by Ken Jennings
Two days! Two days was all it took for comedy to find a nascent medium and terraform it into a completely new ecosystem.
Sitcom Land in Bad Decline
The new omnipresence of comedy explains one puzzling outlier: the seeming decline in popularity of television comedy. This chart shows the number of top-rated television series that were comedies for every TV season since 1951.
In an age when comedy is ascendant in nearly every facet of modern life, and sometimes takes as little as two days to conquer new ones, what’s going on here? In just a quick glance at the chart, you can see multiple eras when comedy was the most popular thing on the television dial. In 1974, the year of my birth, every single one of the seven top-rated programs on TV was a sitcom.XIII The all-time pinnacle of the genre was 1991, when Brandon Tartikoff’s sitcom revival at NBC, led by The Cosby Show, Cheers, and The Golden Girls, was in full swing. “Must See TV” so transformed the broadcast landscape that an unprecedented twenty-two of the top thirty shows were comedies.
But that collapsed pretty abruptly a decade later. In fact, by 2016, The Big Bang Theory was the lone comedy left in the Nielsen top thirty.XIV In just fifteen years, even though the Platonic ideal of “funniness” was more influential than ever in popular culture, network comedy collapsed to a tiny fraction of its onetime greatness relative to other genres. What happened?
“Now you have more of everything,” New York Times television critic James Poniewozik explained when I went to him for answers. “That allows more diversity, more voices. Everything becomes more niche.
“Comedy isn’t unpopular. It’s huge! There are a lot more comedies. More late-night shows. Sketch comedies on cable. Comedy Central, premium cable, Netflix. And then you have a dispersal of the energy and audience of comedy into different forms of programming. A lot of reality TV is, essentially, comedy. Ambitious dramas like The Sopranos or Mad Men or The Good Wife were all among the funniest shows on the air any given week.”
“But why didn’t drama balkanize in the same way?” I asked. “Why is the same monolithic bloc still sticking with NCIS and Criminal Minds?”
“I think that goes to how personal and specific humor is. People just divide more on comedy than they do on, say, police procedurals. Comedy becomes a niche thing more easily, because sitcoms depend more on personal identification.”
There’s also the demographic trend involved. Procedural dramas skew to an older audience that’s more likely to watch the same stuff as each other, the same stuff they got used to watching five years ago. But young people are suckers for the new heat, the new destination. “Including stuff that’s not on TV,” Poniewozik points out, citing YouTube and other short viral-video media that are much better at delivering laughs than drama.
In other words, the apparent ratings disadvantage of network comedy is a direct result of the funniness explosion. There are now so many options if you want to laugh—why would anyone settle for the genre that gave us The Facts of Life and Full House?
The Charms of Deltalina
The ad world was the first industry to learn that humor was a reliable way to increase the attention, comprehension, and persuasion of just about any audience. Then Sesame Street brought the same approach to the world of education, teaching generations of children letters and numbers using the 1960s sketch comedy playbook of Laugh-In. More recently, in one of the oddest comedy developments of our time, the airline industry has been trying out the same technique.
Over the past decade, the simple preflight safety demonstrations of yore—here’s how the seat belts work, here’s where the life vests are—metastasized into full-blown comedies, with lavish musical production numbers and absurdist modern in-jokes. I lived in two different cities that were Delta hubs during this era, so I could watch the progress of the disease on the world’s largest airline. Their first new-wave safety video, in 2008, attracted media attention for what Delta announced as “bits of humor and unexpected twists,” but the staid five-minute video really had only two light touches: a digital twinkle added to the smile of one flight attendant demonstrating how to use seat cushions as flotation devices, and a sassy “No smoking!” finger wag from Katherine Lee, the redheaded flight attendant who narrated the video. Lee became a particular favorite with Delta’s passengers (mostly the male ones, presumably), who nicknamed her “Deltalina” and set up Internet fan pages in her honor. As she returned to reprise her trademark gesture in future updates (now created by—who else?—Wieden + Kennedy), the comedy gradually took over the videos. The 2012 update to the video included silly throwaway gags like a robot powering himself down for takeoff and a man stowing a noisy accordion under his seat.
