by Ken Jennings
The Funniest Kids in the World
For comedians who spent decades in depressing clubs paying their dues, the explosion of amateur Internet comedy is a sobering development. “We had a monopoly before,” one stand-up told me. There’s certainly a potential economic impact: why would you pay a $15 cover charge (plus two-drink minimum) to hear jokes from a professional when hundreds more will be scrolling by on your phone for free? If everyone’s a comedian, no one is.
But I worry more about what it’s doing to the rest of us. When my daughter was in fourth grade, she brought home a book from the school library called How to Be the Funniest Kid in the Whole Wide World (or Just in Your Class). On the back cover was a photo of its author, Jay Leno, clad in all the denim in creation. She had no idea who he was. Most of the jokes inside were typical elementary school riddle-book material: “What kind of math can you teach to cows? Cow-culus.” They could have been written by Bazooka Joe or JAPE or WISCRAIC. Other jokes had confusingly old-timey references to Funny Girl, Seabiscuit, Wurlitzer organs . . . you know, all the stuff that fourth-graders love. School Library Jay Leno actually made Tonight Show Jay Leno seem funny by comparison. But I’d never seen Katie more excited by a new book! She holed up with it for days, eager to become, as promised, the funniest kid in her class. Somehow she had gotten the message: this is how you navigate the world now.IX
Look, I like jokes as much as anybody, but they shouldn’t be compulsory. We don’t need Jay Leno–run reeducation camps, constantly making sure the unfunny are giving it their best in a national game of Last Comic Standing. My personal problem is social media, with its constant pull to always tell another joke and be validated for it, whether I feel like it or not, whether I have anything funny to say or not. Megan Amram, even as a successful TV writer, said that she still wakes up every single morning thinking, “Okay, what am I going to tweet today?” The gamification has worked, the Twitter blessing and curse of knowing, with great precision, how numerically funny everything you said was. “You have other things you’ve done, you have other accomplishments, but the feeling of having a tweet go viral is this immediate thing that’s still amazing.” A writer friend of mine adamantly refuses to join Twitter because that instant gratification might be a little too amazing. She thinks it rewires you so that, eventually, you’re unable to produce anything without it.
And most of us produce nothing at all! The constant cavalcade of jokes contributes to our modern culture of “content,” where we’re all just consumers, all the time. We have tastes instead of hobbies, we race to respond to new ideas with “takes” instead of actually engaging with them. We’ve mastered the language of comedy, but what are we using it for? The riffing on Mystery Science Theater wasn’t a license to make idle snark a default response to all culture. “It’s kind of like being a vampire,” Joel Hodgson told me. “You have to be invited. We’re not riffing against your will. That’s heckling.”
The Not-So-Distant Future
Mystery Science Theater 3000 ran for seven seasons on Comedy Central and then another three on the Sci-Fi Channel, revived by a fan letter-writing campaign. The entire cast had turned over by the time it razzed its final movie (Danger: Diabolik) in 1999. Even Joel Hodgson had left five years in after feuding with his co–executive producer, but he was seamlessly replaced as host by the show’s head writer, Michael J. Nelson. When the show ended, the cast and writers went their separate ways, but over the following decade, they gradually returned to the business of terrible movies. It was a diaspora, not a reunion; the cult success of MST3K had created a whole new cottage industry. Joel Hodgson and his original cast, along with some later additions, toured as Cinematic Titanic, performing live riffs of the usual B-movies and monster fare. When Cinematic Titanic called it a day, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff, the mad-scientist baddies of the show’s Comedy Central era, carried on as the Mads. The core of the Mike Nelson–era cast formed RiffTrax, recording standalone commentaries that customers could sync up and stream as they watched movies at home. True to the show’s DIY spirit, RiffTrax even allowed fans to record and trade their own “iRiffs.”
Mystery Science Theater 3000 was never a ratings bonanza, but its cult and its critical reputation grew steadily, even after multiple cancellations. In 1993, the show won a prestigious Peabody Award. “With references to everything from Proust to Gilligan’s Island,” the citation read, “Mystery Science Theater 3000 fuses superb, clever writing with wonderfully terrible B-grade movies.” In the new millennium, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone all put MST3K on their lists of the one hundred best TV shows of all time. Joel Hodgson, who had begun working to regain the rights to the series and revive it, noticed that he was being treated with a new respect in industry meetings. “Suddenly you’re an elder statesman, or a guru,” I said. “That must be very gratifying.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s awesome.”
In 2015, Hodgson launched a Kickstarter with the aim of crowdfunding a Mystery Science Theater revival, which he would produce but not host. The initial $2 million goal would have funded three episodes. On board was an entire generation of writers and entertainers who had been influenced by the show: Patton Oswalt, Jack Black, Joel McHale, Bill Hader, Neil Patrick Harris, The Book of Mormon composer Robert Lopez, Community and Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon, Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward. The Internet went bonkers, raising $6.3 million in just over a month, enough to produce a full fourteen-episode season 11 (which Netflix later picked up). It was the most successful video crowdfunding project in history.
