It's much more rare for me to find something that makes me laugh uncontrollably now, and for whatever reason, reading is a little more disconnected from physical expression than it used to be for me.
Another factor is changing tastes/standards; I revisit some of the stuff I thought was brilliantly funny and find that it's got racism in it that I didn't notice before, for example. And while I still appreciate how much I used to love it (in many cases, not all) I'd find the same amount of racism in something that I newly discovered (even from a time period when it was culturally acceptable) perhaps enough to put me off it entirely. Someone pointed at the archive.org collection of Abbott and Costello shows from the WWII era, and the sexism, anti-semitism, racism, and tobacco ads are all staggering. Yet it was clearly hysterically funny at the time!
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Date: 2016-05-18 10:25 pm (UTC)Another factor is changing tastes/standards; I revisit some of the stuff I thought was brilliantly funny and find that it's got racism in it that I didn't notice before, for example. And while I still appreciate how much I used to love it (in many cases, not all) I'd find the same amount of racism in something that I newly discovered (even from a time period when it was culturally acceptable) perhaps enough to put me off it entirely. Someone pointed at the archive.org collection of Abbott and Costello shows from the WWII era, and the sexism, anti-semitism, racism, and tobacco ads are all staggering. Yet it was clearly hysterically funny at the time!