Getting Serious About Humor: A Humor Question

You have probably heard about some national security folks in the U.S. accidentally including a journalist in a group chat in which they were discussing military strikes. I heard about it the night before last and ended up sitting in bed scrolling on BlueSky, which I don't usually do. But there was some hysterically funny stuff turning up there about this situation. 

"To stop receiving security material from the White House, hit UNSUBSCRIBE."

I laughed out loud at that one, though it doesn't seem that funny now. Maybe you had to be in bed to get it.

Or how about the skeets with something like "Me listening to White House war plans" with a clip from some movie of an actor playing a bored military guy with a telephone held to his ear? I've seen that one twice.

There was also a Maxwell Smart joke I liked, though I can't remember how it went now. And a really good one with a photo of Putin looking at a cell phone and saying, Hold it, guys. P. Hegseth is typing.

I got up yesterday morning, and I thought, You know, Gail, this is kind of frightening. We have no protection. We have no one to protect us at all.

Then I went back on BlueSky to look for more laughs on the subject.

Why Are We Laughing About This?

Now, I must say, I don't find BlueSky a particularly funny place. I'm slowly working on creating my bubble of writers and publications there both of which I'd expect to stay on topic. My experience on Twitter was that if you can get a big enough bubble, you don't get a lot of other material. But I don't have a big BlueSky bubble at this point. I see a lot of stuff there, and there's not much in the way of humor coming through. Mostly outrage.

Over the last couple of months, there's been a lot of truly...ah...fascinating...stuff going on in the world. But I haven't seen many people cracking jokes about it. Not what you might call creative vs trolling "people humor" coming from the general public. The professional humor writers on, say, The Daily Show, are working these things, but people on the Internet are too busy keeping track of how much money Elon Musk is losing and writing about how happy that makes them to have any time and energy left to think of funny things to say about anything. They may believe that the situation is so dire that there's nothing funny to say.

Until that group chat. Oh, now, we have something funny to say.

My theory about what's going on:

• Accidentally adding someone to a military planning group chat rises (or descends) to the level of farce--a ridiculous situation and buffoonery--in ways that saber-rattling and risking healthcare do not. The group chat thing could easily be in a movie. It will almost certainly be a SNL sketch this weekend unless, God help us, something bigger comes up first.  
• It's okay to enjoy farce, but it's not okay to enjoy being the bad guy threatening countries whose citizens never saw us coming for them. 

Come On, Guys. We Can Do More with This.

The mere fact that there is a military planning group chat is funny. It's incongruity humor--planning a military attack on a group chat the way a bunch of kids might plan, you know, kids' stuff. Except kids would know how to do it.

Group chats could inspire more humor for a day or two before they become overdone:

The Health and Human Services Group Chat: This would include RFKJR being RFKJR as well as Dr. Oz trying to be doctorish.

The Kennedy Center Group Chat: In which Donald Trump organizes entertainment for the performing arts center.

The Department of Education Group Chat: This one would include professional wrestlers being the voices of reason in discussions of student loans and staffing shortages