by Ken Jennings
As Erasmus tells it, society would break down entirely without our ability to laugh with each other in daily life. And maybe this is why organic, “caught in the wild” moments of levity go over better today with comedy audiences than canned jokes. They’re closer to the value we see in the joking around of daily life, and most likely closer to what humor originally evolved to do. Our intuition that the funnier life is better tends to be borne out by research: funny people are perceived by others to be happier, more agreeable, and more attractive. People with a highly developed sense of humor (affiliative and not aggressive, self-enhancing rather than self-defeating) are indeed better than average at emotional IQ skills like striking up conversations and “reading” other people. Today’s dominant comic sensibility in podcasts and the like is the easygoing, collaborative one that powers improv exercises, and it’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that getting better as an improv partner isn’t too different from getting better at being a person: open to new ideas and change, not judgmental of others’ contributions, willing to take risks, valuing listening above all.
But just because so much good comedy today is communal, let’s not start singing “Kumbaya” just yet. Not every joke told in a social context is necessarily going to make the world a better place. Spend a few minutes hanging out on comedy Twitter or listening to old Opie and Anthony shows. Joking around with friends can smooth social interactions, defuse stressful situations, and cheer up the lonely—but only if they’re the right kind of jokes. Jokes can also be wielded to ridicule, scold, or punish others, or trivialize their concerns. In-jokes can create a powerful connection between people, but even they only work if someone’s on the outside of them looking in.
Fugitives from the Grouch Patrol
One thing that long puzzled me about the slow ooze of jokes into every corner of life: what about the workplace? You may not remember the fad for corporate “humor consultants,” but they once covered the plains like the buffalo. They wore Groucho glasses or red clown noses and gave presentations with titles like “Getting More Smile-age Out of Your Workday.” Where did they come from? Where did they go?
The 1980s were a perfect storm for the creation of the corporate humor industry. Organizations were embracing less hierarchical management models, and the new-model executives were quirky, approachable personalities like ice cream wunderkinds Ben and Jerry or Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher, who came to office Halloween parties dressed as “the High Priest of Ha-Ha” and challenged rival CEOs to arm-wrestling matches. Companies were eager for ways to boost employee creativity and solidarity while reducing conflict and stress, and humor training seemed to check every box. In the world outside the office, club comedy was booming, and some of those enterprising stand-ups discovered they could make more money telling jokes at a single “team-building seminar” than they could in a week of nightclub gigs. Second City held special sessions of its improv training boot camp for business teams. Even John Cleese had a lucrative second career with Video Arts, a company he founded to make droll corporate training videos with titles like The Balance Sheet Barrier and Meetings, Bloody Meetings.
Once humor consulting became a buzzword, the ranks of moonlighting comedians were joined by hundreds of business speakers with no comedy background chasing the latest management fad. Joel Goodman was a writer from Saratoga Springs, New York, who’d done business presentations on everything from organizational development to stress management. One morning in 1977, he’d had a road-to-Damascus moment on a Houston hospital shuttle, when a jovial driver had needed just four minutes of easygoing jokes to defuse all the family tension around Goodman’s father’s looming heart surgery. After his dad recovered, Goodman founded a utopian new initiative called the Humor Project that would, as he described it to me, try to replicate his moment of grace in Houston, teaching people and organizations to “ ‘make sense of humor’ and serve it to ourselves and coworkers and families and loved ones when we needed it.” By 1997, he was receiving twenty requests a day for his troupe of humor consultants, who crisscrossed the country educating managers on “the relationship between the funny line and the bottom line.”
And so, if you worked at Eastman Kodak during the funny era, you had a gaily colored “humor room” at your HQ, well stocked with Erma Bombeck books, Candid Camera videos, costumes, novelty chattering teeth, and a Saddam Hussein punching bag. The room was available anytime an employee needed a brief chuckle or a moment of stress relief. If you worked at Ben and Jerry’s, the office “Joy Gang” would periodically surprise you with guerrilla celebrations: an Elvis impersonation contest, Dress Like Your Favorite Freezer Worker Day, Barry Manilow Day. At Apple, employees were instructed to blow on kazoos rather than applaud at quarterly meetings. At Digital Equipment, a roving “Grouch Patrol” wandered the halls looking for sour faces. Anytime they saw a frown that needed turning upside down, their protocol was to reply with the “bat face”: tugging the nostrils upward with one hand while flicking the tongue in and out and making a high-pitched bat squeal. Who wouldn’t crack up at that?
