Laughter in Quarantine
How social media can cure young students’ melancholy in the time of COVID-19
By Emma Niemaszyk
We are now in a time of ever-present unease. The spread of COVID-19 has made us fear the future—lack of jobs, lack of obligations for mental and physical health, lack of motivation for our online classes. Some of us have moved back to our hometowns during the semester, while others stocked up at Aldi and the liquor store, ready to spend long days and nights with roommates. For most of us, the routines that we normally surround ourselves with are no longer viable.
Now more than ever, people are on their phones, on social media, spending a troublesome amount of time scrolling through Instagram, Twitter, and—to much dismay—TikTok. For a long time now, I have been an advocate against social media, with the belief that its falsity and overcompensation ends up making us more insecure and sad than we were before. However, I downloaded the Instagram app because I was bored at home. The more content I saw, the more I remembered not being allowed to leave the house except for groceries and liquor, sitting in bed and not at a desk, eyes always looking at the screen and not at an instructor’s face. The dry, borderline fatalistic humor provided me with relief. I began to sense a pattern. The younger population is now being introduced to a new form of humor: quarantine jokes.
Our collective angst and frustration with the changed circumstances is irreconcilable, but we may as well laugh about it. Now is the time to watch a student on Zoom light up a bong, blowing the smoke into the webcam. There isn’t a better hour to see students cut and paste themselves into an image of Sal’s, or to see an instructor mistakenly identify a water bottle mouthpiece as a vape. There are girls on day nine of quarantine making gender-reveal cakes, even though no one is pregnant. Images of Macaulay Culkin paired with captions are slowly starting to resurface on my feed—a face I haven’t seen for quite a long time.
Gary Janetti’s instagram (@garyjanetti) is filled with collages of the royal family, most of them probably against the behest of the family. One post consists of an image of the CNN article about Prince Charles’ COVID-19 diagnosis; the next slide is of four royals, and in a slow-moving video, the Prince gradually, deliberately fades away, leaving three left—an amusing concept about the triviality and well-to-do attitudes of the frustrating public figures.
Our clocks have stopped. For many people—including myself—the days feel like one giant, long, overdone weekend. An endless weekend, as the people who are stuck in their college houses see it—almost like the spring break lifestyle never really left. On Instagram, there are various people—on separate occasions—chugging bottles of cheap white wine, multiple posts of Ina Garten drinking a giant cosmopolitan.
As everyone says: this is a scary time, and it will only get scarier. But to meditate on pessimistic predictions is not the answer. We must strive to see the more positive side. Bask in the supposed humor of it. We must see the humor in dystopia; we must laugh during what seems like a punishment.