I get what you're saying, but that inward direction is the last American frontier, or so the cultural zeitgeist has seen to it. This is precisely because the outward, wrecked, outraged, mean comedy is perceived as exactly that -- mean, and therefore, unwanted, especially when targeted at groups of people. We right now have a bunch of tsk-tskers and cluckers that holler out "that's not nice!" every time a joke is made at somebody or some thing's expense. The refrain of "can't take a joke" is now the refrain and conciliatory refuge of the ignoramus, bellicose, and unrefined soul. To be truly funny and hip, one must, these days, navigate the neurotic and uncertain terrain of self rather than tangible things or persons existing outside our solipsistic mindset.
The problem in American humor might also be that the main thrust of humor makes somebody, somewhere, the butt of a joke, and Americans and our love for the underdog don't necessarily like that. We have an uneasy relationship with comedy -- we come from religious and communitarian forefathers that were more fire and brimstone than Greek or Roman humor. We started our form of government not out of virtue manifest in its most efficacious form, but out of a religious or human notion of man manifest and implemented with a respect for science and the observational method. The dignity of man codified with science. It's all a paradox, really.
The paradox further extends (though this doesn't logically follow from the sentence before and functions more as an observation) to how we love our winners and losers sentimentally while promoting the middle class to arbiters of everything cultural. But this begets a problem: The middle class these days is nothing if not unsteady in its place, and therefore, humorless. The great American humor and artistic endeavors used to poke fun or contemplate the middle classes, from the nouveau riche to the steady bourgeois. The nouveau riche was successful enough not to notice and the steady bourgeois were too unhip to. But not anymore. The middle class is keenly aware of its own tenuous economic and social position in relation to its betters, and laughs less because of it. In a consumption-based society where everyone has a voice, the humorless and outrage stemming from this insecurity rises to the top, and we hear the comics shouted down by the outrage of both left and right.
Thus, ever inward, but with one caveat: I disagree that inward or meta comedy can't be "real." It can be very real to people who traipse in the unsteadiness that is the neurotic. If there is one paradox in modern thought, it is that this unsteadiness of the comprehension of self is the thing that binds us to each other. Indeed if ever inward, then a suggestion on my end: The true comic should endeavor to destroy the commonality of the neuroses of self through humor. That is the next great rebellious or comedic act and, paradoxically, can only be done on self's grounds.
were Ted and Sausage Party.
