A joke never belongs to the person telling it. It belongs to both people: the one telling it and the one who, before the sentence is even over, already knows where it’s going. Without that shared knowledge there is no joke. There’s only noise disguised as a sentence, much like an equation that only one of the two people knows how to read.
For most of the last century, that wasn’t much of a problem, because the pool of shared knowledge was enormous—and, conveniently enough, handed to everyone on a silver platter. Everyone had seen roughly the same things, at roughly the same time, on the same screen. Titanic stayed in theaters for months. So did The Last Emperor. You could make a joke about either movie in almost any gathering, with almost any stranger, and it would work, because the common ground was almost automatic. You didn’t have to explain anything. Culture had already done that work for you.
The First Crack: The Niche
With social media came something that initially felt like a wonderful expansion. Suddenly, you could find the three thousand people on Earth who loved Godard, The Legend of Zelda, or Borges with the peculiar devotion of someone who reads him as though he were an instruction manual. Small, intense communities with their own internal language. For a while, this was presented as one of the best things that had ever happened to culture: at last, niches could thrive without asking permission from the mainstream. The data supports that story quite clearly. Musical genres that once lived in obscure corners now sustain entire careers by connecting directly with audiences scattered across the world, without needing anyone else’s approval.
But that expansion came with a quiet cost, and that’s the part that interests me. We gained depth, but we lost common ground. A joke about Godard works brilliantly among the five people who get it and falls completely flat everywhere else. It’s no longer enough to tell a joke. First you have to guess whether the other person has the map required to understand it. That’s work. And work is almost always the natural enemy of humor, which either lands instantly or doesn’t land at all.
The numbers already reflect this fracture. Streaming platforms increasingly invest in productions made specifically for local audiences rather than for “everyone.” On YouTube, most of the platform’s biggest videos never even cross the borders of the country where they were uploaded. The old monoculture—that strange period when Star Wars and the latest sitcom genuinely served as social glue across continents—no longer dominates. What we have instead are fragmented audiences consuming different things at the same time, each perfectly satisfied inside its own bubble.
The Second Crack—The One That Hasn’t Fully Arrived Yet
And this is where I think your intuition points to something more serious than niches alone. A niche is still shared territory. A thousand people watch the same Korean drama. A hundred thousand follow the same streamer. A Discord server laughs at the same meme. There’s still a we, even if it’s a much smaller one.
What’s coming is different in nature, not just in scale. If content starts being generated specifically for each individual, adjusted in real time to that person’s pace, references, sense of humor, and exact history of what made them laugh last week, then common ground doesn’t merely shrink—it disappears. We would no longer be fragmented audiences divided into tribes. We’d become audiences of one, each served by a system that no longer needs anyone else to understand the reference because there’s no one else in the room. The joke would stop being a bridge between two people and become a mirror speaking to only one.
And a mirror, no matter how funny it is, doesn’t let you laugh with anyone else. It only lets you laugh alone, even if you’re surrounded by people.
What We Lose When the Shared Joke Disappears
There’s something we rarely say about shared humor. It isn’t a decorative feature of social life. It’s one of the cheapest and most efficient ways we have of constantly confirming that we still understand the world in roughly the same way. Every time a joke lands, two or more people confirm, in the space of a second, that they share the same mental map. That’s no small thing. It’s probably the most economical way of saying, “We’re on the same side of reality,” without having to say it outright, with all the weight and awkwardness that would carry.
If that mechanism disappears—if each of us ends up living inside content built precisely for us, frictionless and requiring nothing to be shared with anyone else—what disappears isn’t laughter. Laughter will probably survive, perhaps more accurately calibrated than ever, more efficient, more personalized. What disappears is the effortless excuse to discover that someone else sees the world the way we do.
And I can’t help suspecting that this effortless excuse was doing far more social work than we ever gave it credit for.