I always thought it was because it was used by people who thought it made their poorly written crap seem more personal and human, when in reality all they were doing was one exceptionally low-effort action: pick the one wacky font that shipped by default with Windows. But instead of making their writing actually seem more personal or human, it just made it look cheap and unprofessional because it was equally associated with the sort of output you'd expect from any child playing with a 1990s-era Windows computer.
(The right answer is instead to embed personality and humanity into the words themselves, which is comparatively much higher effort and indeed beyond the skill of many people.)
Over time we've grown accustomed to working within pre-packaged emotional bounds (e.g. the limited set of emojis) and the meme-status of the font has long since passed so it would probably not be quite the same faux pas today as it was two decades ago.
It probably has a lot to do with things like how much it looks like actual handwriting. Whether you think it's bunk or not, there are people who think they can tell a lot about your personality through handwriting analysis and there are neurological conditions that impact handwriting, so it's not just outright crazy talk to think handwriting reflects something important about the author.
So my assumption would be that to whatever degree humans associate handwriting with things like personality or personal disability, we will tend to associate those concepts with fonts that touch on similar patterns, if that makes sense. (Maybe not explained very clearly.)
Possibly. And I don't think its bunk.. but there's something with emotion tied up with fonts or handwriting. As to what it is, I have no good idea how to discern.
But again, I cannot refuse the fact that comic sans is so.. derided and laughed at. Nary a week goes by without someone guffawing at that typeface on reddit or social media.
Any ideas how to measure this? Seems like emotion is the key here.
When you look at neurological studies, emotion is tied to ability to make snap judgements. People with low affect can't make snap judgements. They lack that file that says either "I have a good feeling about this!" or "Nope!"
Emotion is basically a summary of past experience. Relying on "your gut reaction" is a bit more error prone than actually analysing it, in part because it is rooted in personal prejudice, in essence. But in a survival situation, being able to quickly go "Nope! I'm out of here!" can be the difference between life and death.
So emotion based judgements tend to be fairly strong ones. They tend to be of the "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up" variety.
What makes fonts convey other information? Why is comic sans so derided? (It obviously is.) What makes the emotion of a font come out?