Brands Learned to Be Funny. Now Nothing Is Funny Anymore.

There was a moment — a brief, shining, probably 2017 moment — when Wendy's Twitter account felt genuinely subversive. Here was a fast food chain, a corporation with shareholders and quarterly earnings calls, absolutely destroying randos on the internet with the energy of a sleep-deprived college sophomore. People screenshotted it. People celebrated it. People forgot, for just a second, that they were being marketed to.

That second is over. And we will never get it back.

The Joke Is the Product Now

At some point in the last decade, marketing departments figured out that irony was a skeleton key. If a brand could be self-aware — if it could wink at the camera and say yeah, we know, we're a corporation, isn't that wild? — it could bypass the part of your brain that filters out advertising. Irony, that sacred defense mechanism of the chronically online, became a delivery system.

The playbook spread fast. Brands hired social media managers who spoke fluent internet. They started posting memes. They began responding to comments with the casual energy of a friend texting at 2 a.m. Duolingo's TikTok account built an entire persona around the green owl being mentally unstable and obsessed with a pop star. MoonPie on Twitter adopted the voice of something ancient and unknowable. Steak-umm — Steak-umm, the frozen beef product — went viral for posting what can only be described as epistemological philosophy.

And here's the thing: some of it was actually funny. That's the trap.

The Brands That Nailed It (And Why That's Suspicious)

Let's be real about Duolingo for a second. Their TikTok strategy — chaotic, self-deprecating, deeply weird — worked because it felt like it was made by a person who had given up caring about brand guidelines. The owl showed up at Dua Lipa concerts. The owl "died" and came back. The owl committed to the bit in ways that genuine human beings rarely do in professional settings.

App downloads went up. Of course they did.

This is the part where you have to hold two thoughts at once: the content was genuinely entertaining, and it was a calculated growth strategy approved by executives. These things are not mutually exclusive, which is exactly what makes the whole situation so deeply disorienting. You laughed at the owl. The owl made you download an app. You are now thirty days into a Spanish streak you didn't ask for. The owl won.

Ryan Reynolds built an entire second career on this architecture. His Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile ads were so self-consciously absurdist that they felt like parody — except the parody was also the commercial. The joke was the ad. The ad was the joke. Your enjoyment was the conversion event.

The Brands That Catastrophically Missed (A Brief Hall of Shame)

For every Duolingo, there are seventeen brands that looked at the irony playbook and understood it the way a golden retriever understands a chess board: enthusiastically and completely wrong.

Remember when brands started putting "we're all in this together" energy into ads during the early pandemic while people were losing their jobs? The acoustic guitar. The soft lighting. The logo at the end. That was a corporation doing emotional sincerity, which is somehow even more unsettling than a corporation doing irony.

Or consider the endless parade of brands that attempted Gen Z slang approximately eighteen months after it peaked. Companies tweeting "no cap" in 2021. LinkedIn posts about being "lowkey obsessed" with quarterly projections. A financial services company once used the word "slay" in reference to a mutual fund. These aren't isolated incidents — they're symptoms of an industry that learned the vocabulary of authenticity without understanding that authenticity, by definition, cannot be learned from a deck.

The miss isn't just embarrassing. It's revealing. It shows you the seams.

Can Irony Even Survive This?

Here's the philosophical gut punch at the center of all this: irony only works when it's unexpected. The whole mechanism of irony — the gap between what's said and what's meant, the wink that signals we both know what's really going on here — depends on a shared understanding that the speaker is operating outside the norm.

But when the norm is irony? When every brand has a chaos persona and a meme strategy and a social media manager who just finished a masterclass on being relatable? The gap closes. The wink becomes a tic. And the audience, trained by years of this, starts to feel something new: a low-grade, ambient exhaustion at being perpetually marketed to in the language of not being marketed to.

There's a term that's been floating around cultural criticism circles: "irony poisoning." The idea that consuming enough layers of self-aware, winking, meta-humor eventually makes it impossible to locate sincerity anywhere. Brands didn't cause this alone, but they accelerated it magnificently.

What Comes After the Joke

The weird part is that some consumers have started to respond to sincerity the way previous generations responded to irony — with surprise, then suspicion, then genuine appreciation. Brands that just say what they mean, without the wink, without the chaos owl, without the "we're not like other corporations" energy, can occasionally cut through precisely because the bar for straightforwardness has gotten so low.

Which means the cycle is about to eat itself. Sincerity is going to become the new irony. Brands will start performing authenticity so aggressively that authenticity will need to be reclaimed. Someone will start a small business that "keeps it real," it will go viral, it will get acquired, and the acquired version will hire a social team to maintain the realness at scale.

The owl is already watching. The owl is always watching.

And somewhere, in a conference room you'll never see, someone is pitching a campaign built entirely on the premise of not being like those other brands who pretend not to be like other brands. It will test well in focus groups. It will make you laugh. You will share it.

The algorithm will remember.