People unwittingly optimize for the easiest-to-achieve metric when they aren't being rigorous.

The abundance of "funny" accounts is not an accident. We need to stop acting like making people laugh is that difficult.

Making people laugh is so easy that you can reuse a gag over and over again and people will laugh, not realizing they're laughing at the same joke in a different context.

[Or maybe they do. That's not my point anyway.]

The reason why blogs dedicated to "comedic content" (or, another rookie mistake, "eccentric/shockvalue content") are almost doomed to fail.

There is no value in being the "house of laughs."

Hilarity is abundant and low value.

To tweet 1: if you assume humor is what makes your favorite comedic outfit so successful, you'd be missing a trick. You're seeing the shadow, not the object

Outfit X sells something tangible that triggers laughter

If you don't pay attention, you'll think outfit X sells laughter

That's how you end up with a platform dedicated to "jokes," interchangeable, vanilla gags that make people laugh but not much else.

Any idiot can make any other idiot laugh. Heck, it's so simple, babies and cats can do it.

One always has to ask, what is X?

What am I truly selling that triggers laughter?

The simplest, easy to observe tangible X for humor are:

1. Community [comedy clubs and themed comedy events - favorites being minorities dunking on dominant races]

2. Shaping public opinion.

3. Building tribal identity [corollary to community - tool of signaling class]

People say humor is a tool for bringing people together.

Believing that is exactly what makes you have vanilla gags.

Consider a counter: humor is a tool that suggests a group of people have similar values and completely alienates everyone else.

It's a selection tool.

This is not an all-encompassing take, I'm sure [one of the most annoying things about discourses into humor is that there is always an edge case that threatens the integrity of your thesis], but this is a useful way to think of it.