Have you noticed one of the top comedy cliches for Millennials and Gen-Z are 90's sitcom parodies?
I'd also add that younger people are being prevented from experiencing great art (pop or otherwise) from the past as inspiration. A combination of having a non-stop glut of "new" content and the shielding-from difficult or problematic material from the past. With three networks and some UHF stations to entertain me as I child I was exposed to all kinds of pop-art and entertainment from the 1940's on. I came home from church on Sunday in the mid-80s to be greeted with Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts on television.
To me this deficiency is most visible in the drop off of Pixar and Disney storytelling, and the audience reaction to it.
Particularly in art, the ability to fail and grow is important. With all young comedians' content available for all the world to see and there in perpetuity, I wonder how many fledgling comedians had their career end before it even began because of something that would have maybe gotten them booed in a nightclub in the 90s, but wouldn't have become attached to them the way it does today.
I've felt this about sports, too. I see commercials with Jeter, Shaq, Lebron, Brady, Manning, and Federer. Would the average American even recognize Trout, Jokic, Josh Allen, or Djokovic in a commercial? Would even 10% of the US recognize Connor McDavid? It seems like the only new (as in, post 2012-ish) household names in sports are Mahomes and Kelsey.
I love the NBA - but the league is fucked when LeBron, Steph, and Durant retire, and should thank their lucky stars every night that those three have broken the superstar aging curve long enough to get them to this next TV deal. The league has so many fucking AWESOME players, but no other stars that actually move ratings in a meaningful way: not Jokic/Giannis/Embiid, not Zion or Ja Morant before his nonsense, not Luka or Tatum or Booker.
At some point, maybe when the TV contract starting in 2025 expires, the money is going to start getting smaller rather than just getting larger at a smaller rate.
I have a unified theory of this phenomenon: the library-everywhere effect.
I was a 90s kid, and even back then, I generally preferred to watch/read/listen to older stuff. Reruns were of *good* shows (since the bad ones didn't get rerun, mostly) and they were, of course, new to me. But except for the occasional Blockbuster evening, I was only able to watch whatever happened to be on in our non-cable household.
Now I'm an adult. I haven't heard a new band I've liked in ages. And over the past 20 years I've built a 30 GB folder of big band music, Bluegrass, and 70s-80s hard rock. There hasn't been a movie I was excited to see in years, but I can go to JustWatch and find out what streaming service has every John Wayne western, or Olivier Shakespeare, or whatever.
The point is this: because of on-demand libraries, modern art has to compete with *everything that came before*, including all of the best of it. It's unfair that an up-and-coming rocker has to not only be better than all the other kids with shred-solo dreams: he also has to be better than Townsend, Page, and Hendrix! Why would I (pay money to) listen to the latest Marvel retread when I can, as part of a subscription fee I've already paid, go watch Blazing Saddles again? And the recommendation engines make it worse: I don't even have to have living artists around to get stuff I'll probably like that I've never seen before. Never underestimate convenience: my wife watches far more old Friends now that she can stream whatever episode on demand in bed, than before, when to do so required putting in a DVD.
There's more "content" (writing, audio, audiovisual) available for consumption than an individual can go through in a thousand lifetimes. Previously, it was locked up in libraries, and you had to make a big effort to find it and then consume it; new stuff was put in front of you as conveniently and as often as possible by people who wanted to get your money. Now, the reverse is true, or at the very least, the barrier to seeing old stuff is far, far lower.
How can you burn through all the old stuff? I can watch 130 hours of Columbo. 85 hours of Threes Company. Go through every Swedish Death Metal album of note (maybe another 40 hrs assuming you only listen once), 90 hrs of Seinfeld, and 300 hrs of the simpsons.
That's 645 hrs of entertainment, which is over 2 months of content assuming you never watch/ listen to anything twice and spend 10 hrs a day doing it, and I've only named 4 shows and one musical subgenre.
The National Film Registry is a curated collection of films preserved for "historic, cultural, or aesthetic" significance. It has *873* films listed as of this year. Some are shorts and some are weird, but at 1/day, that's enough entertainment for over two years.
And if you're the kind of nerd who also reads nonfiction for enjoyment, it's even worse. The amount of stuff out there is effectively infinite. The Library of Congress is estimated to have 10-15 terabytes of text alone.
The real answer is to be woke. If everything written before ~2015 is irredeemably sinful because of its author's race/sex/opinions about railroads or whatever, there's much more room for something new.
