Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  This change is often framed as a decline of traditional media, but to my mind, the real story was the new legitimacy and relevance of comedy. In the late sixties, when the Smothers Brothers were doing the edgiest, counterculture-friendliest comedy on TV, the network still carped about every joke that mentioned Vietnam, the most important news story of the day. (Pete Seeger was censored for singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a folk song that didn’t even mention Vietnam.) It’s not always remembered today that Tom and Dick Smothers lost their battle with CBS’s Program Practices division: the show was repeatedly neutered and then, in 1969, abruptly canceled. That cemented the TV status quo for decades: jokes should not have a viewpoint on serious things. The rule worked mostly because the viewership was fine with keeping its news and its comedy in separate time slots. Satire just wasn’t a mass-culture phenomenon; as George Kaufman famously said, it “closes on Saturday night.”

  That was all upended in the Daily Show era, when a comedy host could do an eight-minute tirade against the Iraq War, full of moral outrage—at a time when even the New York Times was banging the drum about Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction—and keep the full support of his network and his audience. In fact, they loved him for it. He was free to layer the editorial commentary in silly pop culture asides (when George Bush called Saddam Hussein “a deceiver, a liar, a torturer, and a murderer,” Stewart asked if he was also “a picker, a grinner, a lover, and a sinner”) and puns (“Mess O’Potamia!” read the chyron) without anyone asking if war was too serious a subject for that sort of thing. He could even snipe at his own network. When President Bush said that the arguments over Iraq were like “a rerun of a bad movie, and I’m not interested in watching it,” Stewart noted that, by an amazing coincidence, that was also the official slogan of Comedy Central. Instead of getting fired like the Smothers Brothers, he became the highest-paid performer on television.V Bush’s successor secretly summoned Stewart to the White House twice to consult on policy, and petitioners tried to draft him to run for president himself in 2016.

  Jon Stewart’s vehement protesting-too-much that he was “just a comic” was always a reminder that he knew how influential his voice was. The Daily Show take on a policy matter or media skirmish could determine the opinion of millions of people, the same way Fox News’s official line could. Was it any wonder that jokes began to receive more scrutiny and Monday-morning quarterbacking than ever before? It wasn’t enough to be funny; every joke was held to strict ethical standards of fairness, civility, compassion. And why not? This was now serious business; comedy could quite literally change the world.

  The Magic Spell of Khlebnikov

  How did we get to this point? Our gradual descent into nonstop comedy started in the early decades of the twentieth century, and I’m going to blame it all on one man: an eccentric Russian futurist poet named Velimir Khlebnikov. The futurists, as the name of their movement implied, were young artists besotted with the speed and dynamism and violence of mechanized modernity, and eager to replace the tired old art of the past with experimental new forms in their new century. The most famous poem of the futurist movement is probably “Incantation by Laughter,” which Khlebnikov wrote in 1909 while he was (nominally) studying mathematics at a Saint Petersburg university. It’s a series of escalating nonsense riffs on the Russian word smekh, meaning “laughter.” An English translation might look something like this:

  O, laugh, laughers!

  O, laugh out, laughers!

  You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly

  O, laugh out laugheringly

  O, belaughable laughterhood—the laughter of laughering laughers!

  O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists!

  Laughily, laughily,

  Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings

  Laughlets, laughlets.

  O, laugh, laughers!

  O, laugh out, laughers!

  I don’t know for sure what was on young Velimir’s mind the day he wrote this poem, but his “Incantation by Laughter” turned out to be a pretty accurate look ahead at the twentieth century, with the simple command “laugh” endlessly branching and innovating into complex new forms, just as comedy itself would. The poem came true.

  Am I implying that this little verse, scratched out over coffee and cigarettes in a bohemian Saint Petersburg cellar café, actually was some kind of magic futurist spell, invoking a new century of endlessly escalating laughs? You’d better believe I am. Khlebnikov saw himself as a prophet even as a teenager, and believed that he was destined to decipher the “laws of time” and predict the future. His essays imagine modern urban planning and even the internet with some accuracy, and he earned great fame for having predicted, in a 1912 pamphlet, the “fall of a state” in 1917—the year of the Russian Revolution. So why not make him a prophet of comedy as well? The secret history of the twentieth century is, after all, largely a history of humor. The old gods were dead, and what was left to us was the laughter of laughering laughers.

