A vague and overgeneralized observation too long for Twitter:
19th century: other cultures are funny!
20th century: cultures’ understanding of other cultures is funny!
21st century: it being funny that cultures’ understanding of other cultures is funny is funny?
(Entirely needless or sorely needed explanation follows.)
As the world gets smaller and our personal circles get bigger - we eat French breakfast, read Japanese comics, listen to Kenyan pop - we crave new ways of finding humor in the strange. It’s less socially acceptable and increasingly more difficult to laugh directly at an entire culture. Step two is still in vogue (see Engrish and Hanzi Smatter) and I wonder when it, too, will become too crass - I mean, is it really that funny that non-English-speaking people don’t speak good English? So the next step in the meta chain may be laughing at those observations themselves.
