It wouldn’t be fun if we didn’t turn this into an educational thing, so strap yourself in, because we’re gonna get a bit nerdy. Or not. We’re gonna get educational, though.
Baby boomers are a generation of people who were born between 1946 and 1964. They're called that because that was the time of conceptual prosperity and hence a lot of people were born during that time. Today, folks representing boomers are between 58 and 76 years old.
Baby boomers are actually the second-biggest generation by population, going right after millennials. Because of these numbers and the state of the economy back in the mid-20th century, they’re considered the most economically influential generation so far.
And, in turn, most people from this generation are goal-oriented, self-assured, resourceful, and value relationships. But, as you might have already guessed by now, growing old means becoming more set in your beliefs, and this meant that there’s bound to be conflict once the next big generation comes along. Spoiler: there already is.
So, millennials came around starting 1981 and continued to come around until 1996, with most of them being kids of baby boomers. And being so far the largest generation around, it has started taking over opinion platforms and pushing out the old ways of boomers.
And this is where it starts to get messy. Compared to the previous generation, most millennials face a lot of financial challenges—everything from crippling student loans to the prices currently inflating in the housing market to a min-maxed labor economy where you gotta work hard to earn peanuts in many cases.
Once millennials started voicing their concerns about this, baby boomers started pointing fingers and calling them lazy, wasteful, and ungrateful (and avocado munchers—yeah, take that, millennials!), despite the economy having been much more generous to them than it is to the later generations.
Studying for boomers cost them nearly 3 times less than it does now for younger generations; the average costs of a new home before the 1970s was $23,000 and only a bit later started rising rapidly; and it’s reported that given how economies work, millennials earn around 20% less than their baby boomer labor equivalents. There are just a few examples of how realistically difficult millennials have it, and how easy boomers had it. Hence the drama.
OK, so, less context, more fun. In turn, boomer jokes are more or less representative of what the general frame of mind was and how things were done back in the day.
The Reddit community r/BoomersHumor does a good job preserving the historical humor of the time in the form of comics and memes, but also newspaper clippings and the like.
Much of this style of humor pokes fun at the generational differences between baby boomers and nearly everyone else, but mostly millennials and Gen Z-ers, but also takes a jab at the boomers themselves in the form of how things have changed.
Topics and themes include ridiculing PC culture and political correctness in general, poking fun at people’s dependence on modern technology, or just dad-joking their way into people’s hearts. Sprinkle in a little bit of sexism, ageism and other forms of opinions that breed intolerance and you got Boomer Humor.
As of this article, the community has nearly 260,000 members who ironically post Boomer Humor on the daily, and it’s a number that the subreddit has managed to draw together since early 2019.
You can check out anything and everything about the community first-hand by visiting the subreddit. But before you do that, comment, upvote, like, all that jazz, and maybe share this list-article with your boomer or millennial friends and see what happens?