Let's not forget: if there's an up-and-coming twenty-something comedian who is actually talented, they're in the same social media crab bucket as Heaven knows how many other comedians. Some might be similarly talented people who just got a bit less lucky, some will be clapter-seekers, and some just bad. And when our hypothetical comedian start to clamber out of the crab bucket, there's a whole lot of crabs who think it should've been them and will want them back in.
I don't know how true this was before social media, but I can't exactly imagine it's gotten better.
EDIT: Also, and perhaps more importantly: your point about the early pipeline for comedians is a perfect mirror for what Jesse Singal and others have written about journalism: you need to be a certain kind of at least moderately well-off kid just to do stuff that doesn't really pay enough to live on, to get your foot in the door. Patterns emerge and rhyme, it seems.
Yes, it’s like journalism. Politics is like that, too. A lot of these “desirable” fields have made the ability to spend your 20s hanging out making no real money the price of admission and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to change things.
Similarly, a lot of creative fields pay less total money now, because so many people are willing to produce content for free. The internet means anyone can be a creator, and the market is saturated. The people who get noticed are the best at marketing and algorithms, not the most talented.
At the same time, content with traditional gatekeepers (studios, record labels, publishing houses) isn’t worth as much because people expect to pay low subscription fees for unlimited access to everything.
I don’t know how this might affect comedy, but in my industry it seems hopeless. Creative work just doesn’t pay unless you get really really lucky.
This is also true and a good point. I joke about cats replacing comedians, but I’m not really joking; free content (from cats and humans) replaces a lot of comedy. Instead of winding down before bed by watching some Comedy Central show or a Scrubs rerun, a lot of people wind down by scrolling through TikTok or Facebook. And the cats ARE funny.
At my local bar they play the cute animal channel when sports stuff or car auctions aren’t on, and everyone loves it-if you get worked up or offended at a puppy or a ferret or a lizard, there is something seriously off with you, even in these times. Comedy-gotta be careful.
I took a couple (non improv, I hate improv) classes at Second City in Chicago about a decade ago. It was fine, i wasnt one of the wannabe's l, just a middle aged hobbyist guy basically. Everyone was cool more or less. I went back a few years after I had left and just the politics and internet "mental health" crud were everywhere. I remember I was walking around a new area and a sign was up in a new lounge area that literally said something like "We do not tolerate making fun of people here." I immediately thought "Isn't that what this whole place is supposed to be about?"
You have confirmed my worst fears about where Second City Training Center has gone. I liked it better when they just took my $1,000 and gave me a T-Shirt
You see it at jam sessions. The musicians may be in their 20s, but they are playing Led Zeppelin tunes and Dead tunes. Oldies.
This music was big 20 years before they were born. That would be like going to a jam session of 20-somethings in 1985 and hearing guys in stone-washed jeans playing Lawrence Welk tunes.
Neil Young said rock and roll will never die, but it should have about 30 years ago. Who is the next Louis Armstrong or Buddy Holly?
Overall political orthodoxy has so infused culture over the past 30 years, that I think future generations will consider this period to be an absolute cultural wasteland.
"Better to just bite your tongue, keep your job, and light a huge chunk of the studio’s money on fire."
Identity culture is a prisoner's dilemma: selfish individual decisions are incentivized, to the detriment of the whole. I don't know how we climb out of this. It would require some number of high profile individuals to willingly self-immolate and set an example.
I guess the next question is if we're missing a single generation or if the age major celebrities is over. Maybe the average age of Super Bowl celeb will keep on creeping up until they die off. At that point, we could just use AI to still have Jennifer Aniston and Ryan Reynolds in ads. Even today, AI fake voices are usually good enough that I can't tell the difference.
Only quibble is you can get anything from the target demographic of the halftime show. Twenty years ago they'd have Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones up there and I would wonder they were choosing performers to only appeal to old losers.
I don’t know if it is so much about lack of talent as it is about fragmentation. There are so many brilliant creatives on social media, but none of them become household names because they all have separate fiefs of audience attention. There no longer is such a thing as a monoculture, and our biggest stars rise before the fragmentation fundamentally changed how performers built followings.
I know that blaming everything on identity politics is the go-to answer, but from what I remember, it's that studios don't want to make movies that they can't potentially sell to China, and comedies don't do well overseas because the cultural context doesn't carry over.
