all the sketches that didn’t stand the test of time from the show's 51 seasons. The ones that didn’t end up in YouTube compilations and best-of DVDs. There are thousands of sketches that aren’t worth looking back on. That doesn’t mean that SNL has always been bad. It means that they’ve been doing what all comedians and all comedy institutions do. They’ve been swinging and sometimes missing. But our online-first world exacerbates this kind of criticism and makes it harder for comedians to get out from underneath it.
Digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels are where most of us consume comedy these days. TV Tech reports that young people consistently watch more social video content than they do traditional television. It's growing at a seemingly exponential pace, and it's impossible to imagine the future of comedy without imagining it online. These platforms, therefore, are a vital outlet for every type of comedian to get their voices heard. A stand-up spot on late-night TV doesn’t have near the viewership potential as a TikTok crowdwork clip. Stand-ups, sketch comedians, character performers, and more all want their slice of the digital pie. They need one in order to compete. The shift in format came with a shift in audience expectations, which changed the art itself.
Online, we expect jokes to come to us fully formed and ready to consume. When we’re scrolling on TikTok, we have no time for bad material. We want the punchlines to grab us instantly. We don’t have the patience to watch a 10-minute stand-up set and see if we might laugh at a couple of jokes. We want our direct interests to be catered to in the way that our feeds are so adept at doing. In a way, this creates its own comedy meritocracy. The funny stuff gets views and engagement, so it gets distributed to bigger audiences. The stuff that doesn’t immediately catch our attention toils in obscurity. But this cycle has a couple of negative effects. It prioritizes the most outrageous, instantly attention-grabbing content (which is different from the best content), and it gives us a lower tolerance for failure. These are not great conditions for making quality art. Sure, some online comedians have found a way around that and found genuine success online, but it’s an uphill battle. The best comedy doesn't scream for attention, it naturally commands it.
Some of the negative reactions to the “film bro” reel, which features two comedians mimicking pretentious guys who care too much about IMAX, point to understandable gripes about comedy in the age of social media. It’s a well-worn trope, and it rang a little hollow to some. The outsize reaction to it comes from a place of exhaustion. We’re tired of our feeds being inundated with people trying to be funny or trying to game the algorithm. We’ve all gotten too smart about what works and what doesn’t. Everyone seems to be chasing virality, from billion-dollar corporations to your roommate who is getting into sketch comedy. This doesn’t make for a better product. It just makes for a more effortful product. We want genuine belly laughs, not optimized content that is guaranteed to reach us but not to make us giggle.
But if we’re too hard on the people trying to make this content, especially the real comedians who are trying to work on their craft in front of an online audience, then we’re missing the point. It’s okay to have a negative reaction to something, that’s not enough to dismiss the entire genre. These reactions, however, are also just another example of what the algorithm prioritizes: flashy, grabby, but not thought through.