mass participatory humor

I wrote a hastily formed comment over on Stubb's blog. For some reason, sitting at home, thinking of something else, I suddenly realize that I forgot to make my actual point in the comment. So, I decide to clarify here on my blog. I get to use the trackback feature, which I really like, especially when used in a community of blogs. (But that is a topic for another post). Posting here also allows me to beef up my own blog. And who doesn't want a beefy blog?

Anyway, to the point:

Over at Stubb's place there was a bunch of discussion of the LOLcat phenomenon. Gary comments:

For me LOLcats are only funny after I've seen a bunch of them in a row. It's one of those jokes that's kind of funny (or odd)the first time, but after seeing it 100 times it becomes funny again. Also, after you've viewed a couple dozen, you actually do start to develop an appreciation for some of the more original ones. The "invisible" LOLcat variations (invisible bicycle, etc) are great, because they're creative and an extension on the originals.

I think this hits on something important. One lolcat image macro may be somewhat amusing or curiously odd. After you see dozens or hundreds of them they all become funnier, because the humor is dependent on the context all of the images provide, and the jokes contained in some of the images may be built off previous images. It was the participation of many individual together that produced the humor. A great case study in how content can be generated by the crowd and how it can take a form very different from content created by a single person or small team working on a finite project.

see also: Wikipedia entry on LOLcats