Have you ever stumbled upon a joke or a meme that made you laugh uncontrollably just a few years ago, only to look at it now and feel a wave of what the kids call "cringe"? That feeling, that subtle disconnect, is more than just changing tastes. It’s a window into one of the most curious social phenomena of our time: the great humor gap between generations, particularly between Millennials and Gen Z.

We often laugh at their jokes, and they laugh at ours—or rather, at us. But why are the things that amuse two generations, born so closely together, so profoundly different? The answer isn't just about skinny jeans or side parts. It's a story about anxiety, technology, and the very different worlds they were each asked to survive. To understand it, we first have to ask a more fundamental question.

Why Do We Find Things Funny Anyway?

Laughter is a deeply human, almost magical reaction, but philosophers and neurobiologists have tried to pin it down for centuries. Aristotle saw humor in a harmless error, a small deformity that doesn't cause pain. Immanuel Kant suggested that laughter is the sudden collapse of a tense expectation into nothing. Imagine a long, winding story where you’re trying to predict the outcome, only for the punchline to be completely absurd. That failure of logic, that release of tension, sparks laughter. Henri Bergson believed humor was a social corrective; we laugh when a person acts too mechanically, like a machine, because it’s not how a human is supposed to behave. It violates our expectations.

Neurobiology backs this up. For our brain, a joke is fundamentally an anomaly—something unexpected or strange. The prefrontal cortex, our brain's logic center, flags this discrepancy. It’s a moment of cognitive dissonance, a feeling that something isn’t right. The brain’s first job is to determine if this anomaly is a threat. A friend smiling through tears is dissonant, but it's distressing, not funny. However, if the cortex decides there’s no danger, it signals the need to release the built-up emotional tension. The easiest way to do that? Laugh.

With help from the amygdala, our emotional hub, humor becomes a part of our brain's reward system. We get a hit of dopamine, the pleasure chemical, and our brain learns to seek out that feeling again. This is why we hunt for new memes. The old ones lose their novelty, their element of surprise. We need something predictably new—a familiar format with a fresh punchline—to satisfy our brain's reward-seeking behavior.

Laughter in the Face of Anxiety

Humor isn’t just for fun; it’s a critical psychological tool. It helps us cope with stress by devaluing a problem, making it seem smaller and less serious. This is especially true of self-irony. When I can laugh at my own fears, they lose their power over me.

This is the key to understanding the generational divide. When Gen Z mocks Millennials for their obsession with productivity, their anxieties about buying a home, or their fierce loyalty to coffee culture, it's not just mean-spirited. It’s a defense mechanism. They are looking at the generation just ahead of them and seeing a future that scares them. They see the burnout, the stress, the crushing weight of adult responsibilities. By parodying it, they are saying, “We see how you’re driving yourselves into the ground, and we’re afraid of becoming you. So, we will make it a joke now, so it’s less terrifying when it’s our turn.”

This targeted humor is incredibly effective. Research shows that jokes related to a specific problem reduce stress more effectively than an abstract meme about a cat. By mocking the struggles of Millennials, Gen Z is preemptively easing their own anxiety about the future they are about to inherit.

The Therapeutic Humor of a Generation on Fire

To be fair, Millennials have their own unique brand of humor, born from their own unique circumstances. Their childhoods were often marked by economic instability and the rapid, chaotic rise of Western culture and the internet. Many had to grow up fast, shouldering responsibility in an unstable world. They were the pioneers of the blogosphere and meme culture, and the jokes from that era feel warm with nostalgia.

Millennial humor is, therefore, a way to process deep-seated anxiety through self-irony and reflection. It’s humor with a therapeutic quality, a way of saying, “I’m laughing at myself so I don’t completely lose my mind.” The perfect illustration is the classic “This is fine” meme: a dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, calmly sipping coffee and assuring himself that everything is okay. He knows he’s in hell, but he’s holding on. For a generation that feels like it’s constantly navigating a world on fire, that image is more of a documentary than a joke.

The Postmodern Escape of Gen Z

Gen Z’s experience is completely different. Their childhoods may have been more stable, but their entry into adulthood has been defined by global pandemics, climate dread, social upheaval, and war. They grew up not just with the internet, but in it. From passive consumers, they’ve become the main creators of culture.

To cope with this relentless chaos, they turn to absurd, postmodern, and often meaningless humor. Think of the surreal, AI-generated characters or nonsensical trends that populate platforms like TikTok. The point isn’t to tell a clever joke; the point is to distance oneself from the overwhelming chaos of reality by watching something that has no connection to it.

Theorists would recognize this. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term différance, the idea that meaning is always shifting and elusive. Gen Z memes operate this way, often existing as a chain of references to other memes, which reference a tweet that remixed an old clip. The meaning isn't in the image itself but in the web of connections that only a native of that culture can understand. Jean Baudrillard would call them simulacra—copies of copies that have lost all connection to an original reality. A meme like Skibidi Toilet began as a parody, but that meaning was quickly lost as it began to simply copy itself, an endless stream of recognizable forms with no anchor to the real world.

The Unending Cycle of Generational Mockery

This cycle of mockery isn't new, and it won't end with Gen Z. In a few years, Generation Alpha—those born after 2012 who have known technology like voice assistants and virtual reality since infancy—will look at Gen Z’s humor and find it cringey. It will be their turn to feel like the outdated generation, complaining that things were better in their day.

There's a cognitive bias at play here called "illusory superiority." Older generations often perceive younger ones as less competent, comparing them to an idealized version of their own past. Psychologists have found that we project our current, mature selves onto our memories, making us believe that today's youth are somehow inferior to how we were at their age. Our memories are not perfect recordings; the brain prunes old neural connections to make space for new information. This process is called synaptic pruning. In this process, unpleasant and unimportant details fade, leaving a polished, beautiful picture of the past. We remember the highlights and convince ourselves, “We weren’t like that,” when what we really mean is, “I wouldn’t do that now.”

Ultimately, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek offers a powerful lens through which to view this conflict. He notes that modern cynicism is born from the gap between our knowledge and our actions: we know something is an ideological spectacle, but we participate anyway. Millennial humor, with its sincerity, vulnerability, and talk of the "inner child," seems sentimental and weak to Gen Z because they don't believe in that kind of emotional security as a foundation for life in a chaotic world.

Humor is a mirror of the times. When a Gen Z individual calls a Millennial joke "cringe," they aren't just critiquing a punchline. They are rejecting the world and the method of survival that the previous generation built for itself. It’s not about the meme; it’s about a fundamentally changed approach to life. And as unsettling as it may feel to be on either side of that divide, this cycle of change, rejection, and reinvention will repeat itself forever. And that's okay.

References

• Martin, R. A. (2007). The psychology of humor: An integrative approach. Elsevier Academic Press.
  This comprehensive text explores the various theories of humor, from philosophical roots to modern neurobiological findings. It provides a strong basis for the article's discussion of incongruity theory (the violation of expectations, as mentioned with Kant) and humor's function as a powerful coping mechanism for stress and anxiety (pp. 293-328), which is central to the analysis of both Millennial and Gen Z humor.
• Twenge, J. M. (2017). iGen: Why today's super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy--and completely unprepared for adulthood--and what that means for the rest of us. Atria Books.
  Dr. Twenge’s extensive research on generational differences provides the cultural and psychological context for Gen Z (whom she calls "iGen"). The book confirms many of the article’s claims regarding this generation's experience with pervasive technology, rising rates of anxiety, and their distinct worldview shaped by growing up in a post-9/11, internet-saturated world. It helps explain why their humor has taken on an absurd, detached, and escapist quality as a response to their unique environment.