Twitter Is Making Us All Comedians

As a child, when I heard jokes and watched sitcoms, I considered comedy to be a wonderful, ineffable mystery — like sex, or the Trinity. But the joke formats and memes of social media are training wheels, template-izing comedy for beginners. It’s impossible to look through the microscope at the comedy petri dish all day and not start to pick up on its rhythms and mechanics. For better or for worse, we’re all becoming comedy writers now, in a writer’s room the size of a planet.