  Let’s be clear: this was not a complete break with the past. People have always made jokes, and most of them went unrecorded. But the culture of which jokes we tell, and when, and why, does change. Comedy’s like any art form; it evolves over time. Yesterday’s jokes influence today’s, and if today’s seem funnier, it’s largely because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

  The funnying-up of modern life has mostly been an organic and imperceptibly slow process, like a glacier inching toward the sea. But sometimes there are watershed moments on a cliff where the ice cracks all at once, and everyone on the cruise ship claps and the landscape in a certain place is changed forever. The glacier just doesn’t flow back uphill.

  April 9, 1917—seven years after Khlebnikov published his incantation—was such a date. On that day, New York’s Society of Independent Artists rejected an entry for its first annual exhibit, a show that was supposed to be open to all artists. Unbeknownst to most of them, the sculpture had been submitted by one of the society’s own board members, who later resigned in protest. The artist was Marcel Duchamp, and the work was the first of his “readymade” sculptures of found objects. It was a lavatory urinal, bought from a plumbing supply house, signed with a fanciful “R. Mutt” signature, and laid on its back. Duchamp called it Fountain.

  Now, it’s certainly possible to name older works of art that viewers found humor in. Paintings were primarily decor for centuries, and funny canvases sold because television hadn’t been invented. If you’re going to hang something pretty on the wall of your house, why not have a laugh as well?VI That explains those sixteenth-century Arcimboldo portraits where some Saxon elector or naval hero is constructed entirely of fruit and fish, or those Jan Steen tableaux of merry domestic chaos, where chubby children are chasing each other around a table and the dog has just knocked over a platter of something.

  But Duchamp’s work was different. It didn’t just have a mildly whimsical air to it; it was a joke, a joke you could “get.” (“Hey, that’s a sideways urinal!”) With works like Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (the one where he painted a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa), Duchamp didn’t just found the Dada movement. He started an avalanche of art that was incomplete without the laugh: the optical illusions of the surrealists, the soup cans and comic book panels and giant puffy hamburgers of the pop artists, the great pains taken by the photorealists to document something silly like a chrome car bumper or glass Automat window. The old masters still cast a long enough shadow that these new jokes could be powered by surprise at their mild subversion. That was their whole impact. Ha, someone made that? And someone else hung it up in their gallery?

  The playful postmodern impulse eventually bled into all the other visual arts—even architecture, where it had been axiomatic since the days of the Bauhaus that function and efficiency were all that mattered. “A house,” Le Corbusier had said, in one of the century’s most depressing pronouncements, “is a machine for living in.” There was o
nly one possible future, and it was going to be defined by the clean, uniform glass-and-steel boxes of the International Style, dammit. It wasn’t until the 1970s that architects woke from their reveries of rectilinear purity, squinted at their blueprints, and started to wonder where the jokes were. And so the pendulum swung back toward the winking neon of Charles Moore and the cheekily ornamented faux casinos of Michael Graves and the rippling titanium currents of Frank Gehry. As fans of John le Carré and James Bond spy fare know, even the British secret service, that least funny of all institutions, now operates out of a bizarrely kitschy postmodern Aztec temple on the Thames that employees call “Legoland.” These new buildings aren’t exactly hilarious, of course; it seems almost beside the point that no one in history has ever lol’ed at the sight of one of them. But it was enough that the architect seemed to have acknowledged that fun exists. As Spy magazine memorably asked, in a 1988 cover package on postmodernism, “For a building, is it funny?”

  Muhammad Ali and Other Superheroes

  Let’s fast-forward from Marcel Duchamp’s Paris to June 22, 1961. That’s the day a young Cassius Clay did a morning radio interview in Las Vegas alongside the legendary wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner. In response to the host’s questions about his upcoming bout against Duke Sabedong, just the seventh of his fledgling pro career, Clay was confident but restrained, in keeping with his public persona at the time. Then he watched George answer a similar question about his next match, against “Classy” Freddie Blassie. “I’ll kill him! I’ll tear off his arm!” the wrestler fumed. “If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it’s not gonna happen, because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world!” Clay was astounded at George’s sheer force of personality and started to see how he could reinvent his persona as a boxer. “Keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous,” Gorgeous George told him later when they met backstage after his wrestling match.

