This week: Netflix has jokes. They just chose to put them all on YouTube for some reason. We explore why. This and footnotes, so many footnotes, just below, so let’s get into it.
Netflix has created one of the best advertising cum branding vehicles on the internet, called Netflix is a Joke. It is one of those ideas so brilliantly simple it's a wonder none of us ever thought of it before. For those unfamiliar, Netflix created a secondary, official, YouTube channel where they upload short bits of comedy sketches, stand-up routines, and clips from their original programming. As I said, deviously simple and yet thoroughly effective.1 But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the fantastic piece of onomatology that is the channel's title.
“Netflix is a Joke” reads like a self-own, like a piece of self-depreciation used to forestall "you're not funny" comments. At the same time, "you're a joke" feels like a dated insult, like something out of a generic 80s movie.2 So, let's start with the word joke. Here's the very complete Merriam-Webster definition3 of joke as a noun:
1: something said or done to cause laughter
2: a brief story with a surprising and funny ending
3: disapproving: someone or something that is not worth taking seriously
The entry goes on to give examples for each definition, but it's the examples for definition 3 that match our investigation:
That exam was a joke.
Their product became a joke in the industry.
In both these examples, something is being derided as not worth the speaker(s)' time and attention. It is something that is beneath their consideration. Therefore, we can invoke the transitive property and claim that when a pronoun is substituted for a common noun, the person denoted by said pronoun is also not worth our time and consideration. Which makes it sound a whole lot more damning than I had thought.
Joke came from the Latin word iocus in the 1660s, as both a noun and a verb. However, as noted by Etymology Online, in 1791 the word acquired the meaning "something not real or to no purpose, someone not to be taken seriously."4 Unfortunately, EO does not give us a source on that 1791 account and the Oxford English Dictionary is once again demanding too much money to use, so I'm turning to a more recent research tool, Google's n-gram viewer5.
I searched for the phrase "you're a joke." There are two things immediately obvious from running the search. One, the phrase is a lot more common now than it used to be. Two, by looking at both the earliest and most recent usages, we see an interesting pattern in that the two genres most represented by the returned results are self-help and advice and pulp-y, noir, and thrillers6.
So, what does this mean?7 Two things: Netflix's use of the phrase is part of a long-standing pattern of usage in English - we belittle people and things by calling them jokes. In doing so we say that they are beneath notice and not worthy of our time. However, by Netflix turning the phrase on themselves, they are adding a layer of irony to the phrase by suggesting that their own content is not worthy of our time or attention. And yet we know, metatextually, that Netflix is the Goliath in a room full of Davids; Netflix is the streaming service to beat and so, by calling their own content unworthy, they are effectively diminishing the content to be found on all those other, smaller, streaming services. As I said above, it's brilliant marketing.
There is so much more that could be said about this8; I've jotted down notes for at least three research papers just in putting this essay together. One day I may do something with them, but, for now, I've rambled enough and there's a whole bunch of funny stuff to watch on YouTube, so...
Stay Curious,
J
Caveats in place: I am not affiliated with Netflix in any way save for being a subscriber; I'm basing this on five minutes of googling and an awareness of how advertising works on the internet. If anyone has better data, I'm all ears. Also, Netflix doesn't release their advertising numbers yet, presumably, they have to pay someone to edit all those clips out of their source shows and then format and upload them to YouTube, so I'm assuming it's cost-effective or else they wouldn't do it.
Google says yes. It was apparently used in The Karate Kid Part III. To be fair, it has also been used a lot by Gordon Ramsey in his Kitchen Nightmares programs of the last decade or so.
As a verb: to jest, i.e. to tell a joke, and to kid, i.e. to make someone or something the butt of a joke.
"a jest, something done to excite laughter" - Etymology Online; also worth noting is that it may derive from something akin to "word play." From "Word Origins: The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z: "a possible link with Old High German gehan ‘say’ and Sanskrit yācati ‘he implores’ suggests that its underlying meaning was ‘word-play’".
Here's the explanation from Wikipedia: Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2019...The program can search for a word or a phrase...if found in 40 or more books, are then displayed as a graph
There's a lot of data I'm just not getting into here - like how many of these results are actually short for "you're a joker" and just how sharply the use of the phrase "it's just a joke" rises vs. the phrase of "it's a joke," implying that a need for the minimizing function of the former is outpacing the need for the explanatory function of the latter.
No idea. But, if you're looking for a research topic, say, for a dissertation, this would be a great one provided you have access to historical corpora that have a good selection of casual conversations, e.g. the iWeb or GloWbe corpora.
I mean, I didn’t even get into the whole “Am I a joke to you?” meme which is a whole other level of meta-commentary.