Conspicuously absent from Hodgson’s monthlong tsunami of hype was any guarantee of the show’s original cast and writers returning, and this was no accident. A series of terse denials from his former satellite-mates made it clear that they were quickly distancing themselves from the reboot. They didn’t share Hodgson’s ownership interest in the show, after all, and many now had successful bad-movie-ribbing enterprises of their own that even made them semi-competitors. The riff rift took some of the air out of the MSTie enthusiasm balloon. After a fifteen-year absence, their favorite show was, against all odds, returning from exile—but with none of their old favorites aboard.
That’s why there was such a collective sigh of relief a few months later when RiffTrax announced that its tenth-anniversary celebration would be a full-fledged Mystery Science Theater 3000 reunion, with riffing from essentially all of the show’s original cast, the Hodgson synod as well as the Nelson. The sold-out show, from the State Theatre in (where else?) Minneapolis, would be simulcast in movie theaters across the country.
I bought tickets for me and my son, who was already a die-hard MST3K fan at thirteen, just a year younger than I was when I saw Time of the Apes in 1989. The series had never been on TV during his lifetime, but he didn’t care. When I told Hodgson about Dylan’s abiding love for his creation, he wasn’t surprised. “Kids like the show—and they don’t have a problem with references they don’t understand, because their life is like that. They’re constantly being confronted with things they don’t understand, but they start to find meaning in the words and the tone in which they’re delivered. The way we move into the world is the same way. You kind of learn things by proxy.”
On the night of the show, our multiplex was full of MSTies somewhere between my age and Dylan’s, all enjoying the preshow trivia. As we squeezed into two of the last available seats, the happy geek couple in front of us was singing along to “The Greatest Frank of All,” from a sketch in episode 523, Village of the Giants. They knew every word.
The anniversary show was a series of bizarre midcentury short films—a genre beloved by the fans—razzed by just about every possible permutation of the show’s cast over the years. It had been a long time since I’d seen a movie riffed in a theater, and I’d forgotten what a rich communal experience it is: there’s the movie, and the first audience watching it carefully, weaving in and out of dialogue, finding their spots and their rhythm, and then
the second audience watching both the movie and the first audience. We are the communicants, and the comedians on the screen intercede for us with the B-movie gods, making their wrath bearable. We’re all in on the jokes—and probably mentally pitching our own—and we’re all audience members as well, even the professional riffers. The bright line between performer and amateur faded away when the lights went down. This is increasingly how comedy works now.
The liturgy on this occasion included educational and industrial shorts with titles like More Dates for Kay, Shake Hands with Danger, and At Your Fingertips: Grasses, each more ridiculous than the last. My son and I laughed until our cheek muscles literally hurt. For the final three shorts, the cast was joined by Hodgson and comedian Jonah Ray, who had been named the host of the new rebooted MST3K. It was his public movie-riffing debut. “Can I just thank you guys for making Mystery Science Theater 3000?” an obviously moved Ray asked his castmates. “It made me who I am.” He could have been speaking for any of us.
* * *
I. Hodgson’s visual inspiration here was a similar drawing from the album sleeve of Elton John’s Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road, used to illustrate the lyrics of the ballad “I’ve Seen That Movie Too.”
II. More precisely, the Comedy Channel merged with its more catchily named rival Ha! to form CTV. Two months later, CTV became Comedy Central.
III. In my memory, I had avoided the “damn girl” craze entirely. But a quick search revealed that I succumbed to temptation exactly once, on March 10, 2013. “Damn girl, are you the second season of Friday Night Lights because you are playing an awful lot of Wilco.” Now there’s a joke that will stand the test of time.
IV. The “Sext:” format was only funny in the hands of its inventor, poet Patricia Lockwood, who used it for oddball tweets like “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me.”
V. JAPE is the Joke Analysis and Production Engine. STANDUP is the System to Augment Nonspeakers’ Dialogue Using Puns. WISCRAIC is Witty Idiomatic Sentence Creation Revealing Ambiguity In Context. URRGH (Unfunny Researchers Rarely Get Humor).
VI. That’s what she said.
VII. That’s what she said. Hey, this is that recursive-joke thing from two pages back.
VIII. In 1999, two psychologists at the University of California San Diego decided to test whether or not machines could make humans laugh another way: by tickling us. After all, it’s impossible to tickle yourself, right? There has to be a tickler and a ticklee. But does the tickler have to be human? The study found that subjects laughed just as hard when they believed their tickler to be mechanical. (But I’m skeptical about the findings for one reason: the robotic tickling hand in the experiment was just a prop, and the blindfolded subjects were actually being tickled by a hidden human.)
IX. A few months later, she also told me she wanted to take improv classes, which she had learned about on some PBS show. “Do you even know what improv is?” I asked. “Making up a play and adding on to what someone else is saying. If someone says, ‘My cat got out,’ the second person says, ‘Okay, let’s go look for it.’ They don’t say, ‘Who cares? Look, here’s a pretty seashell.’ ” In the 1970s, children’s television taught me to read. Today, it teaches kids to “yes, and.”
