Inside 'Gen Z humor,' the layered and absurdist internet jokes millennials are struggling to keep up with

• Some Gen Zers have openly mocked millennial humor as being cringe and outdated.
• Meanwhile millennials have begun appealing to Reddit for help as they're baffled by the humor behind Gen Z memes.
• Gen Z humor is complex, inspired by absurdism and a fast-moving social-media landscape.

Millennial humor has had a rough ride on TikTok lately: Gen Zers have analyzed their gags, picked apart their self-deprecating digs, and denounced the whole thing as try-hard and cringe. 

But if Gen Zers are finding millennial humor cringe, millennials are finding Gen Z humor bewildering — with millennials feeling lost on what they're supposed to find funny. Lately, the generational comedy divide has popped up as a common topic of conversation across the internet.

Last year, a Reddit user who goes by TrainStationPoet posted about this very dichotomy in r/OutOfTheLoop, a subreddit designed to shine a light on various topics for those who feel out of touch. In a lengthy post to Gen Z, she said was a 35-year-old with a 22-year-old sister who sent her memes, and the problem was, "I genuinely do not understand ANY of them."

The post appeared to resonate, receiving over 15,000 likes and 2,500 comments.

Because of the speedy nature of social media today, a joke on the internet quickly snowballs, becoming more intricate and absurd, and relying on everyone being in on the joke. So it's understandable that some people may feel out-of-the-loop when it comes to Gen Z humor. 

Gen Z jokes are often extremely layered, which may contribute to confusion around them

The most popular response to the Reddit post was written by a 34-year-old who compared Gen Z humor to a long-running and "somewhat far-fetched" joke between friends that had evolved beyond its original premise, where the "preposterous" and convoluted growth of the gag becomes the funny part.

A further reply noted Gen Z humor seemed to be more accelerated than old-school millennial memes due to the rate at which younger people used social media, so internet jokes now took on a collaborative quality with a speedy turnover, allowing them to "morph into something absurd as they vomit it back and forth with changes a billion times in a few hours."

A hugely popular recent example demonstrates how this works.

On August 12, a TikToker who goes by @emilyjeffri posted a video with an on-screen caption that suggested a "new bit idea" with her viewers where they could reference a fake 1980s horror movie called "Zepotha" and leave comments on other people's videos saying they looked like characters from the non-existent blockbuster. 

The video received 6.9 million views, and within four days TikTokers had created filters, fancams, and detailed plot outlines for the fictional film. Naturally, it's hard to understand why this is funny unless you saw the original video and followed its evolution, which would require someone to have spent a lot of time on TikTok and be algorithmically served these videos, or have them shared within your community.

Gen Z jokes are often inspired by absurdism or 'anti-humor'

In 2021, Chloe Partlow, a student from Mentor High School, in Mentor, Ohio, examined the relationship between Gen Z and absurdist humor, and shared her findings in a paper published in the High School Edition of the Journal of Student Research. 

Partlow presented memes that varied on an absurd scale — such as an oversaturated image of a man with the head of a cat gripping a baseball bat beneath the words "soup time" — and tested how funny Gen Z students found them. Turns out, they were into them. She concluded, "We can be over 99% confident that there is a present relationship between absurdist humor content in meme stills and how humorous they are rated by Generation Z students."

Thom Hamer, a doctoral researcher in philosophy at Cardiff University and University of Southampton, who published his thesis "A Critique of Humoristic Absurdism," in 2020, agrees. He told Insider a form of absurdist humor can involve the juxtaposition of two ideas, where there is a clear set-up that rapidly goes in a completely unexpected direction to evoke a humorous response, something that is present in many Gen Z jokes.

A good example of is the "Grimace Shake" trend which took over TikTok in June, where creators filmed themselves taking a casual sip from the purple McDonald's drink, before the video bluntly cut to them in strange positions like passed out on top of a car, dragged through a sewer, or trapped behind metal bars. On the face of it, it makes no sense, but in a way, that's the joke.

Then there's anti-humor, which appears to set up a joke, only to reveal there is no joke, which in itself becomes the joke, like a wholesome meme that shows text laid over an image of a person in meme format, but actually offers up a sincere message and no apparent gag.

Hamer said this type of humor isn't strictly new, but "those kinds of jokes get maybe intensified by Gen Z," who are creating their own rules as "a response to the outdated forms of humor" and eschew the classic set-up and punchline formula.

"The absence of a punchline is what constitutes the punchline, and that's something I think you see a lot in Gen Z humor," Hamer told Insider. "It has that absurdity of there not being a joke but at the same time it introduces a kind of new sincerity into the joke."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.