Breaking: Somehow Professor's TikTok Joke Doesn't Land
With the semester in full swing and students showing up to their classes with their syllabus week enthusiasm thoroughly eroded, professors everywhere are growing more and more visibly desperate in their attempts to make their lectures appealing. Equipped with the generational analysis that college kids and tweenagers are basically the same (right?) and freshly Googled understandings of what an e-boy is, today’s professors have turned the lecture hall into a minefield of heavy-handed attempts at Gen-Z humor. One such misguided professor recently tried his hand at a little classroom comedy, joining the incredibly unselective group that is composed of people on campus who tried stand-up once and were disappointed with the lackluster results.
“I’m not sure what went wrong. My TAs all said it would be funny, and that, no, they weren’t joking even if it seemed like it,” said Dr. Peter Collins, who taught a 4000-level class on how to properly use an em dash. “The kids have got their first big test for my class on Friday, and I figured I’d remind them that preparing for it was not something they could successfully procrastinate on. I told them that if they wanted decent grades on this exam they’d need to get off TikTok and start studying since time was ‘tick tock-ing’ towards the test. Not a single laugh. One student closed her laptop and just walked out. I don’t get it. It was a solid joke! It’s funny because the app these kids are always talking about is called TikTok which sounds like tick-tock, which is the sound a clock makes, which is relevant because it was a joke about the passage of time and – you wouldn’t get it.”
“Yeah, I left. I heard the joke and suddenly remembered that attendance wasn’t mandatory,” said Claire Torres, one of Dr. Collins’s students/victims. “Was it a bit dramatic? Maybe. Could I have learned something from the rest of that class? Perhaps. Was Dr. Collins setting up to go over a detailed, yet succinct study guide for Friday’s exam, which would’ve been super clutch for me since I haven’t done any of the readings this semester? Okay, yeah, sure. But I knew in my heart that there was a tiny chance I would stay and have to hear him tell us to stop stanning LOONA and start stanning our textbook, and I just – I couldn’t take that chance.”
Until we can put an end to the epidemic that is boomers and past prime millennials wanting to talk about young people things, the lecture hall will continue to exist as a semi-educational hostage situation. Forcing students to weather verbal assault in the form of misplaced social media references seemed to be a solid plan since most of them were viciously hoping to earn a degree at the end of all the torture. Despite their best efforts, many college professors remained evergreen examples of why your friends telling you you’re funny doesn’t necessarily mean comedy is for you.