  Sports heroes in those days were, almost to a man, not funny. They were sleepy-eyed white dullards with pomaded hair and beer bellies. When athletes got laughs back then, when Jim Thorpe told Gustav V of Sweden, “Thanks, King!” after receiving his Olympic medals or Yogi Berra issued one of his trademark cockeyed aphorisms, like “You can observe a lot just by watching,” those quips were invariably unintentional or apocryphal. Or both, if that’s even possible. It was all so dire that the funniest athlete of the 1930s—you can look this up—was actually Seabiscuit. Compare that to today’s mischievous, smart-aleck sports heroes. The hinge on which that change turned was Gorgeous George strutting down the aisle in a satin robe, accompanied by a rose-water-spritzing valet, and his newest fan Cassius Clay sitting up tall in his seat and seeing an alternate future in his head: the self-aware boasting, the flirting with reporters, the well-rehearsed comic verse, all of it.VII

  Every sport didn’t become funny overnight, of course. Even in my day as a young sports fan, everyone knew who the lone joker on the team roster was, the John Kruk or the Deion Sanders or the John Salley, the guy you knew you’d see in a booth someday. It wasn’t like the modern locker room, where everyone is clowning and cheerfully trash-talking and angling for that postretirement analyst job. But every wisecracking modern athlete today of every race has the same model: Muhammad Ali. In 1964, it didn’t immediately endear the cocksure young man to everyone in America, mostly because he was black and Muslim. But in hindsight, you could make a case that Ali was the most influential comedian of the twentieth century, and comedy wasn’t even his day job.

  Two months after sports got funny, a similar milestone, also spurred on by a single force of personality, changed another corner of pop culture: the lowly comic book. At the time, superhero comics were in a snoozy decline, still dominated, as they had been for decades, by Superman and Batman and the other square-jawed champions of DC Comics. Superman and Batman weren’t the gritty, mutually suspicious rivals we see today on the big screen; in 1960 they were loyal chums who co-headlined World’s Finest Comics every month. They both had dogs and boy sidekicks and secret clubhouses full of trophies, and planned each other surprise parties and treasure hunts every year for their birthdays.

  The wake-up call was the November 8, 1961, publication of The Fantastic Four #1 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the debut of an innovative new superhero line from Marvel Comics. Today, the conventional wisdom about Marvel is that their books took off because their superheroes were, unlike DC’s demigods, human and relatable. The core dynamic of the Fantastic Four was that they weren’t just a super-team but a family, with all the squabbles and growing pains and sentimental “mush” that entails. Spider-Man fought crooks in between long anxious thought balloons about his money troubles, or his sick Aunt May, or the kids who bullied him at his Queens high school. The Mighty Marvel Way was nothing more than grafting soap opera elements onto traditional superhero tropes, and the publisher would successfully stick with that human-interest formula for decades: Iron Man was an alcoholic, Daredevil was blind, the Hulk just wanted to be left alone, the teenage X-Men were battling both their hormones and society’s bigotry. Soon, the rest of the industry was scurrying to catch up.

  But what really made those early Marvel comics such a pleasure to read was that, despite all the adolescent angst, they were genuinely funny. For one thing, the heroes themselves were jokers. Ben Grimm, the Fantastic Four’s rocky “Thing,” spent his days in a perpetual vaudeville slow burn at the infuriating antics of his teammate the Human Torch, not to mention the pranks of the “Yancy Streeters,” a gang of roughnecks from his Lower East Side neighborhood. “What a revoltin’ development!” he would complain, in imitation of Jimmy Durante, or maybe William Bendix on The Life of Riley. Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man, had an even lighter comic touch, using wisecracks to mask his own teenage insecurities and surprising foes just as often with a snarky put-down as with his trademark webs. “Spider-Man!” Doctor Octopus or whoever would snarl. “Well it’s not Dr. Kildare,” Spidey would reply. Or “I sure ain’t Albert Schweitzer!” Compared to the stodgy dads fighting crime over in DC’s books, these were hip references.

