Every Time You Dunk on an Expert, You’re Being an Even Bigger Snob
Renaissance parodies of pedants weren’t rebellion β they were velvet ropes. To laugh at a scholar being mocked, you had to be educated enough to understand the joke, which made satire the ultimate gatekeeping ritual. The same dynamic powers today’s expert-dunking culture: mockery doesn’t dismantle hierarchies, it just builds new ones with better camouflage.