If you spend enough time on Reddit, Twitter, or TikTok, you will inevitably encounter a piece of content that defies all logical explanation.
It might be a heavily distorted image of a baked bean accompanied by Arabic text and ear-rape audio of the Monsters Inc. theme song. It possesses no traditional setup, no punchline, and no discernible cultural reference. It isn't trying to be "funny" in any way your parents would recognize.
Yet, it has garnered four million likes and thousands of comments expressing genuine amusement.
You have just witnessed a shitpost.
To the uninitiated, shitposting looks like the tragic death of comedy. But to digital culture theorists, shitposting is a highly evolved, deeply fascinating comedic movement. Here is an explanation of the internet’s most confusing art form.
What is a Shitpost?
A "shitpost" is aggressively low-effort, low-quality, heavily ironic, and context-free content posted to an online forum or social media platform.
The goal of a traditional meme is relatability. The goal of a shitpost is confusion, derailment, and absurdity. It is an intentional rejection of narrative, aesthetics, and common sense.
If traditional comedy is a finely crafted marble statue, shitposting is throwing a handful of wet gravel at someone's face while screaming.
The Core Elements of the Shitpost
How do you distinguish a genuine shitpost from a simply terrible joke? Look for these hallmarks:
- Aesthetic Degradation (Deep Frying): Shitposts are rarely high-definition. They are compressed, distorted, oversaturated, and bizarrely cropped. This visual ugliness signals to the viewer that the content is incredibly ironic.
- Absolute Non-Sequitur: The image and the text usually have zero relationship to each other. (e.g., An image of Peter Griffin from Family Guy with text that reads "Industrial Society and its Future").
- Meta-Irony: Shitposts are often jokes that have been layered with so much irony that it is impossible to tell if the creator is being serious, sarcastic, or simply insane. It is post-humor humor.
The Dadaist Connection
To understand shitposting, you shouldn't look at classic stand-up comedy; you should look at the European art world in the aftermath of World War I.
In 1916, a movement called Dadaism was born. Horrified by the senseless slaughter of the war, artists (like Marcel Duchamp, who famously submitted a urinal to an art exhibition and called it "Fountain") created art that was deliberately nonsensical, ugly, and anti-bourgeois. They believed that if reality (the war) was absurd and meaningless, art should also be absurd and meaningless.
Shitposting is the digital reincarnation of Dadaism.
Gen Z and younger millennials came of age on an internet that is algorithmically aggressive, highly corporate, monetized, politically chaotic, and utterly overwhelming. Shitposting is the cultural immune response.
When the entire world feels like a serious, exhausting, high-stakes battleground, creating deeply aggressively stupid, meaningless content is an act of rebellion. It is a refusal to play by the rules of coherent discourse.
The Humor of the Exhausted
Why is it funny? The humor of a shitpost stems entirely from its refusal to try.
In a digital landscape where influencers spend thousands of dollars on lighting and editing to create the "perfect" comedic vlog, tossing an unedited, weird screenshot of a frog onto the timeline is hilarious purely because of the audacity. It is aggressively low-effort in an exhaustingly high-effort world.
Furthermore, shitposts require the viewer to be fluent in the frenetic, absurd language of the internet. When you laugh at a heavily distorted image of a bean, you are experiencing the joy of a shared inside joke with millions of anonymous strangers who are just as culturally exhausted as you are.
Shitposting isn't the death of comedy. It is simply the comedy of a generation that has realized the world doesn't make sense, and has decided to stop pretending that it does.