Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  Does it sound gimmicky? It was absolutely gimmicky. Funny food can’t literally taste funny. That wouldn’t go over big in a Michelin-starred restaurant. So the humor in high-end cuisine has to come from something incidental to the way a dish tastes, like a surprising texture or the way it’s plated. But even so, Achatz and his peers achieved the apparently impossible: wringing laughs from the simple, metabolically necessary act of eating. And that perception of “added value” helps when you want people to drop four to five hundred dollars apiece on dinner: laughs are included! At Alinea, that price also includes the wine pairing, which of course makes everything seem funnier.

  It’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to be a single overarching cultural shift behind the race toward funny. In each of these four case studies, the push for more and more humor was powered by something completely different. In art, it was driven by mechanization. The invention of photography lifted from artists the responsibility of mimicking reality on canvas, and allowed them access to a broader palette of approaches and effects—humor among them. The change in sports came from technology as well, but this time from the invention of modern media culture. Mass media created an instant demand for athletes whose ability to entertain a home audience was just as important as whether they won or lost. The irreverent comic books of the same era were mostly a symptom of the growing cultural influence of youth. Baby boom America had just invented the teenager, and that new market demanded its own light entertainment, with comedic markers that would differentiate it from the routine, serious world of working adults. Funny food at the end of the century felt like something a little more ominous: a decadent sign of the fin de siècle, like Roman elites feasting on roast peacock and hummingbird tongues while civilization collapsed around them. But all these trends eventually converged into one spot: a rising tide of comedy, everywhere we looked.

  A Stranger Here Myself

  The world that has been delivered to us now seems to have the goal of packing in as many laughs into every second of the day as possible. “There were more jokes written in one minute on the web today than were written in all of the twentieth century,” the Onion’s Joe Randazzo has observed, only halfway joking. Once you start noticing it, funny is everywhere—even the tiniest, dumbest places. The last time I waited on the phone for a corporate conference call to begin, the recorded hold music wasn’t Vivaldi or smooth jazz; it was a faux-earnest novelty ditty about . . . the travails of being placed on hold. “Yes, I’m waiting on this conference call all alone / And I’m on hold, yes I’m on hold . . . I hope it’s not all day!”VIII The yoga studio up the street from my house added a laughter yoga class. The corner drugstore has replaced its “Video Surveillance in Use” security notice with a sign that says “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!” The bag of organic dried mangoes sitting on my desk right now has “Tropical Humor!” as a label slogan. Not only has this company decided that the biggest selling point of dried mango snacks is how funny they are, they’ve decided to advertise the fact with a confusing pun!

  So life is now a never-ending barrage of little micro-jokes, most so fleeting that they don’t even register. One thing you don’t see much is people wondering if they should make every joke that they can, if there are cases where humor might be pointless or even counterproductive. That kind of introspection usually only happens after a brand makes a joke that it shouldn’t have and gets dragged for it online.IX Online culture in particular seems to demand an even higher comedy quotient than real life. In 2014 I saw a New York Times story about an experimental new technique to save the life of trauma patients by injecting them with freezing salt water and inducing hypothermia—not a particularly hilarious topic, obviously. The headline in the print edition read, “Killing a Patient to Save His Life.” On social media, the headline was, “A Chilling Medical Trial.” Funnier! You have to admit, it’s funnier.

  I am not, generationally speaking, a Comedy Native. I’m an immigrant here. I come from a strange, topsy-turvy time when comedy had already acquired its cool cultural cachet, but—if you can imagine such a thing—there wasn’t actually enough of it. We had to hoard what little of it we had on albums and cassettes and videotapes. The very first movie I ever saw on video (Betamax, specifically) was a comedy: Airplane!, at Michael Brewer’s birthday party in third grade.X I grew up rewatching the same worn VHS comedy tapes over and over: Raising Arizona, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, UHF, David Letterman anniversary specials, Tracey Ullman episodes so we could fast-forward to the Simpsons sketches. I snuck Mad magazine home from friends’ houses where it wasn’t contraband. I reread Peanuts treasuries until the pages fell out. We weren’t allowed to stay up late enough for Saturday Night Live for much of my youth, so my brother and I taped it and watched it the following day after church. (Once, my dad got wind at church that Robin Williams’s monologue from the previous night’s show had been particularly saucy, and the tape went missing when we got home. It’s still the only episode from that season that I’ve never seen.) The scarcity of comedy meant that we watched or listened to things until we knew them letter-perfect. To this day, if you need an emergency transcript of anything from This Is Spinal Tap, Monty Python Sings, or the first season of In Living Color, I am your man. To this day, I can’t even hear the word “lemonade” without mentally adding Eddie Murphy’s brief Elvis impression from his Comedian record: “Lemonade! That cool, refreshing drink!” Sometimes people forget Eddie was a great impressionist.

