This piece on the annoying internet genre of the “Perfect Response” is worth your time. If anything, Adam Sternbergh’s analysis would work on a bit of a broader level than he says. He’s right that the Perfect Response is a fantasy, and one that reflects a depressing tendency for people to see wit and clarity in opinions they already agree with.  But the broader cultural phenomenon is the way in which we’re now living on Planet Zinger, where everyone seems to feel compelled to never stop launching one-liners at each other, constantly. The Perfect Response is emblematic of a culture that seems to think that the kind of ceaseless reference humor and withering insults that are in every comedy now is something that can exist in real life, rather than something that can only come into being through months of work in a writers room.

Even really funny people aren’t funny that way, and most people aren’t really funny. Most people aren’t even a little funny.

I really think it comes from being saturated in sitcoms, in our youth, where people in implausibly nice apartments endlessly ping pong put downs at each other, filling the silence with exactly as much of interest or meaning as the laugh track. To my horror I’ve come to think that a lot of people see this as what adulthood is, people sitting around apartments trying to roast one another, for no particular reason, a ceaseless contest to prove how funny you are between people who lack the capacity to express unguarded human emotion. I mean, that’s what we saw in the sitcoms, right? And what other vision of adult life, exactly, do we have in this country? What is the healthy vision of adulthood in 21st-century America? Even if people were actually capable of doing this effectively, of constantly telling genuinely funny jokes, rather than endlessly A/B testing their shtick on the internet and quickly mumbling past all the failures… god, what a bleak world, what a nightmare.