The Stickiness of Jokes: Why Humor Won’t Modernize Twice

Liwa Sun

Virginia Woolf claimed that on or about December 1910, human character changed. All human relations shifted, transforming religion, mores, politics, and literature. Humor changed too: it became modern, a reproducible technology that could persuade and sell. But here’s the problem: humor modernized once, and then it stuck.

This talk argues that contemporary digital platforms (Twitter, TikTok, Reels) haven’t modernized humor again. They’ve created perfect conditions for its viscosity. Every brand voice sounds identical. Every meme format is a remix of the same comedic move. HBO’s Sopranos and Succession revealed this: their characters can’t tell jokes anymore, only perform around where jokes used to be.

Working between Shanghai and San Francisco, I see how this stickiness operates across different cultural substrates but produces the same outcome: humor optimized not for insight but for adhesion. Jokes don’t need to be funny. They only need to be thick enough to stop your scroll, sticky enough to repost, empty enough not to resist.

We’re trapped in the viscous aftermath of humor’s first modernization, with infinite access to humor’s modern forms but no access to humor’s modernizing force.