Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  IX. The Victorian satirist Samuel Butler felt, in return, that Canada fell on the wrong side of this divide, opining that Canadian jokes were, “like their roads, very long and not very good.” Shots fired!

  X. Comedy also needs brevity because it doesn’t sustain the way other art forms do. There’s a reason why no comedian will do a set the length of a Springsteen concert: the audience would burn out. The modern TV convention of “half hour = comedy, hour = drama” isn’t new. Even in ancient Athens, the satyr plays were much shorter than the tragedies. The twelve Shakespeare plays listed as tragedies in the First Folio are, on average, 3,242 lines long. The fourteen comedies average out to just 2,570 lines apiece. (Interestingly, the most common chronology has the Bard’s work getting longer and more serious as he got older, sort of like an Elizabethan Judd Apatow. After alternating comedies and dramas for many years, he followed Measure for Measure with seven heavy tragedies in a row. Then he finished his career with three “romances,” which are structured like comedies but aren’t funny. Like Funny People with Adam Sandler.)

  XI. Especially since Lucy’s second-season premiere was the “chocolate conveyor belt” episode.

  XII. Like many great discoveries in other sciences, this one was accidental. In 1963, George Schlatter was pulling together a TV special for Jonathan Winters, but the gut-punch of the Kennedy assassination meant that no one felt like writing or rehearsing. At the last minute, he edited together a full half hour from quick vignettes of Winters clowning around with Art Carney. The network was confused (“That’s not a television show!” one exec told Schlatter) but the special won an Emmy, and the fast-paced Laugh-In style was born.

  XIII. Also their narrators. It’s hard to overstate how much a narrator speeds up a sitcom. On Arrested Development, one quick line from Ron Howard (“And Tobias had found the perfect wardrobe for his leading man: the red dress he discovered in the attic crawl space. Assuming Michael had found and returned it, Lindsay called her mother hoping to get money for a new one”) could replace five minutes of plot.

  XIV. Literally. The movie’s very first joke is a title crawl that reads “Chapter Eleven”; the last line is the Yoda character, Yogurt, saying, “God willing we’ll all meet again in Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money.”

  XV. “I’ll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut. End of transaction. We don’t need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can’t imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut.”

  XVI. The story, much beloved in comedy circles, concerns a stand-up hired for the Roseanne writers’ room despite having no writing experience. After two quiet years on the job, he finally spoke up to pitch a bizarre story idea—one in which Roseanne would play her own sister. “We already have Jackie,” someone pointed out. (Laurie Metcalf had just won the second of her three consecutive Emmys for playing Roseanne’s younger sister, Jackie, a major character on the show.) “Who Jackie?” asked the clueless writer. As the story goes, he went on to suggest that his pitch would still work if Jackie were to die, become a ghost, and fly around the room.

  XVII. For decades, inventor Charley Douglass had a near-monopoly on the business of canned television laughter. His giant Laff Box device was a padlocked secret; only Douglass and his close family members knew how to operate it. It was stocked with laughs he’d collected from all manner of live and televised performances over the years. (Marcel Marceau mime shows were good, because there’d be no talking overlapping the laughs.) When you listened to the canned laughter in a lot of twentieth-century sitcoms, you were hearing (at least in part) the chuckles of the dead.

  FOUR

  * * *

  NOTES FROM AN EPIDEMIC

  Funny is like a virus. Once it adapts to a new vector, or colonizes a new host, or spreads to a new population, it’s almost impossible to eradicate.

  The Northwest Ice and Cold Storage building in downtown Portland, Oregon, was an abandoned warehouse for decades, but in 1999 the advertising agency of Wieden + Kennedy remodeled it into a new headquarters the size of a city block. Today the office is a puzzle box of bridges and partial floors surrounding a central atrium, full of quirky “creatives”-work-here touches around every corner. There’s an eight-foot plywood beaver standing in the main entrance, and one hundred thousand pushpins stuck into a wall upstairs spelling out the agency’s motto, “Fail Harder.” The conference room on the top floor is a giant nest, made by sculptor Patrick Dougherty from thousands of sticks gathered from the Columbia River Valley and woven together without a single fastener of any kind. (The nest is not, however, the basket of a giant hot-air balloon, as depicted in a 2011 Portlandia sketch.)

