Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  In fact, high comedy takes pride in the fact that it doesn’t produce belly laughs. As George Meredith sneered in the Victorian era, “We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh.” When Samuel Johnson read the non sequiturs and shaggy-dog digressions in Tristram Shandy, a novel much funnier than anything he would ever write himself, he sniffed, “Nothing odd will do long.”

  For jokes that land a little lower on the brain stem, we have to turn to the American frontier. Artemus Ward, in his comic lectures (stand-up comedy, in its infancy, was a “lecture”), seems to have created out of whole cloth a new kind of silliness marked by simplicity and a casual eccentricity of wording. Explaining the landscape of the West to city slickers, he would say things like “The highest part of this mountain is the top” or “That beautiful and interesting animal is a horse. It was a long time before I discovered it.” When he visited London in 1866, the British press immediately realized this was something new. “His jokes are of that true transatlantic type to which no nation beyond the limits of the States can offer any parallel,” wrote the Times. “These jokes he lets fall with an air of profound unconsciousness.” The Spectator noticed that Ward’s naïveté of speech could not be as easy as it looked. “The art with which he gives the impression that he is floundering along in his choice of words, the victim of the first verbal association which strikes his memory, and yet just familiar enough with language to feel uncertain as to his ground, and to wish to get hold of some clearer term, is beyond praise.”

  The London papers were witnessing the birth of a new kind of humor writing, where the humor is the phraseology, the sheer rhythm of the words, and not the situational funniness of the nominal subject or story. Ward once told his contemporary Eli Perkins that you could even take something sad and beautiful, like Alexander the Great’s famous line about weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer, and reword it to get a laugh: “He conkerdXI the world and wept because he couldn’t do it sum more.” It’s all in how you put the sentence together.

  Sweet Free Association of Youth

  The modern descendant of this frontier phraseology, filtered down through the random absurdities of the Dadaists and the Beats, is the voice of the stand-up who reinvents a familiar topic by finding a sillier, simpler way to talk about it. I always hear Bill Cosby’s voice: kindergarten nonsense like calling adults “grown people” and saying things like “The food goes in the belly button!” with a weird cadence and expressionistic sound effects.XII Today, comedians do it even when the subject isn’t childhood reminiscence. Mike Birbiglia says “connect mouths” instead of “kiss”; Maria Bamford describes lube, in a singsong recess voice, as “jams and jellies and sauces.” Louis C.K. paraphrases his doctor’s order to lose some weight as “You gotta be less people. You can’t be . . . so much.” It’s all carefully calibrated to sound awkward, unstudied. And it’s grown into an entire genre of hit comedy movie built around Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy regressing into these childlike personas.

  The trippy non sequiturs of modern comedy are often dismissed as diversions for “stoner culture”—and yes, it’s certainly easier than ever before to get your hands on substances that will magically make the Seth Rogen movies and Cartoon Network shows playing in your dorm room much funnier, or at least drain your interest in changing the channel. Two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder was already extolling the virtues of gelotophyllis, the mysterious “laughing leaf” of Central Asia—not coincidentally, perhaps, the same part of the world where cannabis plants originated. But why does every absurd bit of comedy have to be co-opted as a wink to potheads? In fact, lots of Adult Swim’s more experimental programming requires such close attention that it seems guaranteed to bewilder or even panic the stoned.XIII Today’s preference for out-of-left-field, why-am-I-laughing-at-this gags seems more closely linked to the guileless stage persona of Steven Wright:

  I went into a place to eat, it said, “Breakfast anytime.” So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.

  Or the “Deep Thoughts” of Saturday Night Live writer Jack Handey:

  If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let ’em go, because, man, they’re gone.XIV

  Their one-liners conjure up not the aimless profundities of getting blazed, but something more primal: the daydreams and flights of fancy of childhood.

