In a video posted to TikTok, a crowd of pre-teens screamed “six-seven” as a Tulsa women’s basketball player sank a three-pointer at an NCAA game. The kids shrieked the random digits like a soldier’s battle cry before running headfirst into war, while parents locked confused — even scared — eyes across the bleachers, baffled at the reaction. At the beginning of 2025, the number 67 had no meaning — and even now remains meaningless, just more popular than before.
“Six-seven” is just one of the absurdist memes that young people embraced in 2025. There was also Italian brainrot, “low taper fade,” and Eye of Ra edits, all of which fall under the category of comedy that’s funny precisely because it’s incomprehensible and holds no meaning whatsoever.
That kind of humor doesn’t come from nowhere. To many in Gen Z, life has been absurd since the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea of a virus being able to take the world by storm in the modern era, much less claim over seven million lives, seemed insane. Then there’s rising political polarization, an affordability crisis, a difficult job market, and a social media environment that constantly exposes the most online generation to misinformation, communication overloads, and disturbing images that create compassion fatigue. To many, nothing in life makes sense anymore — so this year, Gen Z adapted by leaning into the uncertainty.
The absurdist philosophy that underpins this latest chapter in youth humor was popularized by key figures like French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, best known for his book The Myth of Sisyphus. In the Greek myth Camus retells, the gods condemned Sisyphus to push a boulder to the top of a mountain, only to watch it roll back down to the bottom, and then do it over and over again in eternal fruitlessness. Camus considered Sisyphus an absurd hero, given his pointless action in the face of terrible conditions. He argued that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” because, despite understanding the meaninglessness of his life, Sisyphus found peace and perhaps even joy in his fate. This acceptance of meaninglessness, Camus said, allows one to fully appreciate life.
“Six-seven” and other similarly nonsensical memes are Gen Z’s way of laughing in the face of less mythological hard times. The numerical meme emerged from Instagram Reels, and initially gained popularity in March when a young boy at a basketball game went viral for yelling the number that had appeared in the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Throughout 2025, the song was commonly used in videos, especially ones featuring NBA Hornets player LaMelo Ball, since he is 6 feet 7 inches tall. The shifting meaning of the “six-seven” meme has made it even more incomprehensible to kids and adults alike. Italian brainrot, meanwhile, grew on TikTok in late 2024 and went viral in 2025. The term refers to AI-generated videos of random, humanoid creatures with borderline-offensive, Italian-sounding names — like a coffee cup named “Ballerina Cappuccina,” a banana-monkey hybrid called “Chimpanzini Bananini,” or a shoe-wearing shark dubbed “Tralalero Tralala” — all with user-created, nonsensical backstories that contribute to the absurdity.
Gen Z has been trafficking in absurdist political humor for a while, and even more so in 2025. Thousands shared a Snapchat video of Hillary Clinton saying, “I’m just chilling in Cedar Rapids,” when it was uploaded to Vine in 2015; in 2024, young people delighted in the video of Kamala Harris saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and endlessly remixed then-Presidential candidate Trump’s debate comment, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” In 2025, there was grotesque JD Vance, SignalGate, and a swath of Trump memes. Gen Z didn’t champion these and other clips because they aligned with their personal politics necessarily, but because they’re just plain funny.
Politicians get Gen Z’s preference for absurdist humor and meme culture, and are trying to leverage it for their own popularity; though it must be said that President Trump seems to come by this communication style naturally. Since 2017, he has been known for long, ranting posts; he also tweeted more than 25,000 times during his first term. He has since graduated to posting bizarre, AI-generated media on Truth Social, this year posting a picture of himself as the Pope and a video of him dumping excrement on a crowd of protestors while flying a fighter jet labeled “King Trump.”
Other politicians and political entities have been tapping into the trend of meaningless hilarity. After Trump’s AI image spree, California Governor Gavin Newsom responded on X, mockingly resposting AI images like one with Newsom’s face on Mt. Rushmore. The Democrats’ official TikTok account also follows trends and posts somewhat nonsensical memes, mostly making fun of Donald Trump.
This embrace of absurdist humor by the political powers that be has brought more “unseriousness” — a phrase commonly used to describe the Gen Z attitude toward heavy topics and events — to American politics. For Gen Z, with their love of senseless memes, that’s made politics more entertaining.
But this embrace of meaningless memes about politics and all manner of related real issues — the affordability of groceries, access to life-saving medicine, and family separations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is dangerous. Absurdity may help Gen Z cope with a senseless world, but if everything is reduced to a joke, it’s easy to forget the real consequences and difficult to see the point in civic engagement that could effect change in whatever ways youth would like to. Politicians should do better — and Gen Z should, too. The absurd may make Gen Z laugh, but it’s also permitting us to look away.