As anyone who’s ever had a job could probably have warned us, humor didn’t benefit by putting the word “corporate” in front of it. Teaching managers to say things like “That concludes the musical portion of the program!” after a squeal of microphone feedback, or to carry in their briefcase a “humor first aid kit” consisting of a Batman mask, colorful suspenders, and “whatever else can make you or your co-workers laugh,” is unfunny-but-harmless advice. But PowerPoint suggestions like “Staple Kleenex to potentially stressful memos” point out the weird dynamic behind the humor boom: corporations were essentially co-opting fun, forcing it on their employees.XI In many cases, humor didn’t actually relax the old top-down management structure; it just became a new tool for keeping the employee cogs turning without squeaking. “Copays are doubling on our dental and vision plans, LOL! Here’s a Kleenex!” “Lots of unpaid overtime is coming up this quarter, but we’re also having an ugly shoes contest!” It doesn’t help that all the enforced-fun committees from the era, the Joy Gangs and Grouch Patrols, had names you’d expect to see used by brigades of armed, unsmiling children in totalitarian dictatorships.
John Morreall is the rare humor consultant who was actually a respected humor studies academic before he got into the business. He finally hung out his Humorworks consulting shingle in 1989 at the height of the boom, unable to resist the siren song of the lucrative sideline. Though recently retired from William and Mary when I spoke to him, Morreall was still academia’s leading expert on humor in the workplace, and he was surprisingly candid about his fellow humor speakers. “There are a number of people who do this business consulting who have no—how can I put it kindly? They don’t have academic credentials and they don’t have any special insights.”
“Also, shouldn’t professional humor consultants be . . . funnier?” I ventured.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” he sighed. “It’s Reader’s Digest funny. It’s funny maybe for my parents’ generation. I don’t know what to say about the people who like that stuff, but it isn’t my stuff.”
I found one website for a Seattle-based humor speaker, a woman named Patt Schwab, and she was willing to meet with me to talk about her career. “So you will recognize me, I’ll have a rubber chicken head peeking out of my purse,” she wrote in her e-mail. Sure enough, when I got to Starbucks, hers was the only purse with a rubber chicken. Schwab had recently taken the chicken with her on a trip to Cuba; in each photo she showed me, the chicken was wearing a different costume: a kimono, a feather dress, a little tuxedo. The outfits, Schwab explained, were actually those novelty covers people buy for wine bottles. A trick of the corporate humor trade.
Like many of her peers, Schwab fell into the humor business accidentally. She was a college administrator when professional contacts started asking her if she could add a workshop on humor to her repertoire. Before long, she was a full-time evangelist of her own LAF management syst
em (limber up, anticipate change, foster fun!) and traveled the country cracking up hotel meeting rooms full of middle managers with lines like, “Ever since I ate my first Oreo, I’ve realized that good things are in the middle!”
But the high life didn’t last. “I was riding a wave and I didn’t know it,” she said wistfully. In the 1990s, all she had to do was call a presentation something like “Laugh and Everyone Wins!” and clients lined up. But when the humor fad started to fade, she had to find new, more serious-sounding names for all her material. Out went the LAF system, in came “Making Work Work for You.”
Most of the humor speakers “went back to their day jobs” when the boom ended, Joel Goodman told me. John Morreall blames the end of the corporate jokester industry on economic downturns and the easy availability of online resources. Bosses looking to fun up the office don’t need to pay five thousand dollars to fly in a speaker, if they ever did. Patt Schwab was more frank about those online resources: “One of the killers is that you can’t steal jokes anymore,” she said. The borrowed puns and cartoons that powered her industry just don’t cut it anymore in an age of more relaxed, spontaneous joking around.
