Who Lost Their Sense of Humor, Me or “The New Yorker”?
June 7, 2026
Every week, I page through: nope, nope, nope. All I want is one New Yorker cartoon as funny as they used to be, so I can stick it on the fridge and grin at it when I start dinner. Is it me, have I misplaced my sense of humor in the piles of chaos the news brings every day? Or has the humor itself changed, become so small and dry that I can nod once, getting it, but not want to return?
The question begins to haunt me, until I am so puzzled that I resort to asking AI. The chatbot warns me of “expectation bias: knowing the brand primes you to anticipate irony or a specific voice; anticipation reduces the cognitive twist that produces laughter.” This is wrong. Anticipating irony is delicious; it is why I love certain comedians. Nor am I “too distracted to modulate amusement.” Nor am I willing to undertake “‘a cartoon fast’: a short break increases sensitivity to the form when you return.” Oh my living God. And we are letting these machines decide our future?
As I delete the chat, a real possibility occurs to me: I am not too old to laugh, that will never happen, but I am at a point in my life where I am uninterested in the corporate world, the tropes of psychotherapy, and the disappointments of other people’s relationships. Nor do newer forms of humor—cringe, surreal memes—resonate. I fear I have become my elders, who were wistful for Bob Hope and Carol Burnett….
Yet when I look for human opinion online, I find readers of varying ages agreeing with me.
“I don’t think it’s about tastes changing,” one writes on Quora. “I’ve been reading New Yorker for years and it seems that just recently, after years of clever cartooning, the caliber of quality has changed abruptly. I’m guessing that there’s a new cartoon editor, who has a lower bar of acceptability.”
Christopher Bailey writes: “New Yorker cartoons have objectively declined, and it is not just the subjective crankiness of those of us who think everything was better when we read it by gaslight. Those cartoons were once a powerful cultural force, and now they are not.” Bailey accuses the magazine of losing its lightness and becoming, that kiss of death, earnest, because in today’s world, “to be taken seriously as the queen of American literary periodicals, the New Yorker must not be facetious any longer.”
Another answer is simpler: “Because the biggest comedian this country ever has seen has occupied the White House and made every other comedian, comic book drawer and caricaturist jobless.”
I find defenses of the cartoons, too, and some sting: “The humor has shifted to a heavy reliance on absurdist, surreal, or non-sequitur scenarios that may go over many readers’ heads.” Is there more I am not grasping? Then this: “They are meant to be light, refreshing breaks in the middle of long, serious articles, not a daily ‘funny page.’” Geez. All I wanted was a single tear-out for the fridge.
Many apologists fall back on the habitual accusation of in-group, elitist snobbery—but that never bothered my Midwestern soul. People, they used to be funny! Maybe not hours of giggles, but a Hah! of genuine amusement that did not lose potency the minute the joke was grasped. There is a reason the magazine was able to sell hardbound coffee-table books of its cartoons. There is a reason Thurber’s cartoons, decades ago, spun off a TV show and then several movies. And this collection, with favorites from 1928 to 2013, still cracks me up. Okay, maybe today’s humor is “subtler, more satirical.” But I miss the universal, ready response previous cartoons achieved.
Nothing is universal anymore. Apparently, not even human nature.
Or rather, we still use humor to release tension—but each in our own self-enclosed way. Societally, we have made definite progress: gone are the minstrel shows, rude vaudeville, and caricatures of drunken Irishmen and infantilized “pickaninnies.” Gone are the knee-jerk, superior-male jokes—“Take my wife—please.” Gone are the screwball comedies of idealized happy families that were used to punish the rest of us. No longer is it cool to “punch down,” mocking someone perceived as inferior. (Unless, of course, you are the president.)
Starting in the sixties, as civil rights came to the fore, humor found fresh targets in politics, religion, sex, and hypocrisy. Cultural conflict could be exposed, maybe even defanged, by humor. Our neuroses became fair game, letting us laugh together instead of harboring dreaded secrets. One by one, the taboos relaxed. I remember my great-aunt wincing at tampon commercials; her heart could not have stood today’s talk of vaginal secretions and the odors and postures of poop.
Still, she would have missed all of us laughing together—though something as tame as The Ed Sullivan Show would no longer amuse…anyone. We are drawn to (or maybe just treated to) raw stand-up about identity and trauma; absurd internet memes; and my personal favorite, edgy and cathartic political satire (at least until all its practitioners have been fired).
I ought to be grateful. No more dehumanization. No more stock ditzy-housewife or henpecked husband jokes. Instead, a confessional openness that, while it can tip into wearying self-indulgence, is at least honest. Also, there is a welcome easing of the obsession with therapy, now that the need has normalized. But so much of our humor is either niche, in-group cleverness, the sort high schoolers use to exclude, or dry absurdity, the sort cynics on the verge of depression use to puncture others’ cheer.
If we all still watched and read the same stuff, what would our humor look like? I try to imagine how New Yorker cartoonists would respond to a wider audience. Would they be forced to find more durable takes on the way we live, or do we all live too differently now? Surely there are aspects of human nature we still share, quirks that can be teased affectionately without stereotype or malice? I miss the kind of humor that happens spontaneously when people who genuinely like each other hang out and joke freely about foibles. Maybe we are no longer sociable enough, relaxed enough? Appealing automatically to certain sensibilities limits not only a joke’s reach but its depth, and it fast becomes formulaic. Wry observation is not enough to sustain us.
By now, the next issue of the New Yorker has arrived. I flip from one cartoon to the next. Some feel lazy, some overcareful (a casualty of cancel culture?), and some so restrained that they elicit only a slight eyebrow lift and seem happy with that. Topics are predictable: heavy-sigh takes on the failures of all kinds of relationship, our unwanted dependence on technology, or our bleak future. A prophet on a streetcorner holds a sign: “The end of your operating system is near.” A young woman eats a burger: “I ate way more grain bowls back when I had hope for humanity.” Not funny. Which I guess is the point.