The 90s was the last time we could all agree about who was famous. Apparently there's someone called "Mr. Beast" who has hundreds of millions of followers on YouTube and—I shit you not—his own breakfast cereal, and I still have no idea who the fuck he is. Even more troubling, I would be unlikely to consider his opinions when choosing my next cell phone plan.
Did the streaming services ever release the numbers of people watching each show? That might say something about some of your points. Netflix keeps throwing “Dear White People” at me but I will never, ever watch it, not even out of morbid curiosity. If it turns out that most of you are like me - and you fucking are, you know it - we might be past identity politics and pipeline problems and into the downstream effects - all of this stuff is incredibly unappealing and people are increasingly tuning out.
We subscribe to fewer streaming services than we did 5 years ago, not more, and we cut cable a couple months ago. We’re just taking in less entertainment.
There is a Twitter account called TV Grim Reaper run by some unnamed inside source who releases these numbers. And I can summarize it for you: People watch a few shows on Netflix, people watch Ted Lasso and the Mandalorian, people watch reruns, that is all.
I think I agree with the overall premise ... but the superbowl is usually a bad example. MOST of the time they go with performers that are 15 years past their prime. That is the norm, and I also suspect that is the norm for a lot of celebrity endorsement too.
That said, what about youtube for the middle-tier? There are plenty of shows and podcasts getting low-million views and it seems like an era of comedians translated the classic small-shitty comedy starting point, to appearances on podcasts and their own socials, to larger shows and maybe tv spots. Netflix has been pretty good to tier 2 talent in their willingness to do specials as well
“3) You have to be able to tolerate wealthy theatre kid-types. That third thing is the deal-breaker for scores of people” - this is the reason my son decided to not proceed with comedy, he loves stand up but he just couldn’t stand being around theater kids.
Have you noticed one of the top comedy cliches for Millennials and Gen-Z are 90's sitcom parodies?
I'd also add that younger people are being prevented from experiencing great art (pop or otherwise) from the past as inspiration. A combination of having a non-stop glut of "new" content and the shielding-from difficult or problematic material from the past. With three networks and some UHF stations to entertain me as I child I was exposed to all kinds of pop-art and entertainment from the 1940's on. I came home from church on Sunday in the mid-80s to be greeted with Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts on television.
To me this deficiency is most visible in the drop off of Pixar and Disney storytelling, and the audience reaction to it.
Particularly in art, the ability to fail and grow is important. With all young comedians' content available for all the world to see and there in perpetuity, I wonder how many fledgling comedians had their career end before it even began because of something that would have maybe gotten them booed in a nightclub in the 90s, but wouldn't have become attached to them the way it does today.
I've felt this about sports, too. I see commercials with Jeter, Shaq, Lebron, Brady, Manning, and Federer. Would the average American even recognize Trout, Jokic, Josh Allen, or Djokovic in a commercial? Would even 10% of the US recognize Connor McDavid? It seems like the only new (as in, post 2012-ish) household names in sports are Mahomes and Kelsey.
I love the NBA - but the league is fucked when LeBron, Steph, and Durant retire, and should thank their lucky stars every night that those three have broken the superstar aging curve long enough to get them to this next TV deal. The league has so many fucking AWESOME players, but no other stars that actually move ratings in a meaningful way: not Jokic/Giannis/Embiid, not Zion or Ja Morant before his nonsense, not Luka or Tatum or Booker.
At some point, maybe when the TV contract starting in 2025 expires, the money is going to start getting smaller rather than just getting larger at a smaller rate.
Las Vegas Aces star point guard Kelsey Plum?? I'd recognize her anywhere.
I have a unified theory of this phenomenon: the library-everywhere effect.
I was a 90s kid, and even back then, I generally preferred to watch/read/listen to older stuff. Reruns were of *good* shows (since the bad ones didn't get rerun, mostly) and they were, of course, new to me. But except for the occasional Blockbuster evening, I was only able to watch whatever happened to be on in our non-cable household.
Now I'm an adult. I haven't heard a new band I've liked in ages. And over the past 20 years I've built a 30 GB folder of big band music, Bluegrass, and 70s-80s hard rock. There hasn't been a movie I was excited to see in years, but I can go to JustWatch and find out what streaming service has every John Wayne western, or Olivier Shakespeare, or whatever.
