by Ken Jennings
But the whiff of Old Spice was strongest in the first quarter, when a hammy Jeff Goldblum promoted Apartments.com by singing the Jeffersons theme as he and his grand piano were hoisted up the outside of a high-rise to a “deluxe apartment in the sky.” (This ad’s absurd kicker wasn’t a horse; it was . . . literally a kicker. Lil Wayne place-kicked a football between the uprights of a miniature gridiron atop the penthouse, for no discernible reason.) Goldblum was the perfect twenty-first-century spokesperson, combining old-school gravitas with modern ironic cachet. “Guess they couldn’t get Christopher Walken,” I commented at our Super Bowl party. Not too long after, there was a cranky Willem Dafoe, dressed as Marilyn Monroe for a Snickers commercial. “Walken turned down Snickers too!” I said, impressed. Harvey Keitel, currently America’s third-string Christopher Walken, showed up in a Mini car commercial. I had just about given up. But in the third quarter, there he suddenly was in all his eccentric glory: Christopher Walken hiding in a suburban man’s “Walken closet” (get it?) so he could criticize his drab, beige wardrobe and talk him into a choice with a little more “pizzazzzzzz”: the all-new Kia Optima.
The epidemic of “funny” Super Bowl ads escalated so quickly that now it’s big industry news when an ad agency tries to run a different play during the big game: an adorable wordless story about the Budweiser Clydesdales, for example. Once the competition has Jeff Goldblum scaling skyscrapers, you don’t want to be the brand looking to the past with irony-free, Goldblum-free content. Once a certain kind of humor becomes cultural shorthand for hipness and youth and smarts, literally anything else risks looking square and old and dumb.
According to Millward Brown, in 2013, 52 percent of all advertising in North America was “funny or light-hearted” in nature, more than any other part of the world. Humor is a more obvious ad technique for a $4 stick of deodorant than it is for weightier purchasing decisions, like a car or a refrigerator. But that was changing as well. Take auto insurance. In 1998, Geico controlled just 2.5 percent of the car insurance market. Then, under the new ownership of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., the company went on an unprecedented advertising blitz, with annual expenditures eventually topping one billion dollars. A Screen Actors Guild strike made it impossible to hire a celebrity for their new campaign, so the company settled for an animated gecko. The Cockney lizard was an unexpected hit, and over the next decade, as Geico’s market share tripled, insurance advertising changed. The sedate testimonials of years past were replaced with an endlessly wacky parade of ducks, cavemen, nutty professors, humming quarterbacks, and peppy salespeople. Even Allstate’s Dennis Haysbert had to take a backseat to a madman called “Mayhem,” played by 30 Rock’s Dean Winters, who barely survived a series of catastrophic Jackass-style stunts. Nationwide spoofed the trend—and succumbed to it—by introducing their own cocky equivalent of the Old Spice Man, the “World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World.” It was an arms race.
“I don’t think that any product is off-limits for humor if you do it correctly,” Jason Kreher told me. “I don’t think there’s one client I’ve ever worked on where I haven’t tried humor, to see how it goes.” He had recently pitched Weight Watchers on its first funny campaign—not the usual testimonial from a dieter proudly checking herself out in new jeans, but a clever and sympathetic mini-symphony about the universal temptation of snacking. W+K followed this up with a more ambitious Super Bowl spot, a densely edited montage lampooning American excess, consumerism, and the tropes of food advertising itself. “That was the perfect example where, if you did it wrong, you would be completely destroyed. But if you did it right, people would react really well.”
