Imagine trying to pay 80 units of currency and accidentally handing over only 75.
Someone beside you says, “Tokisoba.”
If you know the classic rakugo story, your brain immediately loads the entire bit: counting coins, asking the time halfway through, and slipping a number into the count. If you do not know it, then nothing happens. It is just a five-unit mistake.
Calling this “the joy of being cultured” makes the whole thing sound much grander, and much more hierarchical, than it needs to be.
“Are people who know old rakugo supposed to be superior?” “Isn’t rakugo just one hobby?” “How is this different from anime fans laughing at a manga reference?”
Structurally, it often is not different at all.
A silhouette seems to have too many muscular arms: “Machamp?” Someone strikes an absurdly dramatic pose: “That is a JoJo pose.” You see a blue flower: “If that is the Blue Spider Lily, Muzan is about to clock in.” Two people who know rakugo see a payment mix-up: “Tokisoba.”
The pleasure does not require a hierarchy of high culture and low culture.
It comes from a real-world event connecting to the same stored reference in two minds at the same time.
The interesting part is not “I know this.”
It is “Wait, you know this too?”
Psychology, psycholinguistics, sociology, and media studies give us several useful concepts for explaining exactly why that feels good.
1. “Culture” is too large a word for this tiny mechanism
“Culture” or “general cultivation” can refer to an enormous range of things: literature, history, science, art, institutions, and the ability to see an issue from multiple perspectives.
None of that is necessary to explain why a one-word joke can land.
What matters is smaller:
“I know this reference.” “You know this reference.” “I know that you know it.”
Conversation research calls mutually shared knowledge like this common ground.
A 2024 systematic review of common-ground research describes it as information mutually known by conversational partners. Speakers use that shared information to shorten descriptions and make communication more efficient.
So the important claim is not:
“More knowledge makes you a better person.”
It is:
“When two people share the same reference, a tiny cue can recover a large package of meaning.”
A shared reference is basically a cultural keyboard shortcut.
2. Tokisoba and Machamp are doing the same cognitive job
In the classic rakugo Tokisoba, a man owes 16 mon for noodles. While counting coins into the vendor’s hand, he reaches eight and suddenly asks the time. The vendor answers “nine,” and the customer immediately continues with ten, effectively smuggling the vendor’s “nine” into the payment count and cheating him out of one coin.
That means a real-world underpayment can activate the whole story with one word: “Tokisoba.”
The same compression happens with pop culture.
Too many arms? “Machamp.”
A dramatic angular pose? “JoJo.”
A suspicious blue flower? “Blue Spider Lily. Somebody stop Muzan.”
One label can retrieve a character, a setting, an old scene, a tone, and a whole chain of associations.
The knowledge itself is not the joke.
The joke appears when reality matches a stored pattern and both people notice the match.
Give the human brain enough references and everyday life starts installing unofficial DLC.
3. Common ground is a compression protocol for conversation
Speakers normally adjust what they say according to what they think a listener knows. Researchers call this audience design.
Studies show that people use shared knowledge with a particular partner and gradually settle on shorter, partner-specific labels.
If the listener does not know Pokémon, you may need:
“The four-armed, muscular fighting Pokémon.”
If they do know Pokémon:
“Machamp.”
If the two of you have already joked that a certain person looks like Machamp:
“Oh, Machamp is here today.”
The underlying meaning has not become smaller.
Only the transmitted message has become shorter, because the listener reconstructs the rest from memory.
That is why high-compression communication feels satisfying.
But compression works only when both sides have the same decompressor.
Throw “Tokisoba,” “Blue Spider Lily,” or “JoJo pose” at someone with none of those references and your brain may be playing a 4K video while their screen shows 404.
4. The pleasure is less “I know it” and more “It connected”
Research on shared reality argues that people care not only about behaving similarly, but also about experiencing a sense that another person sees or understands a target in a similar way.
Inside jokes are a perfect miniature version of that.
“Tokisoba.” “What time is it? ...No, wait, I did not do it on purpose.”
In half a second, each person discovers:
“You got the reference.” “You knew the expected continuation.” “You knew that I knew it too.”
That is not merely possession of knowledge. It is successful synchronization.
The same thing happens when a crowd recognizes a song from its first few notes. The rewarding moment is not only recognition. It is recognizing together.
5. Inside jokes create an inside — and therefore an outside
There is a less comfortable side to all this.
Fine and de Soucey described how groups develop “joking cultures”: recurring humorous references known to members that help interactions flow, affirm affiliation, and preserve group history.
But the same mechanism also separates insiders from outsiders.
If two people in a group of three spend ten minutes exchanging references to a series the third person has never seen, the third person has fewer ways to participate.
Shared references therefore have two faces:
“They let us become close without explaining everything.”
and
“They work without explanation, so people without the reference can be locked out.”
That does not make inside jokes inherently bad.
It simply means that the same efficiency that creates intimacy can also create a boundary.
6. Studying references because you feel left behind is not a bizarre reaction
Online culture produces an endless stream of references.
You watch a video. The comments explode with “JoJo reference lol.” Everyone seems to understand except you.
That can trigger:
“What is this?” “Where is it from?” “Should I read it?” “I want to get it next time.”
That motivation may be more than abstract curiosity.
A FOMO paper published online in 2024 and in the 2025 journal volume reported seven experiments with 5,441 participants. FOMO became stronger when people missed experiences involving valued groups, especially when they worried that missing the bonding experience could hurt their future belonging or relationships.