At first there was an illicit little thrill in seeing jokes sprinkled into a serious—and federally mandated—ritual of air travel. What a fun bonus! But then the videos proliferated in a half-dozen new variations. There was a special holiday-themed video every December, in which Ebenezer Scrooge refused to sit in an exit row (“Bah!”) and Santa put his own oxygen mask on first before helping an elf. (Santa flies commercial?) There was an eighties-themed video complete with cameos from ALF, Teddy Ruxpin, Gerald Casale from Devo stowing his red “energy dome” hat under the seat in front of him, and in the copilot’s seat, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Get it? It was funny because he also played the airline copilot in the funny movie.
By 2015, the once-refreshing Delta safety videos had descended into comic anarchy. One new version of the video was themed around Internet memes and featured briefly popular online “celebrities” like Keyboard Cat, Double Rainbow Guy, and Overly Attached Girlfriend. (“What is going on here?” I once heard an older passenger ask her husband while this video played.) In the next installment, Delta swallowed its own tail with a safety video about Delta safety videos. Highlights from past videos were replayed as winners of a spoof awards show called “the Safetys” (sic). If you hadn’t been watching the evolution of the art form since 2008, you would have been very, very confused.
This is the twenty-first-century love affair with humor in a nutshell: take something funny, a small delight, and absolutely wear it out. Strip-mine it for every penny, every eyeball, every chuckle, until there’s nothing left. Salt the earth so no one can ever laugh at tray tables and overhead compartments again.
The Bottomless Appetite
“What happens if the all-you-can-eat buffet runs out of food?” my daughter, Kate, asked when she was six or seven. Like many kids that age, she was obsessed with jokes and trying to figure out how they work.
“I give up. What happens if it runs out?”
“It can’t!” she said. “It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet!”
“That’s a good one.”
“Get it? ‘All you can eat.’ ” I didn’t really get it, but she seemed very pleased with herself.
The funny boom has turned daily life into an endless smorgasbord of comedy, more than you can ever consume. “Thirty-three percent of the American economy is now comedy,” Conan O’Brien has said to his writers. It was a joke, but it didn’t seem too far off.
Jokes are a little like soda pop, or porn. As an occasional treat, the way they started out, they hardly even counted as a vice. Who would begrudge the thirsty teen her tall, sweet cherry Coke from a soda fountain after school, or the bachelor-party rowdies their scratchy, worn-out stag film? But when high-fructose corn syrup or Internet porn began to saturate the culture, when they became the meal and not the dessert, we became grimly aware of their downsides. It was difficult not to wonder if the Big Gulps might be fueling an obesity epidemic, if the hours of online porn-watching might be warping the way people think about real-life sex.
When jokes come at us in dozens of YouTube videos and late-night monologues and hundreds of ads and thousands of tweets per day, they also start to feel less and less like a treat. They’re just a constant low-level hum in the bed of the culture. As our baseline advances, we can become victims of what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill,” need
ing the steady flow of jokes just to keep from feeling unhappy, and ever needing more stimuli, and more novel ones, to feel real amusement.
Why does everything have to be funny anyway? It’s hard to imagine anything that lends itself less to humor than federal air safety regulations do. When I flew as a kid, the laminated safety cards in the seat-back pocket scared the hell out of me, and I would pore over them from boarding until takeoff, absolutely sure that something was going to go wrong and I wasn’t going to know where my nearest emergency exit was located. What if it’s behind me? I think I was right to take the cards seriously; after all, this is life-and-death stuff. The Delta videos are clever, but maybe the airline was so busy asking, “Can we make cabin pressure loss funny?” that they never asked if they should.
Delta claimed that its videos were only funny in the interest of safety. “We wanted people to laugh and be engaged, because if they’re paying attention and watching for the gags, they’re also paying attention and listening to the safety instructions,” the airline’s marketing communications chief told an interviewer. But the jokes quickly became part of Delta’s branding as well. Almost four million people have watched the first “Deltalina” video online—home viewers watching for fun, obviously, not studying life vest procedures. That’s a strong incentive for an airline to load up its safety videos with laughs, whether or not there’s any evidence that funny videos make passengers safer.