When even dieting and insurance were fair game for funny ads, it was hard to imagine the pendulum ever swinging back. The ad right before Kreher’s “All You Can Eat” Weight Watchers spot at the 2015 Super Bowl was from Nationwide, but they’d ditched their “World’s Greatest Spokesperson” in favor of a daring pushback against the grain: a sweet ad about childhood in which the cherubic narrator dramatically revealed, at the thirty-second mark, “I couldn’t grow up, because I died from an accident.” A sad white curtain blew through the open second-story window behind him, perhaps marking the scene of the tragedy. America’s collective jaw dropped. Was Nationwide lauded for using the biggest TV audience of the year to air a potentially life-saving PSA about household safety? They were not! Sixty-four percent of social media reactions were negative, and the chief marketing officer who oversaw the ad left Nationwide three months later.VIII
That’s an extreme example, but it shows the difficulty of weaning advertisers and viewers off the comedy teat. The slide from serious to funny was easy because surprise, the unlooked-for laugh, is so essential to humor. But once audiences expect that infusion of jokes every thirty seconds, anything else falls flat. Internet advertising, for example, is universally hated, by the same people who will watch funny TV commercials on YouTube for hours. It’s no coincidence that Internet pop-ups are also the only ads that never figured out how to be funny.
There’s also the question of what modern ads could even fall back on to replace humor. Craig Allen explained that old-school ad gurus of David Ogilvy’s generation preferred factual product rundowns to jokes for a very good reason: there were just fewer products then. “They didn’t have to differentiate themselves very much. They actually had something to talk about.” Back when there were only three kinds of mayonnaise, you could convince a consumer just by demonstrating that your brand was creamier, or lasted longer on the shelf, or used real lemon juice, or something. No jokey distraction required. “I don’t know why you would need to make a joke if you have something like that in your back pocket,” Allen told me. “I pray for briefs that have that clear of a product benefit.” That’s why cell phone and car ads can still be lengthy, fact-filled encomia to higher-resolution cameras and better fuel mileage: the product is still improving. Mayonnaise, in the absence of new advances in the condiment field, has to resort to making you laugh. Laugh about mayonnaise.
The Pocket Joke Factory
Advertising is just one world that’s been overrun by the joke virus—and it’s no longer the most ubiquitous one. If the average American sees 362 paid media ads a day, as one study found, and over half use humor, that’s almost two hundred jokes a day. Writing about advertising humor in 2014, professor Fred K. Beard opined that “humorous advertisements may be the most frequent way that many come into contact with intentional humor,” dwarfing more traditional delivery methods like stand-up or sitcoms. But within a few years, Beard was exponentially out of date. In the age of social media, a two-hundred-joke day seems downright sedate, a relic of a simpler time.
Twitter was founded almost accidentally in 2007, spun out of a failing podcasting company called Odeo. It was a hybrid technology that filled a need no one actually had: to send messages with the enforced brevity of texts to one’s entire social network. “From early on, we didn’t know what it was,” cofounder Evan Williams admitted in 2015. “ ‘Microblogging’ was a thing a lot of people called it.”
I was bemused every time someone tried to explain Twitter to me: Facebook but shorter? That’s more or less what people thought. It was a toy, a way to shout out important updates like “Just finishing lunch!” or “FINALLY, THE WEEKEND” into the digital ether. I remember thinking that maybe it would be good at zoos. “OMG the tiger is actually awake now and just moved its legs a little, get over there!!!”
Someone at my publisher eventually talked me into getting on Twitter, but I soon learned that just because I’d been on TV at one point, that didn’t make people interested in hearing me hype a book release or reminisce about quiz shows. Nobody even noticed. Frustrated, I started posting jokes just to amuse myself—and immediately started getting responses. I still remember the moment I gave up on real trivia and started tweeting made-up facts instead.
Ken Jennings @KenJennings
DID YOU KNOW! If you laid all Alex Trebek�
�s Perry Ellis suits on the ground end to end . . . HE WOULD BE ANGRY. They are fancy & very expensive!
Suddenly, sixty retweets! For that! Not bad. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. What would you rather pass around to your friends, a new joke, or PR? Twitter’s 140-character limit, it turned out, was crippling for lots of the things the company hoped you would use it for: political discussion, customer service, marketing.IX But it was perfect for one-liners.
Clicking “Follow” on a selection of the most entertaining Twitter feeds turns your phone or laptop into a real-time joke factory of pitiless efficiency. Within a year of joining, I was following about five hundred accounts, which is actually small potatoes by Twitter standards. But that was, on an average weekday, enough to provide me with an unending fire hose of comedy, a new joke or two every single minute. In the early days I would feel guilty if I missed any tweets in my timeline and tried to “catch up” every time I opened Twitter. But eventually it’s just too much. You have to stop struggling and let the waves wash over you.