  Youth—or at least youthfulness—has always been the engine of comedy. In part, that’s because the young brain seems to be wired for it. Networks know that television comedies attract an average viewer decades younger than their dramas and news programs.XV English humorist Max Beerbohm admitted, “I protest that I do, still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth.” Research backs him up: in a 2006 experiment, test subjects over sixty were unable to explain as many jokes or complete as many punch lines as younger folks. This is true of writers and performers as well. The original cast of Saturday Night Live was pretty much all under thirty;XVI ditto for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. For every late bloomer like Rodney Dangerfield or Lisa Lampanelli, there are dozens of great comedians who calcified into Bob-Hope-telling-hippie-jokes mode in middle age or stopped performing altogether. So it goes in every generation for the angry young Turks who shake up comedy. Mark Twain died a bitter old coot; Thurber was an angry drunk.

  But the essential virtues of comedy are also young ones, regardless of the age of the teller or the listener. Why do you think we call a joke “kidding”? Children are still outsiders in the world; they come to it with fresh eyes. They can see the absurdities we don’t, not just because their minds are flexible but also because they haven’t been here so long. They are still tourists. When my daughter, Katie, asks me, “Why do we say ‘tuna fish’ but not ‘chicken bird’?” I have no answer, because I am “grown people.” I’ve been looking at things too long to see them anymore. The deeply funny never lose their sense of wonder, never stop playing. George Carlin at seventy seemed younger than most thirty-year-olds I know.

  The inexplicably funny joke is the one most likely to crack up a room full of hardened comedy obsessives, but it’s also the most childlike, because it trades in a deeply intuitive silliness that can’t be diagrammed, that resists every theory. When my son, at the beach, whips off a pair of aviators to reveal a second pair of sunglasses underneath, he doesn’t know he’s reenacting an inspired gag from Airplane!, beloved by generations of comedy fans. It’s just something goofy he thought up in the car.

  Subjectivity on the Cob

  When jokes were clear narratives with simple mechanics, their punch lines could be explained in a single sentence. These explanations might read like newspaper corrections:

  The bartender meant he served a sweet mixed drink called a grasshopper.

  The headlines made by the corduroy pillows are literally “head lines.”

  The man making the bet was Superman and knew all along he could fly.

  Even humor theorists of competing schools could agree on explanations like these. And that’s just not true anymore of many of the things that make us laugh. No one-sentence answer key can explain the slight aura of funniness around cranberry bogs or harpsichords. You can’t defend or even pinpoint the rules that govern a silly verbal joke (why is “ready-to-sting” a funny way to describe a bee?) or an absurd non sequitur (why is this comedy special just a shot-for-shot reenactment of the Simon & Simon opening credits?). They just are.

  People still try, though. Case in point: On a 2015 episode of Cartoon Network’s hit sci-fi comedy Rick and Morty, Rick’s family is on the run from the Galactic Federation, and they land on a likely-looking planet. The place has one seemingly charming eccentricity: strawberries and flowers grow “on the cob” there, like an ear of corn. But when Rick investigates the local fauna microscopically, he sees cobs even at the subatomic level. “Everything’s on a cob! The whole planet’s o
n a cob!” he says, panicking and rushing everyone back to the spaceship. “Go, go, go!”

  Mystified viewers took to the Internet looking for someone to explain the joke to them. What exactly is so dangerous about a planet where everything is on a cob? Dozens of very serious answers were mooted. Because their lungs couldn’t process air on the cob. Because they themselves would eventually grow on the cob. Because of the existential horror of recursive cob-ness: cobs within cobs within cobs. Because a planet of cobs would inevitably be eaten by some giant galactic eater of cobs. Everyone had a theory.