SEVEN
* * *
BON JOVI, COME HOME
I was late getting my son to a friend’s birthday party, and we didn’t have a gift, so we ran into a drugstore for a gift card. “Get a birthday card too,” I told Dylan. “That makes it a little less tacky.”
Five minutes later, we were still late and he was still mesmerized by the massive wall of greeting cards at the front of the store. Specifically, he was trapped at the “Birthday Cards—Funny” shelf, which dwarfed all the other birthday card sections put together. A placard over one side of the shelf had the logo for a brand called Shoebox, with a laughing face replacing the first letter o. Shoebox, a subtitle assured us, was “Hallmark Approved. Sorta.”
“Let’s get this one,” Dylan decided, grabbing a card and envelope. A bottle of red wine was cartooned on the front. “I know you would love a bottle of wine!” it announced in kicky, hot-pink cursive. I opened it up. “But here’s a card instead!”
“Hey, Dylan, this is what moms get for, like, their friend at the office. It’s not really a card for a fourteen-year-old boy.”
“That’s why it’s perfect. Ben will think it’s funny. It’s a birthday card, but it’s ironic.”
If you still associate greeting cards with old-school sentiment—sparkly hearts and flowers to or from Grandma—get with the times. Edgy, winking humor has increasingly become the dominant voice in a shrinking market under siege from free new competitors: e-cards and Facebook birthday wishes. “With texting now the primary form of communication, it has changed the nature of how we talk to each other,” Sarah Tobaben told me. She’s the creative director for Shoebox, the quirky “alternative” card line Hallmark launched in 1986. “People are much more quick, casual and less formal. And of all the genres of greeting cards, humor cards are the most quick, casual and least formal.”
A few weeks later I was driving Dylan and a friend home from a thingI and it turned out they hadn’t eaten, so we stopped to grab tacos. The two of them were talking about Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld’s animated 2007 nonhit. I looked up from my phone.
“Dylan, you’ve never even seen Bee Movie.”
His friend was shocked. “You haven’t?”
“Dad!” I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to out him.
“Jasper, why are you guys talking about Bee Movie anyway? It came out ten years ago and it’s not any good.”
“We like it ironically,” explained Jasper.
“It’s in memes, Dad.”
I remembered the birthday card. “Okay, here’s a game. I’m going to name some weird, old-timey thing you guys are into, and you have to tell me if you like it sincerely or ironically.”
“Okay.”
“Rubik’s Cubes.”
“Sincerely,” they said immediately.
“Those Jack Chick religious tracts.”
“Ironically,” they agreed. Some church had been giving them out on the corner in front of their middle school and now Dylan had a shelf full of mini-comics where Satan welcomes Catholics, Jews, heavy metal listeners, and Dungeons & Dragons players down to hell. “HAW, HAW, HAW!” he always laughs.
“Bob Ross, The Joy of Painting.”
Long pause. “Sincerely,” said Dylan.
“Really? You wear Bob Ross socks. That’s not a pose in any way?”
“I think his paintings are really good. I looked online if I could buy one but they sell for like ten thousand dollars now.”
What else? “When you call chicken tenders ‘tendies.’ ”
Dylan said “Ironically” at the exact same time Jasper said “Sincerely.” Split decision.
In the car on the way home, “Africa” by Toto was playing and somehow both kids knew all the words, though it was a hit twenty years before either had been born. “How about this song? Ironically or sincerely?”
“I really like it,” said Dylan.
“Have you seen the video?” asked Jasper. “We like the song for real but the video ironically.”
The Man in the Eiron Mask
When I was my son’s age, English teachers would tell us in class that “irony” meant “the opposite of what you would expect.” I was skeptical. By this bizarre definition, the smirky one-liners of David Letterman were not ironic (in that they were exactly what I expected every weeknight), while any sports upset—take Super Bowl XXII, in which the Washington Redskins trounced the favored Denver Broncos—was the height of irony. I wasn’t sure what irony was, but I knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t just a subpar outing at quarterback from John Elway. Once in ninth grade, when I tried to question a teacher on this point, he reassured me that yes, this was exactly how irony was defined—on Friday’s quiz, so
let’s move on. From then on, when irony came up in class, I still didn’t understand it, but I kept my head down and worked on the elaborate ballpoint doodlescapes on my Trapper Keeper folders.
If a working definition of irony seems hard to pin down today, that’s in large part because it’s been a moving target for thousands of years. Our word “irony” comes from the eiron, one of the most important stock character types of the Old Comedy period of ancient Greece. Greek comedies were often built around the conflict between the alazon, a swaggering, hypocritical braggart, and the eiron, a clever everyman who would deflate the alazon’s ego with wry self-deprecation. Today, we can find traces of the eiron-alazon act in the DNA of many sitcom pairings: Norm and Cliff on Cheers, Jerry and George on Seinfeld, Marshall and Barney on How I Met Your Mother, Donna and Tom on Parks and Recreation.II
