Is it the golden age of comedy, or does it just feeel that way

 I ask because I've heard Conan O' Brien, among other comedians, talk about how tough it must be a modern comedian. Not only do you have to compete with other amazing comedians, from all over the world in hundreds of proper conventional media and on youtube for viewers and entertainment, you are also going against once-in-a-trillion events that should and could never ever have happened and nobody would have believed you if you had seen one happen, but are captured all the time now because of the law of numbers and the fact that everybody's got a camera and a videocamera and a snarky comment to go along with it. So you have to compete with hundreds and thousands of videos of a cat jumping right on the same moment a bird is flying nearby, so it enters his mouth, but the cat tilts its head just so the bird escapes but not before it hits the tummy of a child who then starts crying and oh the cat falls into a pile of poop and then the child becomes a fucking megastars raking hundreds of millions of views, becoming a millionaire in a few short months.

Even with that though, there's fantastic 'alt' comedy being produced, in addition to the regular conventional network and cable comedies being produced in ridiculous numbers. There's panel shows, reality-type shows, straight-out comedies, two-camera, single-camera, quirky talk shows, you can't even keep track of a very small subset of a particular sub-genre of comedies being produced. SO much content, and all of it, in my humble opinion, quite fucking fantastic.

I wonder if we're truly living in the golden age of comedy or if every generation feels the same, even when they had like two network television channels to choose from and a handful of total comedy shows being broadcast at any given time. Hmmm.