Week 4 Response – Anika Czander

I found it to be so interesting the differences in humor that we noticed in class today. The Kermit meme is found to be funny by a wide variety of young people; I have cousins in Italy that are 9 and 11, respectively, who find Italian versions of the same meme and love it. While I personally found Mort Sahl’s stand up to be quite funny, it seemed very drawn out, which made me think of the attention span differences between the 1960s and now. While a meme is a single frame with text, and can be read very quickly, it seemed like most of the humor in the 1960s (including both the tv shows and the stand up comedy) were long, humorous, and lead to a big punch line at the end. This certainly supports the theory that people today have much shorter attention spans than they used to, and can be seen through all types of humors and entertainments.