My only reaction to seeing this light-hearted text is to observe a general trend that I hadn’t thought of before. I say this, not about this foray into comedy, which has its moments, but of life in the second decade of 2k, (as we enter the third).

Possibly thanks to the Internet, we have found yet another way to underline differences, rather than to embrace diversity. The people you meet or observe who are not of your generation are not identical. There are fads, like long hair and beards, wide and narrow ties, leisure suits and jogging suits. these come and go and always appear ridiculous or at least out of place when not in their time. Tattoos used to be visible on Marines and Yakusa. In fact, tourists were advised to hide their tattoos in Japan. Now they’re popular, along with holes the knees of jeans, low crotches, etc.

As for jokes and memes, it is true that humor is context dependent. If anyone under 65 saw the cartoon where a parrot is repeating “point in time, point in time…” they wouldn’t have known it was a parody about the televised Watergate investigations of about 50 years ago, where that was repeated. How many people who began watching SNL when it first appeared still think it’s funny without the original cast and writers? That was “a point in time”, too.

We’re each different in many ways, even if we belong to a race, a religion, a gender. Again, this article and the comments only served to remind me that drawing more artificial lines to denigrate, even if lightly, saddens me.