• Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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    11 months ago

    Put simply it isn’t a joke. It’s evolved to the point where it basically means “prepare yourself, a joke’s coming.”

    It’s just a meme that got so overused that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

    Think of it like how 90% of knock knock jokes don’t need the setup of answering the door, it’s just a familiar setup. Why is a banana knocking on the door? Why does there need to be a door in the setup of interrupting cow? That’s what “no one” means to younger people. It’s a familiar way to set up the joke.

    Edit: I forgot to mention, correct usage would be something like:

    Nobody:
    Me: A trillion lions could totally defeat the sun.

    The joke being nobody asked, nobody cares, and I said it anyway.

    • Varyk@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Okay, thank you for the explanation, I think I understand the structure now.

      It’s a non-sequitir with an extra step, and despite the setup only making sense preceding non-sequitirs, the setup is used constantly with things people commonly talk about, are obviously popular or easy to get.

      I think the knock knock setup makes sense because it very clearly sets the audience in a framework, encouraging you to inquire about the situation that you interrupt by subverting expectations via a punchline.

      The no one line seems more like gilding a lily, a hat on a hat, superfluous.

      It doesn’t add much to a joke or non-sequitur, it’s just pointing out that this thing from left field is from left field, while of course if the statement was from left field then you wouldn’t need to explain that it was from left field.

      Weird.

      I understand it better now, and I appreciate your explanation, but I’ll keep cropping these as I see them.

      The no one line feels too much like a kindergartener rubbing their hands together like “I have a joke for you! My joke is a statement!”

      • Sombyr@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        Feel free. The whole “no one” thing has gotten a bit annoying for me too, since the initial memes of it showed up well into my adulthood, well past when my sense of humor had already developed and mostly solidified. I suppose we’re all becoming old people shaking our fist at those darn kids we can’t understand. It’s just good to keep in mind they grew up in a different world with different jokes and games, so their humor is always gonna seem a little weird.

        I prefer to embrace it and just use the memes even more wrong to make them cringe. I think that’s hilarious.