And is there any evidence? The Federal Aviation Administration has said that it never studied the question but still plans to do so. In a 2014 experiment, an Australian aviation safety researcher, Brett Molesworth, showed three different safety videos to a group of sixty undergraduates. One was serious, the second was funny, and the third featured celebrities. The funny video made viewers feel better briefly, but it had little effect on their recall. Humor, Molesworth wrote, “is positive in securing attention, but may disrupt processing of key information.” In 2016, Delta ended the comedy one-upmanship by debuting a new, more straightforward series of safety videos with an international theme and no jokes.
But that’s not the trend. Laughing makes people feel good and pay attention, and that’s a powerful combination for anyone whose job is to make people feel good about something: a product, a place, a point of view, a political candidate. It’s a simple process psychologists call “affect transfer”: I laughed when I saw the funny ad about Old Spice, and I will spend the rest of my life vainly trying to recapture that flash of happiness, by buying Old Spice. “A brief moment of happiness is pretty good,” said Jerry Seinfeld in 2014, speaking to a room full of ad industry folks giving him an honorary Clio award. It was a sardonic joke at the expense of advertising, but he wasn’t wrong. Sometimes everything’s bad, and it’s nice that someone cleverly crafted a hopeful little moment to make you feel good about something. That’s what advertisers do; it’s what comedians do too.
But let’s not forget that the people suffusing every second of your day with comedy aren’t in it for humanitarian purposes. Funny spreads like a virus because mass media need content, and content pays. YouTube and late-night TV and essentially every other comedy vector in the media exist so they can sell advertising.XV And funny advertising is now a $60 billion business annually. Of all the trends that we’ve seen powering the new humor boom—technology, youth, secularism—consumerism may be the most potent, simply because it’s the best funded.
As I left the creatives at Wieden + Kennedy, I mentioned that I had recently picked up my first stick of Old Spice in decades. A few weeks earlier, in need of deodorant, I faced a full drugstore aisle of bewildering, demoralizing choice. After a few minutes of searching, I still couldn’t find the exact size and shape of Speed Stick I was replacing. At a loss, I picked out a brand pretty much at random. It was Old Spice, the one with the funny ads. Affect transfer is for real.
“If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist!” the back of the package announced. Craig Allen explained that Wieden + Kennedy now writes everything for the Old Spice brand, right down to direct mailings and label copy, stuff that would normally be segmented among different agencies. “It’s very rare to get to do that.”
I wondered to myself if the joke was originally pitched as “If your father hadn’t worn it,” which then got rejected as too edgy. Still, it was a bold gambit, to make the customer imagine his grandparents having sex every time he gets out of the shower. It’s not reassuring, but it is funny. Today, that’s really all that matters.
Why not? It’s not a deodorant anymore, it’s an entertainment brand.
* * *
I. Inspired by, of all people, executed murderer Gary Gilmore. When Utah prison guards brought Gilmore before the firing squad in 1977, they asked if he had any last words. “Let’s do it,” he replied.
II. Ogilvy’s book was a touchstone for Mad Men producer Matthew Weiner in creating the world of 1960s adman Don Draper. Draper, like Ogilvy, is deeply skeptical of humor in advertising. When shown the ironic 1960 “Lemon” ad for the Volkswagen Beetle, one of the most influential “funny” campaigns in history, Draper says, “I don’t know what I hate about it the most: the ad or the car.”
III. Sorry about the clickbait. “Drink a warm cup of Ovaltine,” is the answer.
IV. His most famous records include “John and Marsha,” in which the two lovebirds do nothing but coo each other’s names for 2:28 over a bed of soap opera organ music (and which the BBC banned under the theory that John and Marsha might conceivably be in the throes of sexual passion), and the Billboard number one hit “St. George and the Dragonet,” a Dragnet parody in a medieval setting.
V. Played by Freberg’s own son, Donavan.
VI. Over a three-day shoot, W+K only got three usable versions of the intricately choreographed shot. The one in the commercial is take fifty-seven of the final day.