That study did not test the specific behavior of learning manga references from a video-comment culture. We should not pretend it did.
But the direction fits well: what hurts is sometimes not missing information, but missing a shared experience that everyone else seems to have.
Learning the reference can become a tiny cultural passport.
7. When shared knowledge turns into rank: subcultural capital
Why, then, does a harmless sentence like “knowing this made the moment more fun” sometimes get interpreted as “people who do not know this are inferior”?
Because knowledge sometimes really can become status inside a community.
The concept of subcultural capital describes situations where knowing the right works, styles, histories, norms, or distinctions can function as status within a scene.
Nissenbaum and Shifman showed a similar mechanism in their study of internet memes. Meme knowledge can operate as cultural capital, mark boundaries between insiders and outsiders, and produce conflict over the “correct” use of a meme.
At that point, the interaction can shift from:
“You know this too?”
to:
“How do you not know this?”
The shared reference has turned from a toy into an exam.
That is the important distinction.
The problem is not whether the reference came from classical rakugo or Pokémon.
The problem begins when “I know this” gets converted into “therefore I rank above you.”
8. You can understand the reference perfectly and still think, “Not another JoJo joke”
Not every negative reaction to an inside joke is secret envy or fear of exclusion.
Sometimes you know the reference and are simply tired of it.
You can understand every JoJo reference and still think:
“Again with the ominous sound effects?” “Another character drawn with a JoJo face?” “Does everything become a JoJo reference now?”
Memes need familiarity, but they also need some degree of novelty.
Nissenbaum and Shifman describe memes as an unstable equilibrium between convention and innovation. Communities can argue endlessly over stale memes, wrong uses, forced references, and what counts as a fresh variation.
So at least two different irritations exist:
“I do not understand this and I feel left out.”
and
“I understand this perfectly and it has been run into the ground.”
Those are not the same psychological state.
9. In face-to-face conversation, check the listener’s dictionary before sending the file
This is where the research becomes practical.
When a reference fails in an article, the reader can often skip a sentence.
When a reference fails face to face, the result can become a judgment about the speaker:
“Why did this person suddenly say something weird?”
That is why adjusting references to the listener is sensible.
You know they like Demon Slayer. → Use the Blue Spider Lily joke.
You know they like Pokémon. → Use the Machamp comparison.
You think they probably know the work. → Add a small label first: “In Demon Slayer terms…”
They probably do not know it. → Use an ordinary description.
That is not “watering yourself down.”
It is audience design.
You are matching communication protocols.
Being funny is not only about storing more jokes. It also includes estimating which jokes this particular person can decompress.
10. Writing gives you more freedom — and eventually the writer becomes a reference
Articles, blogs, and long-form posts are more forgiving than live conversation.
A reader can skip one reference. You can mix rakugo, games, manga, memes, and self-directed punchlines without forcing every reader to respond in real time.
Something even more interesting happens when you write repeatedly.
At first, the reader needs to know JoJo to understand your JoJo joke.
Later, regular readers start to know you.
They learn:
“This writer is going to make that comparison again.” “Here comes the self-interruption.” “They are going to turn this mundane object into a ridiculous boss fight.”
Now the writer’s own habits have become common ground.
A person who originally borrowed references from existing culture can gradually become a reference system of their own.
The only danger is assuming every new reader is already a veteran.
The strongest writing can support both layers at once: highly compressed jokes for returning readers and enough low-compression context for newcomers to keep following the main argument.
Conclusion: Knowledge does not raise your human rank. It increases the number of things you can connect
Knowing Tokisoba does not make you superior.
Knowing JoJo does not make you superior.
The same goes for Pokémon or Demon Slayer.
What knowledge does is increase the number of reference points available when reality happens.
If another person shares one of those reference points, a tiny moment can suddenly become a game:
“That is totally that thing.” “You saw it too? lol”
A payment mistake becomes a centuries-old comic story. A pose becomes a manga panel. A flower becomes a final-boss alert.
Maybe “life becomes richer” is too grand.
A more accurate description is that the world accumulates unofficial annotations.
And when the person next to you can see the same annotation, that is unexpectedly fun.
The key feeling is not:
“I know this.”
It is:
“Wait, you know this too?”
References (7)
- Fine, G. A., & de Soucey, M. (2005). Joking cultures: Humor themes as social regulation in group life. HUMOR, 18(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.2005.18.1.1
- Bovet, V., Knutsen, D., & Fossard, M. (2024). Direct and indirect linguistic measures of common ground in dialogue studies involving a matching task: A systematic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31, 122–136. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02359-2
- Ferreira, V. S. (2019). A Mechanistic Framework for Explaining Audience Design in Language Production. Annual Review of Psychology, 70, 29–51. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011653
- Echterhoff, G., Higgins, E. T., & Levine, J. M. (2009). Shared Reality: Experiencing Commonality With Others' Inner States About the World. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4(5), 496–521. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01161.x
- Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan's /b/ board. New Media & Society, 19(4), 483–501. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815609313
- Rifkin, J. R., Chan, C., & Kahn, B. E. (2025). Anxiety about the social consequences of missed group experiences intensifies fear of missing out (FOMO). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 128(2), 300–313. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000418
- Japan Arts Council, Cultural Digital Library. Everyday life in rakugo: traditional time and money counting in Tokisoba. https://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/dglib/contents/learn/edc20/geino/rakugo/kurashi3.html
