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> The Three Stooges were a slapstick comedy trio (if you’re under 40, ask your parents). Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cu

> The Three Stooges were a slapstick comedy trio (if you’re under 40, ask your parents). Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and such. Seems with either (a) a larger population, and/or (b) a rising tide of more sub-niches and fracturing in entertainment (music, TV, movies, etc), it's getting harder to a common base to draw upon.

petercooper 5y ago
You're right. My parents used to witter on about all sorts of old fashioned things that I've remembered and refer to (e.g. Monty Python quotes) simply because my parents and The Simpsons were almost all I had as cultural guides. I know who the Three Stooges are entirely because of a reference a doctor makes in The Simpsons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBj8r1-fDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBj8r1-fDo Nowadays, the Internet offers thousands of entertainment choices in every sub genre with a million memes generated every minute and modern audiences like that, so until The Three Stooges turn up in a popular GIF or TikTok...
barneygale 5y ago
Culture went through a brief period of heavy homogenisation while terrestrial television was a big thing. The Three Stooges never aired in my country, but I still got the reference. It's still homogenised, and with the advent of the commercial internet, subcultures are exposed to reactionary backlash before they have time to properly develop and establish themselves.
syoc 5y ago
I completely agree. I fear that the lack of a common cultural ground will make society even more individualistic, antagonistic and enforce the existing tribe mentality even further. It is also something I don't see getting any better. There are a lot more divisive trends right know than uniting in my opinion.
- barneygale 5y ago
  Culture has been hyper-local since forever, and you'll never remove that instinct. It's a success story for humanity, not a problem to address. The issue we face today is that it's profitable to provide free online arenas where tribes can do battle.
  - Loughla 5y ago
    I think the larger problem is that hyper-local used to mean your neighborhood, family/friends, and generally the people around you. You went to the same places, you saw each other often, you interacted. In general, this is not the case anymore. In general, the wide-wide world huge tribe has invaded the hyper-local space via politics, religion, or whatever else and has segmented even those local spaces. Neighborhood block parties were a thing in the area I live, up until about 2004. Now they're a quaint weird one-off that one local neighborhood does. People don't know each other, other than to know that Joe lives in that house, and Sara lives in that one, with no context about who they are; until Joe puts a Trump flag up, now everyone knows what he's about. I don't know what my purpose is for writing that, it's just an observation I've made.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      A lot of that hyperlocality was because the only way to hear music was to go to a live performance. The only way to enjoy a dramatic performance was to go to a live performance. In the era before widespread dissemination of printed materials and widespread literacy, the only way to enjoy a literary work was to—you guessed it—go to a live performance. This meant, among other things, that there was a period of time when a larger portion of the population was able to make a living (albeit not necessarily a good living) through arts performance. Jerry Lewis, for example, got into show business to support his family (this was also the case with the Marx brothers a generation earlier). As technology has increased the ability to disseminate artistic work, it has become a smaller fraction of the population gaining a wider audience. Some of the trends, e.g., streaming music, have ended up with recorded music becoming economically unviable for smaller acts (the numbers are widely disseminated so I won't get into that). Not sure where things are going from here, or what the anomalous period in human culture really was or will be.
rgoulter 5y ago
It was interesting to see the most-disliked YouTube Rewind. There were so many large YouTube channels and communities in the video that the average viewer wouldn't recognise most of them.
jedimastert 5y ago
I was just about to comment on this, but in a different way. I'm 26, most of my friends are early-to-mid twenties, and all of them would get a Three Stooges reference, or at least know who they are. It almost always feels super condescending to say it like "if you're under..." as opposed to "if you don't know them, they were a staple of physical comedy and comedy of errors, you should definitely look them up". Definite "You wouldn't get it kid" vibes that I'm never a fan of. > it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and such. I wouldn't agree with that, or at least I wouldn't put this nearly as recent as you make it sound. I think that idea fell away when we stopped having folk tales. In America, I would point to the fall of the tall tale, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry. As someone who grew up adjacent to Appalachia, story-telling was a big part of my cultural education. I think it's something I was to pass to my kids too. As a side note, in making this comment I came across the wikipedia page for "American Folklore" and it's actually a really interesting read. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folklore_of_the_United_States https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folklore_of_the_United_States
bigbillheck 5y ago
> Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and such Yeah, and it was mostly limited to the Bible, some classical mythology, and Shakespeare.

