Lead Blog Post: Comedy Within the Global Village

With social media, every individual has the power to create the next viral sensation. Often, a viral phenomenon starts as something unintentional - for example, Drake had no idea that his dancing in the Hotline Bling video would become a meme:

This grandpa just wanted a nice dinner with his grandkids, not to get thousands of retweets:

Skai Jackson was just posing for a nice photo, she wasn’t trying to become an overused reaction picture:

Viral sensations often make the world feel strangely connected - which is a notion that was around even before the dawn of the social media age.

Marshal McLuhan was a prominent scholar in the 20th century, whose theories were extremely ahead of his time. He coined the term  “global village” before the Internet had even come into existence. This phrase basically means that through modern communication, the world has actually seemed to become smaller. He elaborates in the following quote:

 “Like primitive, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. It doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs.”

He is essentially saying that advancement in technology has actually caused us to regress back to a primitive state, in certain ways. The digital age has enabled things to spread rapidly, giving us a sense of immediacy and connection to people across the world, regardless of their socioeconomic status. This global village can be a great thing - it gives people from every walk of life a common thing to bond over and laugh about. But in some cases, it can bring out the darkest parts of human nature - such as the Sharkeisha video discussed last week. Additionally, the global village can humanize those who have achieved celebrity status - The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon does this quite often.

I personally love The Tonight Show, but they have fallen into a formula of comedy for the sake of going viral - often by playing bizarre games with celebrity guests, such as catapulting watermelons at a giant target with Mark Wahlberg:

Or playing a game of Jell-O Shot Twister with Shaquille O'Neal:

People enjoy watching these videos because they humanize someone who otherwise is put on a pedestal. Seeing celebrities play these wacky games is likely funny because of the superiority theory, meaning that it brings famous people down onto the same level as ordinary people. However, the show recently got a lot of backlash for humanizing presidential candidate Donald Trump. Many people did not find it funny to ignore serious issues and instead mess up his hair:

Since The Tonight Show places emphasis on parody and lighthearted comedy, as opposed to the political satire seen from John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, hard-hitting questions should not have been expected. However, in the current tumultuous state of the presidential race, combined with all of the remarks made by Trump in the past, trying to show his "human side" was bound to cause controversy. Since we have been discussing political satire, it is interesting to see how this situation, which is basically the opposite of satire, sparked such a heated political debate.

Comedy, especially in this technological age, can make everyone appear equal with the common response of laughter. But perhaps we should also be mindful that the global village can distort reality, by making the world appear much smaller than it actually is.