Joel Goodman ended the Humor Project’s annual conferences in 2012. “There has been some ebb and flow” to the humor business, he conceded, but he seemed reluctant to say that his day has passed. “Humor has gotten woven into the fabric of the culture,” he insisted.
I can’t agree that Goodman’s brand of prefab jollity really represents the comic mood of modern culture. Quite the opposite: comedy as a corporate trend seems to have run its course largely because it was so often glaringly artificial and unfunny in a world that was getting hip to a more genuine comic sensibility. But Goodman is certainly correct in one sense: it’s harder to think of laughter as some undervalued, elusive commodity now that it’s everywhere. And organized levity is now an expected part of professional life, especially in sectors like tech. A friend of mine briefly worked for a massive Internet search company that will remain nameless. He told me that the buzzy new time-waster at work was trying to handle as much internal communication as possible not with e-mail or instant messaging, but with funny memes. A whole platform was designed from scratch to facilitate this dubious-but-“fun” goal. If the boss from Office Space pops up on your screen saying “That’d be great,” that’s a Level Three problem. But if Rambo pops up, uh-oh. That’s a Level Five. You might be working late tonight. “Considerable time and effort has gone into developing this tool,” my friend said, smiling ruefully.
Humanity’s Funniest Home Videos
Such is the allure of today’s looser, more improvisatory comic sensibility that even scripted comedy now chases it. The dazzling virtuosity of TV in the baroque 30 Rock vein can overshadow the parallel strain of comedy vérité that took over streaming television in its wake. Curb Your Enthusiasm–descended slice-of-life shows like Aziz Ansari’s Master of None and Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan’s Catastrophe weren’t always interested in the artier aspirations of Transparent or Girls, but they aimed to show funny people as they are, not as they might be if they had a roomful of people sharpening their zingers. You can always tell one of these shows immediately: in violation of decades of sitcom tradition, the characters will often laugh at each other’s jokes. You don’t realize until it happens how much you were missing it. What could feel less organic than a world where everyone is constantly quipping at each other but no one ever laughs?
The lazy pinnacle of this trend has come in late night: James Corden singing karaoke with celebrities or Jimmy Fallon challenging them to a game of Pictionary, pretending all the while that this qualifies as comedy somehow. “People are having fun, this must be funny!” There was a time when late-night hosts were our sharpest and most experimental comic minds, but in the end our need for breezy social comedy trumped everything else. Leno got the Tonight Show instead of Letterman, and Jimmy Fallon held on to it when Conan couldn’t. On the other hand, all the genial Fallon-style gimmicks and lip-syncs will probably age better than scripted Letterman monologue jokes or weird Conan O’Brien sketches like “Horny Manatee.” Kliph Nesteroff pointed out to me that our modern image of midcentury comedians is largely from clips of them palling around on Jack Paar or What’s My Line? “That tends to hold up better than their act does,” he said. If that’s true as a rule, our grandchildren might still be charmed in fifty years by late-night clips of Tina Fey telling vacation stories to Seth Meyers, even while they find the travails of Liz Lemon to feel stylized and dated—“very 2010s.”
Spontaneous, conversational humor is now so endemic that we’ve even had to change the meaning of words. Now that a “joke” is essentially any funny exchange between pals, comedy writers have had to invent a new term for the more classical structured quips and anecdotes of yesteryear; those are “jokey jokes.” “Jokey joke” is what’s called a retronym—a new term created when old technology gets outpaced or outmoded, like “acoustic guitar” or “silent film.” As we’ve seen, the canned joke has a history going back millennia, so I don’t expect jokey jokes to go the obsolete way of silent film anytime soon. But they might become the equivalent of acoustic guitars: a slightly quaint alternative to the hip thing. Good for kids. Easier for beginners to whip out at parties.
