The Tyranny of Silliness

If one wades through the popular YouTube videos one will quickly notice a common theme: silliness. Each one features fast, jerky shots (usually with some sort of inane music in the background) of a person making a silly expression or gesture, and adopting a daft tone of voice, as if they were entertainers having a nervous breakdown on some dire children's television programme.

One can take random examples from the 'trending' section of YouTube to illustrate this:

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When most people look at or listen to recordings from the 1940s, say, they think the people sound silly. The pitch of the male voice is too high, the enunciation too precise, the accent too plummy. Yet modern man and woman hears their own absurd, graceless speech and think it is normal. Of course, it is not so much silliness they identify in the voices from the 1940s, but rather their own discomfort. The old voices sound silly to moderns because those old voices were serious. They were learned, hierarchical, dignified, from a time which was far more serious. When moderns laugh at these voices it is a laughter to alleviate unease. Indeed, the tyranny of silliness we face is a result of the fear of the serious, the discomfort one might experience in the presence of seriousness and serious people, and therefore feeling entirely out of place. The brain spasms, and a trite phrase, 'yolo' or 'lols' perhaps, is ejaculated; the phone is removed from the trouser pocket or handbag, and the person exits the world and enters their unholy sanctuary of social media, comforted by its triviality and silliness, which requires nothing of them but laughter and likes.

Of course, while they are patently silly to many around them, they do not consider themselves silly. They have almost reverted to a semi-animal state where they are not fully self-conscious. One example of this phenomenon is pop music. In the typical pop music video, a person in daft clothing, spouting the most uninspired and crude lyric (which they think is meaningful), will bop about nonsensically, usually with a very glum look on their face. It is this glumness which is most revealing. They think they are serious, or at least the very least not silly. One of the most obvious features of most popular music (so obvious most people seemed to have missed it) is its complete lack of a sense of humour. It has gone through eras of flared trousers, psychedelic t-shirts, ripped jeans, tracksuits, oversized 'bling', pseudo-hooker outfits, mohawks, mullets, and worn it all with a straight face. The most frightening thing about the tyranny of silliness in which we live, is that the silliest people take themselves seriously, and moreover they are taken seriously by most others. The pop star is an idle, he or she is revered; any semi-literature, uninformed pronouncements made on a political or moral issue are considered to have weight.

As I wrote here, we really do live in an inverted age.