Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Well, the second part is easy: none for me. I’m too old to change. I basically do what I’ve always done. I do think YouTube and the Internet in general have radically changed the humor industry, especially for younger audiences, which are much more oriented towards meme-y things that they see. Other people would get shorter things, shorter bits, things that require a lot of inside knowledge, which everybody seems to have now, thanks to the Internet. And if I can extend it to not just YouTube, but Twitter and Instagram and Facebook . . . Everything happens so fast, and everything builds on everything else so quickly. Things become old almost instantaneously, or become mutated so much instantaneously, it’s really hard to keep up, which is why I don’t really try that hard, to be honest. If I think of the humor I consume, I’ve realized, today compared to when I was a kid, how much of it is from amateurs. There’s some one-star reviews on Amazon that are actually hilarious. Twitter can be funny; it’s very context-dependent. Maybe you know this South Korean video of Robert Kelly, the man doing an interview. He’s trying very hard not to be funny, and his two children barge into the room and are removed by his wife. Truly, if you were to hire professional writers to write a scene and professional actors to act, you could not possibly have outdone that particular 30-second sequence. It was just so wonderful because it was real.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.