  I was a comedy geek. Not a first-generation one—those would be the kids about ten years older than me with George Carlin records and subscriptions to the National Lampoon. But our parents didn’t understand what we were laughing at, so it felt like we were breaking new ground. That was all that mattered.

  This is largely hindsight, by the way. I don’t remember ever identifying as a comedy geek at the time. Things were on; you watched them. If they were good, you taped them so you could watch them over and over. But being a funny kid was a big part of my identity, almost as far back as I can remember. Bothering grown-ups with riddles, asking them to explain the jokes you still didn’t understand.XI Do you remember? Making an adult genuinely laugh is a huge thrill when you’re five or six and nobody really pays much attention to you.

  I was the Smart Kid too, but it doesn’t take long before reasonably self-aware Smart Kids start to see the ambivalence with which the world regards them, not just peers but adults as well. Funny Kid is a lot less lonely, as identities go. Not everyone can make people laugh, and children figure out pretty quickly who has the knack and egg them on. Not a week goes by when I don’t think about Eric R., the kid in my kindergarten class who leaned over to me during the Pledge of Allegiance on the morning of May 19, 1980, and stage-whispered, “Mount St. Helens blew its penis yesterday!” This is still one of the top four or five funniest jokes I’ve ever heard. As George Carlin pointed out on his Class Clown record, elementary school classrooms are an amazing comedy venue, because “suppressed laughter is the easiest to get.” The research bears out my childhood intuition on the benefits of being the Funny Kid. When psychologists ask fourth-graders to rate their class members on humor and popularity (“classroom social distance” is the nicer way to say this in the literature), the two variables are always closely linked—and the pattern of variances strongly suggests that popularity is predicted by funniness, not the other way around.

  If you’ve met a few grade-school Smart Kids–turned–class clowns, or are one yourself, you won’t be surprised to learn that this was also a preemptive measure for me. I wasn’t the biggest kid in class or the best soccer player; I was quiet and full of crippling self-doubt. That’s not a great trade-off. In that situation, where all might be lost for others, at least the Funny Kid can tell jokes. You joke about your own bad haircut. Your bad skin. Your airball. The clothes your mom thought looked “sharp” at Mervyn’s. Tell the joke you fear others might tell about you. It’s a vaccination; you might get cowpox but you probably won’t die o
f smallpox. You can also deflect by joking about literally anything else: the girls, the teacher, the bully trying to destroy you. As Harry Shearer once said to Marc Maron, “Comedy is controlling the reason people are laughing at you.”

  I never went anywhere close to comedy as a profession (see “crippling self-doubt,” above) but I was always in its orbit. Nobody was quicker than me to jump into an argument over the worst “Weekend Update” anchor or the most underrated Judd Apatow movie (Kevin Nealon, Walk Hard, duh).XII And after I became a professional ex–game show contestant and started to write for a living, I suddenly had a little online venue (blogs, then social media) to post things that cracked me up instead of just annoying my family and friends with them. The Internet is a seductive mistress for would-be comedians: personal enough for lots of strangers to tell you how funny they think you are, but impersonal enough that there’s no humiliating silence (or silence-with-a-single-cough) when a joke misses. It’s also a great place to buddy up to comedy writers and performers you have long admired, pretending to be one of the cool kids.

  On paper, it seems like the modern funnying-up of America would be a golden age for a guy like me. Who doesn’t like to laugh? Who would rather sit through an earnest, awkward sex ed class than a funny one? Who wants to go back to a time when if there was nothing funny on any of the three TV channels, our only options were a Dave Barry book or Caddyshack on video for the fiftieth time?

  And yet, even in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I have my doubts. In recent years, I have often found myself more bemused than delighted to find an endless stream of jokes everywhere I look, from politics to upscale dining to my kids’ sex education. And it’s made me think seriously about what this change might be doing to our institutions, our social relationships, our very brain chemistry.

  Everything is funny now. Shouldn’t we be happier?

  Giggling Toward Gomorrah

  In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman worried that the trivialities of mass media were going to be the death knell for American culture. In his view, the West had successfully avoided the authoritarian dystopia of 1984 only to embrace the narcotized “soma” culture of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” he wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?” Postman, presciently describing information overload even before the dawn of the Internet, blamed our plight on a glut of celebrity culture, television commercials, and dumbed-down news. He longed for television that would stay in its lane, sticking harmlessly to “junk entertainment.” Couldn’t it leave commerce, news, culture, and education alone?

