The New Yorker:

Our unfunny times are rife with laughter that seldom offers relief.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

The other day, I flew to New York, an event that normally occasions an elation only briefly dampened by the humming trepidation of flight anxiety. Flying scares me, it’s true, not that my Instagram profile or frequent-flier status show it. Recent events, though, have ratcheted that worry to something more acute. On January 29th, American Airlines Flight 5342 crashed into the Potomac River in D.C., after colliding with a military helicopter, marking the deadliest airline accident in the U.S. since 2009. Two days later, a medevac flight operated by Jet Rescue Air Ambulance nose-dived into a Philadelphia neighborhood. These tragedies, whose causes are under investigation, followed decades of deregulation of the airline industry, and understaffing of air-traffic control sufficient to give even fearless fliers pause. Our reinaugurated President, meanwhile, was scything the payrolls of federal agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration. As I brushed my teeth the day before the flight, my dread coalesced into the shape of a meme: Does anyone know if we have airline safety tomorrow?

The meme, in its original form, features an image of a bandanna-clad boy taking a serious-faced mirror selfie, given voice in screaming font that asks, “does anyone know if we have to bring our backpacks to the field trip tomorrow.” With some slapdash editing—slapdashery is part of the charm—others have turned the child’s straightforward query into a template for expressing a memeable malaise, for example, “does anyone know if we have January tomorrow,” posted during the doldrums of that seemingly interminable month; or, perhaps, alluding to the current Administration, “does anyone know if we have federal government tomorrow.” Presented without the expected interrogative mark, these questions suggest a tossed-off despondency, retaining the anxiety of the child who seems unprepared for tomorrow’s excursion. The meme’s humor lies in its shallow expressions of deep feeling: existential problems otherwise worthy of metaphysics or high literature here flung out as low-res Internet flatulence.

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