The point is this: because of on-demand libraries, modern art has to compete with *everything that came before*, including all of the best of it. It's unfair that an up-and-coming rocker has to not only be better than all the other kids with shred-solo dreams: he also has to be better than Townsend, Page, and Hendrix! Why would I (pay money to) listen to the latest Marvel retread when I can, as part of a subscription fee I've already paid, go watch Blazing Saddles again? And the recommendation engines make it worse: I don't even have to have living artists around to get stuff I'll probably like that I've never seen before. Never underestimate convenience: my wife watches far more old Friends now that she can stream whatever episode on demand in bed, than before, when to do so required putting in a DVD.
There's more "content" (writing, audio, audiovisual) available for consumption than an individual can go through in a thousand lifetimes. Previously, it was locked up in libraries, and you had to make a big effort to find it and then consume it; new stuff was put in front of you as conveniently and as often as possible by people who wanted to get your money. Now, the reverse is true, or at the very least, the barrier to seeing old stuff is far, far lower.
I wonder what will happen when everyone has burned through all the old stuff. Maybe then and only then will new content be prioritized.
How can you burn through all the old stuff? I can watch 130 hours of Columbo. 85 hours of Threes Company. Go through every Swedish Death Metal album of note (maybe another 40 hrs assuming you only listen once), 90 hrs of Seinfeld, and 300 hrs of the simpsons.
That's 645 hrs of entertainment, which is over 2 months of content assuming you never watch/ listen to anything twice and spend 10 hrs a day doing it, and I've only named 4 shows and one musical subgenre.
Exactly.
The National Film Registry is a curated collection of films preserved for "historic, cultural, or aesthetic" significance. It has *873* films listed as of this year. Some are shorts and some are weird, but at 1/day, that's enough entertainment for over two years.
And if you're the kind of nerd who also reads nonfiction for enjoyment, it's even worse. The amount of stuff out there is effectively infinite. The Library of Congress is estimated to have 10-15 terabytes of text alone.
The real answer is to be woke. If everything written before ~2015 is irredeemably sinful because of its author's race/sex/opinions about railroads or whatever, there's much more room for something new.
Let's not forget: if there's an up-and-coming twenty-something comedian who is actually talented, they're in the same social media crab bucket as Heaven knows how many other comedians. Some might be similarly talented people who just got a bit less lucky, some will be clapter-seekers, and some just bad. And when our hypothetical comedian start to clamber out of the crab bucket, there's a whole lot of crabs who think it should've been them and will want them back in.
I don't know how true this was before social media, but I can't exactly imagine it's gotten better.
EDIT: Also, and perhaps more importantly: your point about the early pipeline for comedians is a perfect mirror for what Jesse Singal and others have written about journalism: you need to be a certain kind of at least moderately well-off kid just to do stuff that doesn't really pay enough to live on, to get your foot in the door. Patterns emerge and rhyme, it seems.
Yes, it’s like journalism. Politics is like that, too. A lot of these “desirable” fields have made the ability to spend your 20s hanging out making no real money the price of admission and there doesn’t seem to be much of a push to change things.
Similarly, a lot of creative fields pay less total money now, because so many people are willing to produce content for free. The internet means anyone can be a creator, and the market is saturated. The people who get noticed are the best at marketing and algorithms, not the most talented.
At the same time, content with traditional gatekeepers (studios, record labels, publishing houses) isn’t worth as much because people expect to pay low subscription fees for unlimited access to everything.
I don’t know how this might affect comedy, but in my industry it seems hopeless. Creative work just doesn’t pay unless you get really really lucky.
This is also true and a good point. I joke about cats replacing comedians, but I’m not really joking; free content (from cats and humans) replaces a lot of comedy. Instead of winding down before bed by watching some Comedy Central show or a Scrubs rerun, a lot of people wind down by scrolling through TikTok or Facebook. And the cats ARE funny.
At my local bar they play the cute animal channel when sports stuff or car auctions aren’t on, and everyone loves it-if you get worked up or offended at a puppy or a ferret or a lizard, there is something seriously off with you, even in these times. Comedy-gotta be careful.
Re: Theatre kids, its gotten worse i think.
I took a couple (non improv, I hate improv) classes at Second City in Chicago about a decade ago. It was fine, i wasnt one of the wannabe's l, just a middle aged hobbyist guy basically. Everyone was cool more or less. I went back a few years after I had left and just the politics and internet "mental health" crud were everywhere. I remember I was walking around a new area and a sign was up in a new lounge area that literally said something like "We do not tolerate making fun of people here." I immediately thought "Isn't that what this whole place is supposed to be about?"
