Gen Z humor is an acquired taste, and it became chaotic as a deliberate response to growing up entirely online. They were exposed to irony at an age when previous generations were still watching Saturday morning cartoons. Gen Z has developed what researchers call a meta-awareness of humor formats, making straightforward jokes feel dated.
The meme that makes no sense is funny because it promised to make sense and then did not, and the audience is in on the trick because they have been in on every previous version of it. It is humor that assumes fluency, which is also how you know it belongs to a generation that grew up speaking internet as a first language.
The closing argument for the no-context meme is simple and has nothing to do with philosophy or neuroscience. Sometimes something is funny, and no further explanation is available or needed. Demanding a rationale for laughing at a banal image is the comedic equivalent of asking why a song makes you feel something, and getting an answer would not improve the experience.
The memes you are about to encounter lack context because that's not what they were built for. The point was the two seconds between seeing it and whatever your face did next, and that already happened before you finished reading this sentence.
