I started doing comedy in New York at the tail end of one era and the start of another. I wasn’t a name, but I lived in the places where the culture breathed: late-night bars, basement shows, open mics where people tried to carve a thought into a punchline. I grew up on Hicks, Patrice, Carlin, and Stanhope. They weren’t influencers. They were craftsmen whose jokes functioned like scalpels.

Their work trained you to think.

Hicks pushed your mind past the surface.

Carlin exposed how language hides power.

Patrice insisted on honesty even when it hurts.

Stanhope stripped every illusion down to the bone.

They sharpened you. They forced autonomy.

I went into comedy because it was the purest form of autonomy I had ever seen. Nobody could take it from me. It was my body, my voice, and whatever language the room understood. No gatekeepers. No infrastructure. No algorithm deciding whether I existed. If I had something to say and the nerve to say it, I could walk into any basement in New York or any bar in Italy and make something happen.

Coding gives me the same freedom now—another craft where output depends entirely on skill, not permission. I like things where the power sits in your hands.

That was the world I entered: a culture where the stage was a forge, where you learned by friction, where craft mattered more than clout.

Then the culture flipped.

Kids today grow up in a completely different ecosystem—one where identity isn’t carved, it’s generated. Their “teachers” are streamers, reaction guys, parasocial personalities living inside a feedback loop. The old path was:

observe → think → write → perform.

The new path is:

react → broadcast → repeat.

Autonomy was replaced by audience-dependence.

Then COVID hit and erased the physical infrastructure. Months of lockdown dissolved the slow, friction-based world where craft used to incubate. When New York reopened, the people returned, but the culture didn’t. Something new took its place—something born online, not on stage.

That’s the atmosphere where Dimes Square appeared.

A few streets treated like a cultural center, but the real movement lived in Discord servers, group chats, and parasocial loops. The neighborhood wasn’t a movement; it was a landing pad for identities already shaped on the internet.

The tone was set by voices like Nick Mullen, Adam Friedland, and Red Scare.

Cum Town, especially, shaped my generation.

Nick’s comedy felt like the raw truth hiding under the false sincerity of the 2010s—brutal, self-hating, precise. A joke knife slipped under the skin. For many of us, those episodes were more honest than any piece of mainstream media. Messy, but clarifying. They built a worldview: nothing is sacred, everything is fragile, and the only way to tell the truth is to tell it sideways.

Nick wasn’t just funny—he hit me at a strange moment.

I was one of the many who quit comedy during COVID. No more mics. No more late nights. Suddenly I was a guy listening nostalgically to a podcast describing the rooms I used to grind. Nick felt like a ghost of a future I didn’t choose.

He’s a genius of freestyle—like an underground rapper who never releases an album but destroys anyone in a cypher. On stage he’s good; on the mic he’s untouchable. Loose, chaotic, razor-sharp. It felt improvised but inevitable.

But irony doesn’t scale.

It works in a room.

It works in a niche podcast.

It dies in the algorithm.

The moment irony hits mass distribution, it stops being a method and becomes an aesthetic. By the time Dimes Square hit mainstream attention, it had already turned into a parody of a parody. The aesthetic got stripped of meaning. The meaning became the aesthetic. People weren’t imitating ideas; they were imitating posture. Irony as a look. Irony as lifestyle. Irony as brand.

That’s how the tone migrated to TikTok.

Kids who never listened to a full episode mimicked the cadence, the posture, the detached cynicism. Irony became a filter, not a thought. A tiny downtown joke turned into a mass-produced personality template.

And once the tone becomes empty—once irony becomes the entire message—someone eventually fills that emptiness with sincerity. Dark sincerity.

That’s how you get Red Scare hosting Nick Fuentes.

Not shocking—structural.

The endpoint of the drift.

If your brand is built on pushing boundaries, eventually the only “boundary” left is the one the old world considers untouchable. And if you forgot why irony worked in the first place, you don’t see the slide coming.

Then the Israel discourse hit—2023, 2024, 2025.

The political tripwire.

The topic that detonated friendships, jobs, and entire social circles.

Calling everyone Nazis for a decade eventually generates real ones—or at least people who stop caring about the distinction.

My generation doesn’t share the emotional attachment Boomers do.

We see AIPAC.

We understand influence.

The machinery is visible now, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

That visibility created a vacuum where irony used to live.

At some point, the most “ironic” thing you can do is drop irony entirely.

Not joke.

Not distance.

Just say racist things because you mean them.

That’s where the Groypers come from.

Not from Carlin or Patrice.

From irony collapsing into identity.

Once identity enters the room, the tone changes.

Comedy stops being exploration and becomes recruitment.

Irony can’t survive that pressure—it hardens into sides.

My generation took cues from comedians who pushed you toward individual thought.

Today’s generation takes cues from streamer culture—Zerkaa, Sneako, Fuentes—hour after hour of reaction, not creation. No editing, no structure. Talking not to sharpen ideas but to generate tribal energy. It isn’t about thought. It’s about belonging.

COVID didn’t just pause culture—it reset how culture spreads.

Stand-up trains the mind slowly.

Streaming trains the nervous system quickly.

Downtown scenes used to form through discipline.

Now they form through algorithms.

I’m part of the generation caught between these worlds. I learned from the old guard, then lived inside the irony wave. I laughed at Cum Town like everyone else. I saw both the brilliance and the danger in its tone. And now, with distance, I’m trying to trace how we went from the basement rooms of my twenties to the influencer-driven tribalism shaping kids today.

The through-line is simple:

irony → aesthetic → tribe → escalation.

We didn’t plan it.

But we lived through it.

We thought we were joking.

We thought we were reacting.

But we were training the machine.

And now the machine isn’t just training us—

it’s writing the script for whatever comes next.