  At Comic-Con the following year, a fan brought the swirling controversy to the show’s creators, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon. “Why are cobs so terrifying?” he asked. The panelists straight-facedly sketched out some of the possible downsides of a planet where everything was on the cob: mosquitoes on the cob, black widow spiders on the cob, arcade tickets that won’t come out of the little slot because they’re on the cob. (“The slots are on a cob! It’s a mess!” added Harmon.) Staff writer Ryan Ridley joked, “We have a three-episode arc in season three that explains the origin of the cob and Rick’s relationship to it.”XVII

  Justin Roiland came the closest to giving a serious answer to the question: “Well, as soon as we answer that, the joke dies, doesn’t it?” I wonder if the nerds in the room thought that meant, “We know the answer, but telling it to you wouldn’t be funny.” To me, the joke was very clear: We weren’t supposed to understand or even care why Rick is freaked out. We were meant to enjoy the silly idea that something that’s not corn (indeed, everything that’s not cornXVIII) could grow on a cob, and the fun of using that to power a standard “We’ve got to get out of here!” sci-fi cliché.

  Dan Guterman, the writer who pitched the cob planet idea, patiently confirmed this to me. “The lack of an explanation is the punch line to the joke. The only person who will ever know exactly why they needed to get off that planet is Rick, and the fact that only he knows it, knows it immediately, and won’t risk taking the time to explain what he knows because of what he knows, is still hilarious to me. Really, it’s a very simple joke.”

  Humor has always been a very individual quirk. A sign in the head writer’s office on The Carol Burnett Show read, “There are few good judges of comedy. And they don’t agree.” According to writer Gene Perret, the writing staff used to argue about the sign, because a few of them thought “And we don’t agree” would be funnier. The new, more nebulous comedy is even more subjective, because it’s a quantum computer, not operating on principles that everyone can immediately measure the same way. Let’s be honest: you were probably mystified by much of my list of random things that crack me up. If you were to make such a list, it might not overlap mine much, because it would be informed by your own experiences and comedy prejudices and not mine—my weakness for nostalgia, for example. I’m well aware that a focus group of average Americans might be able to agree on a dozen or more breakfast cereals that they collectively find funnier than Crispix. How could I argue with them? The people have spoken.

  This is a perennial question in comedy circles: who is the ultimate arbiter of funny, the professional funny person or the audience? Generally, comedy writers are suspicious of audience laughter as a metric for funniness, knowing that it’s possible (and even easy, once you clear a certain skill level) to get laughs with hacky material. Comedians are more comfortable with the idea that the audience might know best, because they live and die with every response. They’ve all had to throw out a personal favorite joke because they just couldn’t make it work live. I once watched a documentary about the making of a sketch show that David Cross and Bob Odenkirk put together for Netflix. In one segment, the duo is watching Paget Brewster rehearse an introduction to the blockbuster film “Transformbots, about transsexual robot performers.” The line isn’t working, and Cross is adamant that it’s funnier shortened to “transsexual robots.” He wants the flat, abrupt laugh of the twist. Odenkirk pitches the exact opposite idea: a meandering punch line that just keeps going. “Transformbots, about transsexual robots that can switch their sexual identity at will, and then switch back also, or not be robots either, even.” The more convoluted the line gets, the bigger the laugh from onlookers. In the video, Cross is clearly not sold on the change, but he can’t say anything, because the new line works. His comedy convictions have been trumped by forces beyond his control.

  To me, the interesting viewers in the cob planet controversy aren’t the confused ones, for whom the joke didn’t land. Almost every joke has those. More revealing to me are the hundreds of others who thought the joke was funny—but, it turned out, couldn’t agree on why. Like many ineffable jokes, it grabbed them immediately, and they laughed. But the joke was so elusive, even to them, that they couldn’t walk back through the process. Like hypnotists’ volunteers making chicken noises onstage, they were unable to explain what exactly they were doing.

  Hothouse Flowers and Spanish Toast

  The observation that dissection can kill a joke shouldn’t surprise us; it’s just one special case of the general truth that almost anything can kill a joke. At lunch one day, a friend and I started trading fondly recalled stories from the Onion. We quickly realized that neither of us was making the other laugh with our favorite headlines—because we weren’t quite remembering them perfectly. You’d think that something as tight and elemental as an Onion headline (“Drugs Win Drug War,” “New Dog Digs Up Old Dog,” “Trophy Wife Mounted”) would be idiot-proof, but no. Even a conceptual joke like their famous 2008 Obama headline, “Black Guy Asks Nation for Change,” needs to have every word just right, or there’s really no point. “Black Candidate Wants”—no, wait. “Black Man Wants Change.” “Black Guy Says He Needs Some—” Hold on. Shit.