Let’s Get Small
Everything about Twitter was miniaturized: the character limit, the little glowing screen you probably read it on, the small daily concerns of the quipsters there.X And that makes sense. The modern proliferation of funny into everyday life has been driven, in large part, by the shrinking scale of the jokes themselves.
It’s difficult to construct a historical narrative of humor, because the vast majority of jokes ever told in human history were never written down. We can assume that medieval peasants liked to tell earthy stories about horny damsels and farting monks, but there’s no way to be sure.XI The history of jokes is like the history of sexuality: the most important stuff was never written down. In fact, when the brothers Grimm changed the history of folklore by compiling written records of popular tales, they deliberately left out funny stories in order to keep the scope of their project manageable.
But when jokes started to get published, their subjects tended to be unlikely, larger than life. Think of all of Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines and their improbable love polygons, or the delusional escapades of Don Quixote. It might have been farce, or satire, but it certainly didn’t remind readers much of everyday life. This was especially true in America, where the homegrown mode of humor was based in the “tall talk” of the frontier. The new landscape of the West was jaw-droppingly big and strange: the plains, the canyons, herds of buffalo a million strong, whatever the Mormons were up to. So the jokes were big too. Humor almanacs with names like The Rip Snorter and Whim Whams filled their pages with cheerful braggadocio about corn that grew so fast it caused an earthquake, men so tall they had to climb a ladder to shave, rain so hard that you’d shoot fifteen feet in the air out of your shrinking buckskins.
That’s a strain of bravado you still see on the American scene today, from pro wrestling to hip-hop, but it’s no longer the dominant voice of comedy. We might think of observational comedy as an early-eighties genre pioneered by stand-ups like David Brenner and Jerry Seinfeld: “What’s the deal with socks in the dryer?” But that all began in the 1920s, with humorists like James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, and the incredibly influential Robert Benchley. Benchley was a cofounder of the wisecracking Algonquin Round Table, along with famous friends like Dorothy Parker and Robert Sherwood. In his essays for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Benchley created a new kind of epic, detailing his furious struggle with the smallest annoyances of modern life: hay fever, a broken shoelace, trying to read a newspaper on a crowded bus. When he described waiting in a long post office line only to realize at the counter that your package isn’t in fact ready to mail, he got a new kind of laugh—a laugh of recognition—that could never be earned by a tall tale about Davy Crockett putting a rifle ball through the moon. “That’s funny because it could never happen!” was replaced by “That’s funny because it happens to me all the time!”
Benchley and his contemporaries also reversed the notion of humor as the province of the masterful. No longer would joke-tellers be either swaggering Falstaffs or wise court jesters. The new comic type was the hapless neurotic, the nebbish, the loser. As Thurber wrote in his 1933 autobiography, twentieth-century humorists led “an existence of jumpiness and apprehension”; they “talked largely about small matters and smally about great affairs.” Their muses were the modern men who, in Thurber’s words, “look so swell, and go to pieces so easily.” Benchley, who became a household name during the Great Depression playing himself as a lovably befuddled everyman in a series of short films for MGM, was in reality a much more complicated, troubled soul. His older brother, Edmund, had died in the Spanish-American War when Robert was only eight years old. When his mother received the telegram informing her of the tragedy, she was at a public Fourth of July picnic. “Why couldn’t it have been Robert?” she shouted, with her stunned younger son at her side. The story, for obvious reasons, became a town legend in Worcester, Massachusetts, for decades afterward. Later in life, Benchley became a kind of World War II–era Eddie Murphy, lured away from his early comic genius by big Hollywood paychecks, neutered by the system. His column was dropped by the New Yorker, and when his movie and radio career stalled, he turned to alcohol and pills. He died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage, complicated by cirrhosis of the liver, in 1945.
