Modern pictorial jokes sacrifice meaning for speed of recognition

Evidence

Even the joke, in which once the freedom of the mind collided with the facts and exploded them, has gone over to illustration. The pictorial jokes filling magazines are for the most part pointless, devoid of meaning. They consist of nothing beyond a challenge to the eye to compete with the situation. One is supposed, schooled by countless precedents, to see what is ‘going on’ more quickly than the moments of significance in the situation can unfold. What is acted out by such pictures and then re-enacted by the well-versed onlooker, in the instantaneous sizing-up of the situation, the unresisting submission to the empty predominance of things, is the jettisoning of all meaning like ballast. The joke of our time is the suicide of intention. … Cleverness turns straight into stupidity in face of regressive progress. The only comprehension left to thought is horror at the incomprehensible. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 163

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• CANDY: ‘The joke of our time is the suicide of intention’ — a sharp, tweetable Adorno line.
• SEED: Essay angle: a century before the internet-meme era, Adorno precisely diagnosed the comic strip and pictorial joke as training the eye to outrun meaning — anticipates the modern reaction-gif/meme economy almost exactly.