  The jokes seemed simple, but their simplicity had evidently been the result of long and careful effort. They were murdered by paraphrase. Everyone remembers E. B. White’s frog comparison in “Some Remarks on Humor,” but the very next sentence of the same essay is an even better analogy: he compares jokes to soap bubbles. Humor, he says, “won’t stand much blowing up, and it won’t stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect.”

  When you think about how many different ways there are to kill a joke, it’s a wonder that they evolved at all. Chaplin’s famous dictum “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot” is essentially an admission that the exact same joke can succeed or fail depending on an accident of geography: how close to the subject you’re standing. You can confirm this by watching any Jacques Tati movie, where gags line up precisely to the edge of the frame or some piece of the scenery. The viewer is watching the action from the one point in the universe where it’s funny. Animator Chuck Jones once quantified the exact margin of error on one of his most famous jokes: Wile E. Coyote, when falling off a cliff, had to hit bottom exactly fourteen frames after he disappeared from sight. “It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn’t work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh.”

  The implication is that one-twenty-fourth of a second, the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, is enough to kill a joke. I was skeptical when I first read Jones tell an interviewer this; it seemed more like mystique-making than actual animation know-how. But I changed my mind after seeing the effect firsthand. One day after taping a Jeopardy! tournament on the Sony lot, I got a text from a friend, who happened to be doing the final sound mix for a Simpsons episode at a nearby stage.XIX I walked over to say hi on my way to dinner and ended up staying for over an hour, mesmerized by the fine-tuning of an animated sitcom. A writer could suggest something like, “Can the music be more dramatic here but, like, twenty percent less ominous?” and I would roll my eyes in the dark. But then the engineer would do something to the bass and the drums, and when we watched it again, a miracle would occur: the scene would play funnier. Matt Groening himself was at the mix, which surprised the hell out of me, and at
one point he quibbled about the sound made by an attacking Japanese-style robot. (Not a Transformbot, as far as I could tell.) “The lion’s roar is good, but it should do it three times, in quick succession.” Again, this seemed like gibberish, but the next time the robot attacked, the identical triplet (“ROAR! ROAR ROAR!”) made me laugh out loud.XX

  If moving a camera one foot to the left or delaying a sound effect by a fraction of a second can hamstring humor, you can only imagine what the ravages of time and distance can do to a joke. At any performance of Shakespearean “comedy” today, you’ll have a hard time mustering a genuine chuckle at the zany Elizabethan antics of the clown. “Aha, he’s thrusting his hips and leering at the crowd! That must have been a sex joke!” It doesn’t take five hundred years, either. Watch a typical sitcom from the 1950s, and then watch something from the same era that was dead serious when it was written—an advertisement for cream of wheat, an educational film about good hygiene. Guess which one gets bigger laughs today? It’s not fair, but unintentional humor just has a longer shelf life than the intentional kind. Booth Tarkington summed up this Bizarro-world effect of old-timey humor perfectly: “Antique funnyings in print bring on a pleasant melancholy.”

  Translation across languages is an even more immediate way to see the fragility of humor. Steven Wright’s “French toast during the Renaissance” isn’t a complicated joke, but just try to tell it in Spanish. First of all, you face the problem that many Spanish-speaking cultures don’t exactly have diners. Their closest analogue to a diner might not serve breakfast all day. And their closest analogue to a diner that serves breakfast all day might not announce “Breakfast anytime” on a sign or menu. And even if it did, you’re going to have a language problem. In English, we use the same word—“time”—to mean both “time of day” and “historical period,” and the joke hinges on that ambiguity. But in Spanish, these are separate words: hora and época, respectively.XXI