  Every issue was narrated in the knowing, irreverent voice of scripter-editor Stan Lee, immediately creating an over-the-top house style that defined Marvel for decades. “Like costume heroes?” Lee asked with a wink in the comic that introduced Spider-Man. “Confidentially, we in the comic mag business refer to them as ‘long underwear characters’!” Marvel fans weren’t just readers—they were in on the gag. This clubby relationship carried over into the letters pages, where Lee answered reader mail personally in an unidentifiable borderline-youthful patois of his own invention, somewhere in between “Greenwich Village hepcat” and “carnival barker.” Every staffer and freelancer got credited with a nickname emphasizing just how fun it must be to goof around in the Marvel bullpen all day: “Smilin’ ” Stan Lee, “Jolly” Jack Kirby, “Cheerful” Chic Stone, “Merry” Marie Severin. Superhero comic books, for the first time in a long time, were actually comic books.

  Laughing Through a Mouthful of Tapioca Foam

  The dominoes kept falling as the twentieth century neared its end. The same wave of postmodernism that had turned architecture on its ear had long since become the language of fashion as well, with designers regularly praised for their “witty” new collections. With shelter and clothing taken care of, just one basic survival need remained stubbornly unamusing: food. Shout-out to food for providing us with the basic caloric content and nutrients needed to sustain life—but why wasn’t it funnier?

  In 1994, chef Ferran Adrià used a million-dollar investment from a Spanish philanthropist to expand and update the kitchen of his popular Catalonian restaurant elBulli. At the same time, he created an in-house “development squad” to focus on R & D for new culinary “concepts and techniques.” The following year, a young Heston Blumenthal bought a run-down sixteenth-century pub in Berkshire and opened a soon-to-be-legendary bistro called the Fat Duck. These two ev
ents kick-started the avant-garde cooking movement now called “molecular gastronomy”—using science to prepare foods that no one had ever actually seen before. Not every newly possible dish was a culinary success—just because we have the technology to carbonate gravy or freeze bacon-and-egg ice cream doesn’t mean it’s a great idea—but for the most part, diners were delighted by the movement’s chic novelties. Spherical mango “ravioli” would explode in your mouth like magic bubbles, and intricate little pocket watches of bouillon and gold leaf would melt, Salvador Dalí–style, into glass teapots of soup. The watchword was always surprise. Hey, these look like Oreos, but they’re actually tapas made from black olive dough and sour cream! This mandarin orange is full of chicken liver parfait!

  Just like a circus act, an avant-garde food menu is designed to elicit laughter and gasps in alternation—and sometimes in combination. I once had a three-hour dinner at Alinea, Grant Achatz’s outpost of molecular gastronomy on Chicago’s North Side, and the food, though delicious, was completely overshadowed by the showmanship of Achatz’s “dinner as theater.” The very first course, a butternut squash puree, was served inside a block of ice. A thick glass straw was the only utensil provided, so you couldn’t get the puree down without producing a deafening slurping sound designed to draw stares from every other diner in the room. (We were the first table served, and got to enjoy the wave of periodic slurps that circuited the dining room over the next hour.) A hot potato soup was served in a wax cup punctured by a skewer; when the skewer was pulled out, five different cold garnishes would plop into the soup, which you could then down like a shot. Not every dish was slapstick comedy. Some were visual jokes, like the corn/corn-silk/corn-smut combo plated to match a painting hanging in the dining room. Others were semantic, like a “fish and chips” plate where the fish was trout and the chips were . . . crispier trout. Medallions of lamb served with an array of forty-eight different toppings—choose your own adventure!—seemed like a knowing parody of foodie excess. But nothing was over the top like dessert was over the top: first, a helium-filled balloon made of apple taffy that we were told to suck up in one breath, leaving us sticky and squeaky; next, Achatz’s trademark “dark chocolate piñata,” which you scoop off the table after a server freezes and then destroys it in front of you.