Creativity Quote by Max Cannon

"It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not" is the shrug that doubles as a warning label. Coming from an artist, the line reads less like indecision and more like a practiced stance: a refusal to let the audience settle into a clean category where humor is harmless and seriousness is respectable. The phrase "sort of" does the real work here. It drags the listener into the same unstable middle ground the work likely occupies, where laughter catches in the throat because the joke is attached to something true.

The intent feels strategic. By undercutting certainty, Cannon shields the piece from easy moral bookkeeping: if it offends, it was "sort of" a joke; if it lands, it was "sort of" a critique. That ambiguity can be evasive, but it can also be honest about how contemporary life actually registers: memes born from panic, irony used as coping, sincerity smuggled through comedy because direct emotion reads as naive.

Subtext: the artist is pointing at a culture that metabolizes discomfort as entertainment, and entertainment as a way to avoid discomfort. "Funny, sort of not" is the emotional frequency of doomscrolling, where tragedy and punchlines share the same screen. Contextually, it fits an art world (and internet) trained to reward the wink, the deadpan, the posture of not caring too much. The line works because it offers a compact alibi and a diagnosis at once: we laugh, then immediately distrust our laughter.