VII. A few years after Craig Allen helped mastermind the new Old Spice campaign, he was talking to a W+K account manager just back from a Nike shoot in China. At a store in Beijing that sold fashion-forward Western clothing, there was a series of Old Spice deodorant sticks lined up on the counter. “Why do you have these?” the account man asked. “It’s Old Spice!” the clerk told him. “It’s a cool American thing!”
VIII. The ad was equally unpopular in the halls of Weight Watchers and Wieden + Kennedy. “Everyone was saying, ‘Oh my God, did that f—king kid die?’ for the first twenty seconds of our commercial,” groused Jason Kreher. “So that didn’t work out great.”
IX. Twitter recognized this fact in 2017, controversially doubling its character limit to 280.
X. A Twitter update from The State comedian Michael Ian Black: “Had some soup already today. Later I’m going to have a salad. It’s like a soup and salad combo but spread out over a few hours. Thx.”
XI. Even in the absence of documentation, scholars tend to believe there was plenty of such joking. Sociologist Christie Davies points out that for decades there was no written record of antigovernment joking in the Soviet Union, but émigrés and defectors assured us that such jokes were common.
XII. Generally, this is how you know your joke was easy or “hack” in some important way. Presumably people who are better at jokes than I am can actually tell this in advance.
XIII. All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, The Jeffersons, M*A*S*H, Rhoda, and Good Times. Then The Waltons breaks the streak.
XIV. If you don’t count ties. The single-camera family comedy Life in Pieces was tied with two NBC procedurals for the thirtieth slot. In on a technicality!
XV. Not Twitter comedians. They’re just venting, or want you to come to their shows.
FIVE
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A LITTLE MORE CONVERSATION
The doughnuts had been hurled gleefully into the crowd at least twenty minutes before their owner came to the stage to confess. “They’re secondhand,” he explained, loud but quiet in the manner of the unmic’ed. “I wouldn’t eat the doughnuts. I
found them in a garbage can.”
“Wait, which doughnuts, the Voodoo Doughnuts or the Krispy Kremes?” demanded our host, stoner comedian Doug Benson. It was the Krispy Kremes. “These doughnuts? Don’t eat those ones, you guys. This guy says they’re bad.” What was actually wrong with the doughnuts? Were they laced with PCP? Human flesh? No one was sure. Who would put a box of tainted doughnuts on a theater stage for a host with the munchies?
I was a guest at a taping of Benson’s long-running podcast Doug Loves Movies, in which a rotating panel of his comedy friends gabs about their favorite movies and competes at movie trivia games. I’m not a comedian, but occasionally there’s a specialty act like me on the panel as well, like the dog acts of the vaudeville era. For many years, I’d been Benson’s regular novelty panelist when his show pulled through Seattle, because, I gather, he likes guests who take the trivia games seriously. Also, I live ten minutes from the theater.
“That was one of the weirder exchanges I’ve ever been a part of,” observed fellow podcaster and Doug Loves Movies regular Graham Elwood.
“ ‘Hey, you know those doughnuts you just threw at people?’ ” Benson said, imitating the matter-of-fact tone of the stage-rusher. “ ‘They’re full of poison.’ ”
“Whaaa—?!?”
Poisoned doughnuts were a new wrinkle, but I was accustomed to all kinds of comic anarchy at recordings of Doug Loves Movies. Benson used to record the show in a studio, but when he started taping it weekly in front of a live audience, the crowd—a weird nexus of movie nerds, comedy nerds, and potheads—became part of the circus. The live show was a dizzyingly colorful coral reef, semirandomly accreting new layers of trivia and tradition every episode. The fans learned their lines and shouted out ritualized answers like a Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd. They would leave votive offerings of baked goods onstage for Benson before the show, and dozens of them would hang out at the stage door to smoke up with Benson afterward. In just a handful of appearances on the show, I’d seen the crowd peppered with Nerf darts on one occasion and doughnut holes from a slingshot on another. I’d seen a drone-copter flown over the crowd and a Darth Vader piñata whacked apart onstage. Maybe none of this business sounds like the most natural fit for an audio-only medium like podcasting, but fans don’t seem to mind. The show gets downloaded by over a hundred thousand listeners every week.
