Clever, Original, and Funny Title

I try to be unique. It never works.

Mark Twain once said, “The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism.” At least, I think he said that. Someone else probably said it first.

The point is, there's no such thing as an original thought. There are 7 billion humans on the planet right now, a small fraction of those who have ever existed. Statistically, anything you say or think has most likely been said or thought by someone else at some point in human history. Maybe nothing came of it. Somebody will discover the cure for cancer and some guy in Cambodia's going to think, "Aw, crap! I thought of that! Why didn't I do anything about it?"

Similarly, it seems to be impossible to make any sort of joke that hasn't been made before. I like to laugh and I like to make people laugh and be around people who are laughing. But finding a joke that'll make every single person in the room think, "Oh my god, that's so new and hilarious! I've never heard anything like it!" is absolutely impossible. (I don't mean to compare comedy to the cure for cancer, but they do say laughter is the best medicine. Ugh. You see that? I just borrowed that common trope for my own joke. I'm awful.) Sure, a couple people will be hearing it for the first time, but never everyone.

The Horsehead Nebula.
This is what you've done.

I suppose this is where my hatred of memes comes from. Or, more broadly, what I call "reference humor." Memes are jokes that started sort of funny, then became so wildly popular that everyone's just making the same joke with a slight variant. The joke has lost its soul at this point. But enough people haven't seen it, or don't care, that for someone out there the novelty still exists. There's beating a dead horse, and then there's atomizing it. The internet actually beats the horse so much it breaks down into the very building blocks of existence. That's how much of an epidemic this is.


Nowadays, though, the memes don't even stay on the internet. When internet culture went mainstream, it bled into the real world. I hear people saying, "Can I has _____?" and "Ermagherd," and "You're such a grumpy cat today!" Jokes that were originally funny because of their complete stupidity have become part of our culture and language. That's kind of terrifying. It makes me want to say Idiocracy is becoming a documentary, but everyone says that and it's not funny any more.


It's not just memes, though. Movie quotes, those poor movie quotes, end up driven so far into the ground that they end up somewhere that makes this metaphor slightly original. Monty Python and the Holy Grail used to be one of my favorite movies. I can't watch it any more, thanks to incessant quoting. If I could gauge how interesting a conversation is, the theoretical zero point would be Holy Grail quotes. We can get damn close. Someone will bring up the movie and the rest of the conversation is completely out-of-context, shoehorned quotes. "WHAT... is the average flight velocity of a sparrow? African or European? What? I don't know that - WHOAAAAAA!" says every wannabe comedian at the lunch table. STOP.

It's just an overused joke!

I'll admit, I'm occasionally a hypocrite in this regard. I'll make an out-of-context reference every now and then and when I catch myself doing it, I wish I could take it back. Errare humanum est. I do try to hold myself to a higher standard, though. I want laughter to have soul. Some spark of human creativity. Like I said, it's impossible statistically, but we can at least try. Laugh at a meme, then move on and don't think that you're going to be able to top the original with your slightly different subtitle.

You're funny. You don't need to show me that other people are, too.