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Comment on And why you gotta touch my back with those ice blocks 😩

Sombyr@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It’s a weird gen Z thing. The original point of the “no one” meme was to make jokes about people responding to things nobody has ever said. Subverting the punchline is a way to increase humor because it’s not expected. Misusing the meme phrase entirely sets you up to think the meme is going in a direction you’re familiar with only to be a completely different meme, thus increasing the humor. However the “no one” meme has been used this way so often that misusing it became the default use of it instead. Now the humor from it comes from the opposite, in that it’s basically a universal buildup that works for any joke. More or less it’s a beat phrase that sets up a brief moment of suspense for the punchline, similar to how comics will have dialogueless beat panels to increase the humor of the punchline.

Gen Z grew up with this kind of humor, which is why they think it’s so much funnier than older people do. Equally, gen alpha will likely have completely different humor gen Z doesn’t understand.

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Varyk@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I understand that it’s somehow bring used incorrectly, but I’m not sure I understand that a correct usage of it would be.

Isx the joke here supposed to be “nobody has ever said girl’s hands are cold”?

Because that’s a common trope in TV shows, novels, regular conversation.

If the joke is that girl’s hands are cold, why would you need “no one”, and if the joke is that nobody would talk about girls hands being cold, then clearly that’s incorrect.

I appreciate the long explanation, I just do not understand it yet and I’ve received so many different explanations of what “no one” is supposed to mean without getting any closer to what the joke is.

And I completely agree that whatever the original meaning was is essentially lost in people just put the phrase “no one” in front of any image pretending it is a setup to a joke that it is not.

That’s why I crop these images, because there doesn’t seem to be anything semantically or comedically gained from “no one”.

It’s like putting a hat on a hat.

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- Sombyr@lemmy.zip ⁨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.
  
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