I was thinking of "random humor" - the sort of thing that hinges upon unexpected juxtapositions or non sequiturs or the like, examples of which range from surrealist comedy to teenagers on the internet saying "lol taco pancake" - and I was thinking about what it truly means for something to be "random". I mean, I hear people talk about "random" things all the time as though "random" really did just mean "unexpected" or "unusual". But then I also hear people talking about whether or not something was intentional or "truly a random coincidence" or anything like that. And it made me wonder whether or not "random humor" is genuinely random.
I mean, it's produced by a person, right? With a few exceptions (I'm thinking about online Twitter accounts purportedly run by spambots and the like), this so-called "random humor" is produced by people. People do things with intention. Even if they don't think they're doing things intentionally, there is still some part of their brain that's actively trying to do something. (Barring extreme cases in which one really doesn't have any control over what one's doing, of course, but I don't think those cases are really associated with the production of humorous material.)
So is this stuff truly random, then? I guess it depends on how we're defining "random". Words take on new meanings over time, and sometimes they don't change meanings so much as just get an additional one to the original. Or maybe it's random in a figurative sense - not actually created with no sense of order or reason behind it, but it sure looks like it was, hence the description. Honestly I'm amazed that a certain kind of humor (much of which isn't even considered particularly "good") can have this much effect on the English language. Or maybe I'm overthinking it. Rubbish. There's no such thing as overthinking.
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