  What is one of the world’s most influential ad agencies doing in Portland? In a word, Nike. Wieden + Kennedy made the up-and-coming shoe company’s first national TV ads back in 1982, and the two homegrown Oregon companies have been very good to each other over the years. W+K cofounder Dan Wieden coined the iconic “Just Do It” slogan in 1988,I and for decades, the ad agency’s reputation was based on its muscular, motivational TV campaigns for Nike, the kind of spot that for thirty seconds could make you believe you might want to run a triathlon, or at least look into a gym membership.

  But the W+K brand is no longer just about pumping up sweaty strivers. When I met there with creative director Eric Baldwin, he had just returned from a pro wrestling match in Austin, Texas, where he’d been shooting the agency’s latest commercial. Mike “the Miz” Mizanin, dressed in a yellow chicken suit as the fictional “Puppers Cluckers” mascot, was absolutely destroyed in the ring by KFC’s Colonel Sanders, played on this occasion by wrestling superstar Dolph Ziggler. Did the WWE SmackDown Live audience mind the interruption of their show by a live ad break? I wondered. “They lost their shit,” Baldwin told me. “The chant of ‘Colonel Sanders!’ started the minute he came out.”

  Wieden + Kennedy was the agency responsible for the KFC campaign in which a series of beloved comedians (Darrell Hammond, Norm Macdonald, Jim Gaffigan) traded off impersonating the venerable restaurateur, who had died in 1980, in a series of ridiculous wigs and false beards. It took guts to try a comedic Colonel Sanders reboot in 2015. His last appearance on American televisions was a cringeworthy campaign in which Randy Quaid voiced a sassy animated Sanders. “Go Colonel! Go Colonel!” the cartoon pitchman would chant while doing the Cabbage Patch with his cane, just like the real Sanders probably used to. But the new campaign was a hit. “Sales are through the roof for them,” said Baldwin. “They couldn’t be happier.”

  As the ad-viewing public became savvier than ever before, this brand of self-aware, winking weirdness (Dolph Ziggler as an elbow-dropping Colonel, Rob Riggle as one who owns a chicken-themed pro football team, George Hamilton as an “extra crispy” one) became central to the Wieden + Kennedy playbook. “If you’re taking yourself too seriously as a brand, people are just going to turn off and walk away,” explained Baldwin. “But if you can poke fun at yourself, and say, ‘This is an ad, that’s what it is, and we’re going to try to make you laugh,’ being very straightforward with that, people find it refreshing and are more willing to let it wash over them.”

  “It’s the acknowledgment that we’re in a relationship together,” added his colleague Jason Kreher. “I’m trying to make you eat this chicken. I’ve interrupted your experience to tell you about eating this chicken. So instead of giving you thirty seconds of facts about chicken, I am going to entertain you.”

  That was a surprisingly recent discovery for the advertising industry. “Be serious. Don’t use humor or fantasy,” wrote ad guru David Ogilvy in his 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising Man. “Good copywriters have always resisted the temptation to entertain.”II For decades, advertising was built on this truism: anything fun or showy might distract from the brand. Even if customers laughed at the joke, it didn’t mean they’d try the product. You can look at thousands of print and broadcast ads from the first half of the twentieth century�
�the same time frame when comedy was making millions for movies, radio, and TV—and you’ll find a chuckle-free wasteland. You will be instructed to buy, say, Kraft mayonnaise not by a jovial mascot or a punny tagline, but by two columns of tiny type describing the brand’s many nutritional and textural advantages. The copy might suggest how much happier your household will be once you switch brands, or inform you that singer Rosemary Clooney uses the stuff, but it will all be in deadly earnest. Back then, a boundary-pushing ad slogan was something like Morton Salt’s “When it rains, it pours!”—slightly clever, but still a straightforward salute to Morton’s big game-changing innovation in the salt world, the addition of a chemical called magnesium carbonate so its salt wouldn’t cake in wet weather. The only vintage ads that would get a laugh today are unintentionally funny, like ones that use the word “gay” in its original sense. The pinnacle of this genre is a 1945 magazine ad featuring a negligee-clad girl-next-door type brushing her hair in her boudoir. “To Wake Up GAY in the Morning!” teases the headline, “Just Try This at Bedtime Tonight!”III

  But when Madison Avenue let radio comics read their commercials, that soon started to change. Like a chameleon, advertising adapted to its surroundings. Bob Hope used to annoy his sponsors by ad-libbing around their copy. “I’ve been chewing Beech-Nut gum for twenty-five years,” he would say. “Its price has never changed.” Then, unable to resist, he would look up from the script. “It’s either a big bargain now or it was a big gyp then!”