  Decades later, we live in the exact culture Postman predicted. (He died in 2003, having seen his worst fears unfold before his eyes.) But even he underestimated the degree to which the thing that would “amuse us to death” would be amusement itself—laughter, comedy. Life is full of possible trivial distractions, but we have increasingly decided to while away our hours with the funny ones. Reality television is often just the dumbest excesses of Postman’s celebrity culture, now molded into the shape of the classic sitcom. Television commercials once praised products; now that’s almost incidental to telling jokes. On the Internet, with all of human knowledge at last available democratically to all, the most popular aggregation sites are usually topped by short-attention-span laughs: viral memes, TV screengrabs, funny animal videos. The smiling mannequins reading news and making light chitchat about it have been replaced, for millions of people, by actual comedians. If you can’t get one of those comedy-news jobs—if you quit Saturday Night Live in 1995, for example, because you got passed over for the “Weekend Update” desk—you can still become a United States senator for nine years. If you get dropped from your reality show, but the crowds hoot and holler loudly enough at your campaign antics, you can even be elected president.

  We are in uncharted waters here. No one really knows how a comedy-first culture might change comedy or culture. I agreed instinctively with Greg Smallidge’s maxim, “Something can be important without being serious,” but that doesn’t mean that nothing should be taken seriously. I object to the nihilism of that, but I also object to the comedy construction. What would be our benchmark for comparison in a world where everything was funny?

  My favorite part of Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” is the neologism that the translator renders as “laughterhood.” It seems to encompass everything about a culture’s funniness: not just the voice of its comedy, but its social clusters and media and genres and fan bases, its techniques and tropes, its lineage and influence. We don’t really have a word like that in English. But even when they don’t know what to call it, groups always have a laughterhood. Families have one, offices have one, online communities have one, ethnic groups have one. Zoom out and civilizations have one.

  This book is an attempt to capture something ineffable: the comic mood of a moment. Today’s jokes aren’t just ubiquitous; they’re also a new breed: faster, weirder, more complex, more self-aware than ever before. How did we get here? How is the new sensibility changing our laughterhood? How is it changing us? It seems to me that these are questions worth asking because we’re not living through just any comic moment, subject to the usual shifting winds of fashion and circumstance. After a century of rising comedy saturation, our present society feels more like a culmination. In the same way that ecological doomsayers predict “peak oil,” a point beyond which decline is inevitable, it may be that we are fast approaching “peak funny,” the singularity of our current dizzying spiral toward never-ending hilarity. There’s something foreboding about all the funny buildings and desserts, the fifty new Twitter jokes per minute on my phone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still laughing, but it feels unsustainable, the same way tourists often feel amid the splendid excess of someplace like Vegas or Dubai. This can’t go on, right?

  When someone’s telling a joke, you can usually sense when the punch line is coming.

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  I. When I asked Smallidge later about this interlude, he asked if he’d also done his “penis opera” bit at that point. “I don’t know if I saw the penis opera,” I replied. “You would remember it,” he said. “Is there actually a singing penis?” I asked eagerly. Reader, there is not a singing penis, just a song about the penis.

  II. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele felt so bad about Miller’s $11,000 fine that they wrote a check in that amount to his eye-care charity for children.

  III. Did you hear the one about the Kymaean who was selling his house? He carried around one of the building blocks to show what it was like. Boy, those Kymaeans, am I right, folks?

  IV. In 2011, the show’s average viewer was forty-one years old. And the evening network news (if you combined all three broadcasts) always drew more than twice as many twentysomething viewers as Jon Stewart did.

  V. If you don’t count syndication. Judge Judy made $47 million that year.

  VI. Funny art has always been dangerous art, however. The Greek artist Zeuxis is said to have died laughing at his own painting of an old woman who had insisted on posing herself as the goddess Aphrodite.

  VII. Even Ali probably didn’t foresee what a weapon his comedic dexterity could be within the ring as well. Would he have been able to knock out Sonny Liston in 1964 if Liston hadn’t been kept infuriated by months of Ali calling him “Big Ugly Bear”? “Liston even smells like a bear. I’m gonna give him to the local zoo after I whup him.”

  VIII. The music was such a hit with users of the UberConference conferencing system that the company hired a YouTube-famous band to cover the song in ten different genres, from torch song to rap to samba.

  IX. In hindsight, did Cinnabon need to mourn the 2016 death of actress Carrie Fisher with a tweet saluting her signature Princess Leia hairstyle as “the best buns in the galaxy�
��? I’d argue no.

  X. The next time I saw Airplane! at somebody’s house, it was in high school, and the girl’s dad stayed in the room to sternly fast-forward through the scene where Julie Hagerty manually reinflates Otto the autopilot. Seeing fellatio simulated on a smiling inflatable dummy would apparently have been too much for our hair-trigger adolescent hormones to handle.

  XI. I distinctly remember my mom having to explain this joke to five-year-old me: “Waiter, this coffee tastes like dirt.” “Well, it was just ground this morning.” Even with the explanation, I thought it was pretty lame and told her so. Kindergartners don’t pull punches.

  XII. Once when I was running down a few of my beefs with the first Anchorman, my brother got frustrated enough to say, “Then you just don’t like comedy!” This is seared into my memory as the single most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me.

  TWO

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