You have confirmed my worst fears about where Second City Training Center has gone. I liked it better when they just took my $1,000 and gave me a T-Shirt
You see it at jam sessions. The musicians may be in their 20s, but they are playing Led Zeppelin tunes and Dead tunes. Oldies.
This music was big 20 years before they were born. That would be like going to a jam session of 20-somethings in 1985 and hearing guys in stone-washed jeans playing Lawrence Welk tunes.
Neil Young said rock and roll will never die, but it should have about 30 years ago. Who is the next Louis Armstrong or Buddy Holly?
Overall political orthodoxy has so infused culture over the past 30 years, that I think future generations will consider this period to be an absolute cultural wasteland.
Wait. You're 43? It's adorable when the guy pulling the old man schtick was raised on Scott Baio/Willie Ames comedies and Alf.
To people in their 20s, I am the same age as a 60 year-old.
The point is, you are old enough to be John Mulaney's slightly older brother.
But his cooler older brother that bought him beer and smokes. Turned out so well ...
"Better to just bite your tongue, keep your job, and light a huge chunk of the studio’s money on fire."
Identity culture is a prisoner's dilemma: selfish individual decisions are incentivized, to the detriment of the whole. I don't know how we climb out of this. It would require some number of high profile individuals to willingly self-immolate and set an example.
I guess the next question is if we're missing a single generation or if the age major celebrities is over. Maybe the average age of Super Bowl celeb will keep on creeping up until they die off. At that point, we could just use AI to still have Jennifer Aniston and Ryan Reynolds in ads. Even today, AI fake voices are usually good enough that I can't tell the difference.
Only quibble is you can get anything from the target demographic of the halftime show. Twenty years ago they'd have Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones up there and I would wonder they were choosing performers to only appeal to old losers.
I don’t know if it is so much about lack of talent as it is about fragmentation. There are so many brilliant creatives on social media, but none of them become household names because they all have separate fiefs of audience attention. There no longer is such a thing as a monoculture, and our biggest stars rise before the fragmentation fundamentally changed how performers built followings.
It seems like Hollywood has given up producing comedies. Its hard to create new stars if there aren't any movies for them to be in.
Why? My guess is identity politics and sensitivities has made it impossible for comedians and movies to make jokes lest they are canceled.
I know that blaming everything on identity politics is the go-to answer, but from what I remember, it's that studios don't want to make movies that they can't potentially sell to China, and comedies don't do well overseas because the cultural context doesn't carry over.
The 90s was the last time we could all agree about who was famous. Apparently there's someone called "Mr. Beast" who has hundreds of millions of followers on YouTube and—I shit you not—his own breakfast cereal, and I still have no idea who the fuck he is. Even more troubling, I would be unlikely to consider his opinions when choosing my next cell phone plan.
Did the streaming services ever release the numbers of people watching each show? That might say something about some of your points. Netflix keeps throwing “Dear White People” at me but I will never, ever watch it, not even out of morbid curiosity. If it turns out that most of you are like me - and you fucking are, you know it - we might be past identity politics and pipeline problems and into the downstream effects - all of this stuff is incredibly unappealing and people are increasingly tuning out.
We subscribe to fewer streaming services than we did 5 years ago, not more, and we cut cable a couple months ago. We’re just taking in less entertainment.
There is a Twitter account called TV Grim Reaper run by some unnamed inside source who releases these numbers. And I can summarize it for you: People watch a few shows on Netflix, people watch Ted Lasso and the Mandalorian, people watch reruns, that is all.
FX is the only cable channel that consistently produces shows with a vibe that I consistently like.
I think I agree with the overall premise ... but the superbowl is usually a bad example. MOST of the time they go with performers that are 15 years past their prime. That is the norm, and I also suspect that is the norm for a lot of celebrity endorsement too.
That said, what about youtube for the middle-tier? There are plenty of shows and podcasts getting low-million views and it seems like an era of comedians translated the classic small-shitty comedy starting point, to appearances on podcasts and their own socials, to larger shows and maybe tv spots. Netflix has been pretty good to tier 2 talent in their willingness to do specials as well
“3) You have to be able to tolerate wealthy theatre kid-types. That third thing is the deal-breaker for scores of people” - this is the reason my son decided to not proceed with comedy, he loves stand up but he just couldn’t stand being around theater kids.