In the past, the limits on spontaneous humor were mostly logistical ones: there were books and books of reliable canned jokes, but how often did something truly, memorably funny happen to you in real life? I made a list once, and could only think of half a dozen really anecdote-worthy experiences in my lifetime:
1. Trying to hug the dentist
2. Rooftop animal noises during the blackout
3. The smuggled apple
4. Jerremy the unhelpful waiter
5. Duct tape/pubic hair misunderstanding
6. Sex ed with P. J. Carlesimo
In a world where everyone had only a handful of real-life funny stories, scripted comedy was a lifeline. But today, thanks to Internet sharing, we can see that “jokey” jokes are a drop in the ocean compared to the real-life kind—not just in podcasts, but in all the “found comedy” highlights of random earthlings going through daily life. Maybe a dog in Australia will just barely fail to clear a fence and will plunge end-over-end to the sandy beach below in hilarious fashion. Only three people got to see it in person, but if the owner had a camera phone out, that number can become three million by the next morning. A random toddler doing weird stuff to Kanye’s “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” will make me laugh ten times harder than any classic Oscar Wilde aphorism or Marx Brothers routine. In the America’s Funniest Home Videos era, it was possible to treat real-life moments like these as anomalies, an embarrassing “guilty pleasure.” But now that we’re surrounded by them, we know different. All the podcasts and tweets and YouTube videos are really the same thing: real life with the unfunny parts removed.
Real life was as funny as canned jokes all along, but it was hard to see in close-up. We used to get the funny highlight reel of just one lifetime, but now we get to see millions.
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I. Film critic Leonard Maltin has been invited on the podcast many times to play “The Leonard Maltin Game.” He’s terrible at it.
II. That number is accurate. Every man, woman, and child in the English-speaking world is doing, on average, three different comedy podcasts at any given moment.
III. My wife even keeps a separate queue of soothing, low-pitched podcasts she can fall asleep to at night.
IV. He stays away from that kind of material today, for some reason.
V. Almost literally overnight. Louis C.K., who watched Notaro’s set backstage, persuaded her the next day to release a recording of the set as a comedy album on his website. The two later fell out over C.K.’s refusal to address the mounting rumors of his sexual misbehavior.
VI. You could probably produce a list of comedians with mystique, but I don’t know if everyone could agree on who should be on it, at least not after “1. Ed
die Murphy.”
VII. The popular-circa-1960 joke about a fly in a bowl of soup (“The backstroke, I think”) is believed to have its roots in an exchange between a comedian at Lindy’s and one of the deli’s notoriously snarky waiters.
VIII. The first celebrity roast in recorded history, I believe, took place in 423 BC at the Dionysia festival in Athens. In the comedy competition that year, Aristophanes had submitted his play The Clouds, which lampooned the philosopher Socrates. During the performance, confused out-of-towners in the audience kept whispering, “Who is Socrates?” to one another, so Socrates himself cheerfully stood up in the crowd to take the ribbing.
IX. It was a total sausage-fest, though. The Friars didn’t allow women in their little clubhouse until 1988. In 1983, when Phyllis Diller wanted to see Sid Caesar roasted, she had to sneak in wearing a man’s suit, wig, and fake mustache.
X. CBS insisted on a laugh track, not wanting to risk upending forty years of comedy tradition; Gelbart was anti–laugh tracks in general (“They’re a lie!”) but especially given the show’s wartime setting and subject matter. In the end, he at least extracted a small compromise from the network: no canned laughter would be heard in operating room scenes.
XI. This has become a universal enough comic trope that it powered versions of The Office in nine different countries, but the definitive comedy treatment of “funny” early-nineties office culture is the “Grass Valley Greg” sketch from the eighth episode of Mr. Show. “Work is play, Tofutti break today!”
SIX
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EVERYONE’S A COMEDIAN
On the evening of Thanksgiving Day 1988, most residents of Minnesota’s Twin Cities were probably watching football, if they had their televisions on at all. But any viewers accidentally venturing into the upper reaches of their dial during the fourth quarter of the Cowboys game might have wondered if they were hallucinating in their turkey comas. For reasons not immediately clear, channel 23 was airing episodes of Stingray, a 1960s British undersea sci-fi series for children, repackaged into a feature-length movie. In the lower right corner of the screen, a boyish host and two robot puppets were watching the bizarre adventures of the World Aquanaut Security Patrol and occasionally interrupting the movie with a bemused quip. It was the debut of one of the most enduring comedy phenomena of our time, and fewer than four thousand people saw it.