petercooper 5y ago

You're right. My parents used to witter on about all sorts of old fashioned things that I've remembered and refer to (e.g. Monty Python quotes) simply because my parents and The Simpsons were almost all I had as cultural guides. I know who the Three Stooges are entirely because of a reference a doctor makes in The Simpsons! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBj8r1-fDo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmBj8r1-fDo Nowadays, the Internet offers thousands of entertainment choices in every sub genre with a million memes generated every minute and modern audiences like that, so until The Three Stooges turn up in a popular GIF or TikTok...

barneygale 5y ago

Culture went through a brief period of heavy homogenisation while terrestrial television was a big thing. The Three Stooges never aired in my country, but I still got the reference. It's still homogenised, and with the advent of the commercial internet, subcultures are exposed to reactionary backlash before they have time to properly develop and establish themselves.

syoc 5y ago

I completely agree. I fear that the lack of a common cultural ground will make society even more individualistic, antagonistic and enforce the existing tribe mentality even further. It is also something I don't see getting any better. There are a lot more divisive trends right know than uniting in my opinion.

barneygale 5y ago
Culture has been hyper-local since forever, and you'll never remove that instinct. It's a success story for humanity, not a problem to address. The issue we face today is that it's profitable to provide free online arenas where tribes can do battle.
- Loughla 5y ago
  I think the larger problem is that hyper-local used to mean your neighborhood, family/friends, and generally the people around you. You went to the same places, you saw each other often, you interacted. In general, this is not the case anymore. In general, the wide-wide world huge tribe has invaded the hyper-local space via politics, religion, or whatever else and has segmented even those local spaces. Neighborhood block parties were a thing in the area I live, up until about 2004. Now they're a quaint weird one-off that one local neighborhood does. People don't know each other, other than to know that Joe lives in that house, and Sara lives in that one, with no context about who they are; until Joe puts a Trump flag up, now everyone knows what he's about. I don't know what my purpose is for writing that, it's just an observation I've made.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    A lot of that hyperlocality was because the only way to hear music was to go to a live performance. The only way to enjoy a dramatic performance was to go to a live performance. In the era before widespread dissemination of printed materials and widespread literacy, the only way to enjoy a literary work was to—you guessed it—go to a live performance. This meant, among other things, that there was a period of time when a larger portion of the population was able to make a living (albeit not necessarily a good living) through arts performance. Jerry Lewis, for example, got into show business to support his family (this was also the case with the Marx brothers a generation earlier). As technology has increased the ability to disseminate artistic work, it has become a smaller fraction of the population gaining a wider audience. Some of the trends, e.g., streaming music, have ended up with recorded music becoming economically unviable for smaller acts (the numbers are widely disseminated so I won't get into that). Not sure where things are going from here, or what the anomalous period in human culture really was or will be.

rgoulter 5y ago

It was interesting to see the most-disliked YouTube Rewind. There were so many large YouTube channels and communities in the video that the average viewer wouldn't recognise most of them.

jedimastert 5y ago

I was just about to comment on this, but in a different way. I'm 26, most of my friends are early-to-mid twenties, and all of them would get a Three Stooges reference, or at least know who they are. It almost always feels super condescending to say it like "if you're under..." as opposed to "if you don't know them, they were a staple of physical comedy and comedy of errors, you should definitely look them up". Definite "You wouldn't get it kid" vibes that I'm never a fan of. > it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and such. I wouldn't agree with that, or at least I wouldn't put this nearly as recent as you make it sound. I think that idea fell away when we stopped having folk tales. In America, I would point to the fall of the tall tale, like Paul Bunyan or John Henry. As someone who grew up adjacent to Appalachia, story-telling was a big part of my cultural education. I think it's something I was to pass to my kids too. As a side note, in making this comment I came across the wikipedia page for "American Folklore" and it's actually a really interesting read. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folklore_of_the_United_States https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Folklore_of_the_United_States

bigbillheck 5y ago

> Meta: it used to be that any society used to have fairly consistent cultural references that could be rely upon for analogies and such Yeah, and it was mostly limited to the Bible, some classical mythology, and Shakespeare.