  Fathering the Funny Commercial

  In 1957, a comic named Stan Freberg debuted his satirical radio show on CBS as a summer replacement for Jack Benny. Freberg’s show featured ads for fake products like “Puffed Grass” cereal, and like Bob Hope, he liked to rewrite his sponsors’ copy so the real ads would be as funny as the rest of the show. “We have agencies to do that,” his CBS producer told him. “Yes, I’ve seen their work,” replied an unimpressed Freberg.

  The edgy parodies on Freberg’s show often targeted corporate America, as in the famous “Gray Flannel Hat Full of Teenage Werewolves” sketch, in which a vapid Madison Avenue adman leads a secret double life as a werewolf. Perhaps not coincidentally, the show had a hard time attracting advertisers. Two different cigarette companies offered to sponsor the show, but Freberg refused to shill for tobacco. On the show’s last original episode, Freberg drolly read commercials that advertised . . . himself. When CBS canceled the series the next week, ending the last network comedy show of the Golden Age of Radio, Freberg decided that if you can’t beat ’em, you join ’em. Preparing a stack of business cards that read “Ars Gratia Pecuniae”—“Art for Money’s Sake”—he opened Freberg Ltd. (But Not Very), his very own ad agency.

  As a result, Stan Freberg, who in his seventy-year show business career did everything from voicing Looney Tunes characters to writing for Mad magazine to releasing million-selling comedy records,IV left behind a surprising legacy. In the words of his 2015 New York Times obituary, he was above all “the father of the funny commercial.” Over a forty-year second career in the advertising world, Freberg produced an endless stream of dazzlingly high-concept sixty-second mini-masterpieces. In Freberg-world, Ann Miller’s suburban kitchen opened up into a Broadway stage so that she could lead a twenty-dancer chorus line in a mock Busby Berkeley number praising Heinz’s Great American Soup. (“Emily, why do you always have to make such a big production out of everything?” her husband complains.) Science fiction author Ray Bradbury appeared on a giant Fahrenheit 451 view-screen to predict a futuristic world in which Sunsweet prunes would be wrinkle-free. The Lone Ranger and Tonto crashed a dinner party to protest the use of the “William Tell Overture” in Jeno’s Pizza Rolls ads. None of this would be surprising today, but in 1960, winking at the customer was downright subversive. But clients couldn’t quibble when their sales went up. Freberg’s groundbreaking commercials won him twenty-one Clio awards and bought him a shag-carpeted stucco mansion in Beverly Hills complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool. He called it “Stan Simeon.”

  Freberg’s most innovative trademark came from his early days as a parodist: he loved to make ads that made fun of advertising. “Nine out of ten doctors recommend Chun King chow mein,” read one print ad. The photo showed nine Asian men wearing stethoscopes . . . and one white one. (Okay, you probably couldn’t get away with that today, but it’s a pretty solid joke.) In his last iconic campaign, Freberg reinvented Encyclopaedia Britannica’s image in 1987 with a savvy spoof of infomercials. A squeaky, jean-jacketed teenV sparred winningly with a big-voiced announcer (“Let’s have that 800 number. Excellent!”) over the virtues of a good home library. As a result, Britannica sold an all-time-high 120,000 encyclopedias in a single year.

  The spots were explicit about creating a new advertising dynamic in an age of more jaded viewers with shorter attention spans. “Sorry for the interruption,” the kid-with-the-report-due-on-space said at the top of one ad.

  “The what?” asked the worried announcer.

  “Well, that’s what a commercial is, basically, right?”

  “Uh, don’t tell them that.”

  “This is a commercial,” the kid insisted. “Hold on,” he added, leaning into the camera. “Don’t zap me yet.”