Today Benchley is a fairly obscure figure compared to fellow New Yorker humor luminaries like Thurber and E. B. White. But without the comic archetype he helped create, the put-upon “Little Man,” we’d never have a Woody Allen or Charlie Brown or Liz Lemon. And the comic sensibility he built, where big laughs can be mined from small, commonplace occurrences, opened the door for comedy to infiltrate every part of modern life. Jerry Seinfeld became the biggest comedian in the world with a show, as he described it, “about nothing,” gripes and quips about the most inconsequential minutiae possible, because that was part of the joke. Shirt buttons could be funny. Junior Mints could be funny. The jokes were so small they could trickle down into any part of society. Every nook and cranny could be filled. Anything could be funny.
Comedy Abhors a Vacuum
The sheer joke density of contemporary life suggests that “peak funny” could very well be, like “peak oil,” a sign of depletion. What if we’re running out? On any given day, a breaking news event will be inevitably followed on Twitter by many, many people simultaneously making the same jokes about it. A new Indiana Jones movie has been announced? Brace yourselves for hundreds of variations on the premise that his new adventures might be a little different because Harrison Ford—wait for it—is very old! Congressional leaders propose a tariff on Mexican imports? Here comes a tidal wave of guacamole jokes! Even a celebrity death can become a ghoulish, nerdy rap battle on Twitter, with thousands of aspirants mining the deceased’s show-biz résumé for good one-liner material.
I’ve had to delete dozens of tweets after a follower pointed out that someone else had told the exact same joke thirty seconds or thirty minutes earlier.XII And the professionals aren’t immune. Late-night talk show and comedy news hosts are now competing with the Internet equivalent of a million monkeys with typewriters. They know that unless a monologue joke idea is very, very good, it probably made the rounds on Twitter hours ago. Outlets with longer lead times like Saturday Night Live and the Onion have it even worse: they need to scavenge for comic takes that days of Twitter users and late-night writers have somehow left on the vine.
Late-night TV is, in fact, one of the best examples of comedy colonizing a new frontier and immediately changing it forever. In July 1953, when Steve Allen began a live local comedy show on New York’s WNBT every night at 11:20, late-night television didn’t exist. After the local news at eleven, stations would generally play the national anthem and sign off until morning. But in 1957, NBC decided to air Allen’s show nationally, renaming it Tonight. The new time slot was a complete vacuum, desperate for content, and Allen filled it with a new type of program that emerged from his head like Athena, fully f
ormed: the bandleader, the announcer, the opening monologue, the celebrity interviews, the comedy bits, the musical guests. Once comedy had planted its flag in late night, it prospered there for sixty years, with Allen’s template shoving aside news and late movies until it spanned all four networks. For a few decades, Nightline swam upstream against Leno and Letterman, but by 2013, the acclaimed news show couldn’t even survive as counterprogramming anymore. ABC pushed it back to 12:35, so that Jimmy Kimmel, a perfectly pleasant white man, could do his reliable Steve Allen–derived hour against two or three other pleasant white men doing the same thing.
Almost fifty years later, another new frontier opened. The YouTube website made its public debut in May 2005 with cofounder Jawed Karim’s classic video “Me at the zoo,” a nineteen-second test shot of elephants at the San Diego Zoo. The site was in beta-test mode for over six months, establishing itself as a place for teens to share videos of their bedroom rants or acoustic guitar performances, and it launched officially on December 15, 2005. Just two days later, on December 17, someone uploaded a copy of a new Saturday Night Live digital short: Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell’s “Lazy Sunday.” This was a rap parody based on the premise that, as rappers go, Samberg and Parnell were anything but “hard,” two middle-class slackers spitting rhymes about Magnolia Bakery cupcakes and an Upper West Side matinee of the first Chronicles of Narnia movie. It was one joke, but it was a pretty funny joke. The video went viral, generating a then-unprecedented five million views before NBC Universal finally pulled the clip. YouTube’s reputation had been made: this was now the destination to catch new copyrighted content, either with the permission of rights holders or before they could respond. Just a month later, YouTube overtook Yahoo Video, then the web’s leading video-sharing site, in traffic numbers, and was soon acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.