  “I usually zap the commercials,” said a bored-sounding child’s voice, offscreen.

  “I understand. But you can really use these books.” This infomercial was different, we were given to understand. It was on our side. It knew that infomercials are dumb. With that out of the way, we could get down to some straight talk.

  The Ad Your Ad Could Sell Like

  Wieden + Kennedy dipped its toes into the water of cutting-edge humor with its long-running “This Is SportsCenter” campaign for ESPN. These ads predicted the mockumentary boom of the Office era by imagining the cable channel’s dreary Connecticut headquarters as a playground where bajillionaire athletes goofed around at the water cooler with reporters and staff. But the real turning point for the agency debuted during the 2010 Super Bowl and starred an athlete who had never made it off the practice squad. In the first of the award-winning “Smell Like a Man, Man” spots for Old Spice, a shirtless hunk bragged to female viewers about how superior he was to their husbands and boyfriends, because he used a more masculine body wash. Everyone was talking about the ad’s in-camera visual trickery, which moved the Old Spice Man from a bathroom to a boat deck to the back of a horse, all in one seamless take.VI But what gave the ad its staying power was the crisply written monologue (“What’s in your hand? It’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love!”) and the cheerfully over-the-top performance of former wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa. The ad was viewed thirteen million times on YouTube in its first six months, and Old Spice sales doubled. “We had to run the ad less because people would go to the stores and there’d be no product left,” said Craig Allen, who co-wrote the ad with Eric Kallman.

  The calculus was changing. Though David Ogilvy famously recanted his “no humor” rule in 1982, he wasn’t entirely wrong. The research is still mixed on exactly how persuasive a funny ad can be, because many viewers do indeed remember the joke and forget the product. When Taco Bell abruptly ended its “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” campaign in 2000, word quickly spread that their Chihuahua mascot had died. In fact, that was an urban legend. The Chihuahua was alive and prospering, but same-store sales numbers at Taco Bell franchises were not. The company learned that ad viewers loved their quippy mascot but weren’t buying the gorditas.

  But technology marched on, and by 2010, that was a problem that a sufficiently entertaining ad could easily overcome. A funny commercial that went viral would be passed around to a vastly larger audience than would ever see it otherwise. As of 2017, the first “Smell Like a Man, Man” ad had been viewed over fifty million times online, not by people who were waiting to get back to their TV show, but by people who chose to watch it. By fans. They were so delighted by the ad that they wanted to pass it on to friends and family. And none of this
cost Old Spice a cent in television airtime! With numbers like that, it doesn’t matter if some, or even most, of the viewers don’t remember what product the “I’m on a horse” guy was plugging. The sheer number of eyeballs captured can make the funny ad more influential than a much “stickier” earnest one.

  “The CEO of Procter and Gamble told everyone that ‘Old Spice is now an entertainment brand. It’s not a deodorant brand,’ ” Jason Kreher bragged. Think about that for a second: Old Spice—the eighty-year-old product that smells like your grandpa’s undershirts, a stodgy brand so threatened by Axe in 2009 that P&G executives discussed changing the name to “Spice”—is now a hip, digital-era entertainment property. The aftershaves and stuff could go away tomorrow, and “Old Spice” would still exist as an intangible metaphysical concept—an attitude, a comic sensibility. It wouldn’t smell like anything, but it would be cool.VII

  Wackiness at Nine Million Dollars Per Minute

  Years after the Old Spice Man made his debut, the industry was still chasing his chiseled, towel-clad glutes. It wasn’t just KFC. Every advertiser wanted that whimsical wink at the viewer, that confidently ridiculous pitchman, that slightly absurd sense of humor. Watching the Super Bowl in 2016, I could almost sense the sweaty desperation of a child beauty pageant from every commercial. Not every ad can go viral, after all. Which would it be? Clearly, the advertisers all had the same theory: it would be the surprising one, the one that pushed the envelope of outlandishness and visual trickery just far enough. A horrifying science-project-gone-wrong called “PuppyMonkeyBaby” broke into an apartment and forced Mountain Dew Kickstart on a trio of confused roommates, while repeating its name in a rhythm that PepsiCo clearly hoped would become an unstoppable earworm. Steven Tyler sang a duet with his own Skittles portrait.