Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  It’s also a convenient way to fight for a cause while staying one step ahead of oppression. In 1987, Poland’s Communist government geared up for a big celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. In response, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union sent around brochures imitating the bombastic language of government propaganda. “It is time to break the passivity of the popular masses!” began the leaflet, which invited supporters to wear red at a massive October rally. Everyone knew it was a put-on, but what could the government do? Strictly speaking, an enthusiastic embrace of Communist symbology was the party line. Sure enough, crowds showed up in laughably over-the-top garb: red coats, red scarves, red lipstick. Police were forced to stand by and watch helplessly as an ironically pro-Soviet demonstration took over the streets. Finally, some onlookers who wanted to get in on the fun began flocking to a nearby food stall for ketchup-dipped breadsticks to wave aloft. Then fed-up police finally moved, shutting down the stall and arresting one would-be ketchup purchaser. Solidarity’s ploy had worked: everyone had a good time, and the authorities looked like idiots. It was the beginning of the end. The following September, the government agreed to talks with the opposition, and within two years multiparty elections were scheduled.

  Authoritarianism still has no idea what to do about irony. In 2016, sources in North Korea reported that the Kim Jong-un regime, having survived The Interview, had now banned sarcasm altogether, because it feared that apparent statements of patriotism were being used to criticize the government. In particular, the ironic use of “This is all America’s fault!” as a response to any hardship of North Korean life was condemned by authorities. Apparently, “This is all America’s fault!” is the “Thanks, Obama!” of North Korea.XVII And lest you think that irony is only a valuable survival tool in a totalitarian rogue state, the U.S. Secret Service announced in 2014 that it was looking for a reliable “sarcasm detector” algorithm, one that could distinguish between sincere and insincere professions of loyalty and disloyalty online. Good luck! I’m a human being who can pass the Turing test with flying colors and I have no idea how many irony levels deep we are in half the Twitter conversations I read.

  It’s ironic (or, if we’re using Strict Alanis standards, it’s unfortunate) that snark became the lingua franca of the Internet, which is the worst possible medium for it. Nuances of tone are notoriously hard to convey online. In a 2005 study, e-mail senders were asked to predict how often recipients would pick up on their sarcasm, and they optimistically put the number at 78 percent.XVIII Fully 90 percent of e-mail recipients were confident they could do so. But when researchers tested them, their sarcasm detection rate in practice was only 53 percent. (Even in spoken conversation, the study’s authors found it hovering around 73 percent.) This is an ongoing problem, but it could have been trivially solved if we as a society had adopted one of the irony punctuation marks that various typographic visionaries have been trying to get going for centuries. The movement dates back to the 1580s, when English printer Henry Denham first proposed the percontation point, a backward question mark () to signpost verbal irony—specifically, rhetorical questions. Can you imagine how many clueless Facebook and Twitter replies we could avoid with this thing

  Outgrowing Snark

  Irony as a literary device, as something to observe, is fine. But as a way to live your life? Cloaking every thought, word, action with the implication that you might not mean any of it? That’s a pathology. Unless ironic distance is the only way to keep government authorities off your back, it shouldn’t be the only pitch in your repertoire. The occasional curveball is only effective if you can throw a fastball and a changeup as well. “A Modest Proposal” is funny and effective, but let’s not pretend it accomplishes all the same things that a heartfelt plea for starving children would. You don’t always get to the same place by taking the opposite route.

  In an age of irony, it will always be a temptation to use it as a cop-out, because it’s easier to smirk at things than solve them. Maybe the real Spy magazine took on worthier targets than my high school knockoff did, but whether its tone was playful or mean-spirited, it was always so unrelentingly negative. “The moment has come to grow up, get serious, address the issues of the day carefully, thoughtfully, straightforwardly,” wrote Kurt Andersen in one of the tour de force “Great Expectations” essays that opened every issue of Spy. “Enough jokes, enough merrymaking. It’s high time that we told the world not just what repels and astounds us, but what we are for. [Pause.] We’re thinking.”XIX

  An air of detached superiority is one of the easiest facsimiles of adulthood to mimic, which is why teenagers grab on to it so eagerly. And even when irony is used to make a worthy point, it’s still the clever way to make that point, the contrarian way. Cleverness and contrarianism are hallmarks of adolescence, but it’s not too late to decide what we’re for and say so. It’s not too late to grow up.

  I mean, would it kill us

  * * *

  I. When you have a thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old you are never not driving them to or from a thing and you don’t even remember or care what it is. It’s all the same thing, one long thing, and it doesn’t end until they learn to drive.

  II. Falstaff is an alazon; so is Ralph Kramden. Ferris Bueller is an alazon with a sweet car. Lightning McQueen is an alazon who is a sweet car. The eiron type was so influential that it pretty much defined comedy for millennia, from the scheming slaves of Plautus’s Roman comedies to Figaro and other clever servants of the Renaissance. The archetype continued through P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and even survived the end of the servant class in Europe. Today’s clever comic underdogs are wage slaves instead.

  III. Whereas to the Greeks, litotes just meant plainness or asceticism of lifestyle. Couldn’t those guys get anything right? Unlike irony, “litotes” was precisely and correctly defined by my ninth-grade English teacher, though he pronounced it wrong.

  IV. From 1971 to 1978, it was also the premise of the TV series Columbo.

  V. Churchill’s bodyguard Ronald Golding insisted that, of all the great apocryphal withering-Churchill-put-down stories, this one actually happened, and he himself heard it firsthand. If that’s true, though, Churchill borrowed the line from W. C. Fields, because a very similar riposte can be found in the 1934 movie It’s a Gift.

  VI. Is? Mr. Garner?

  VII. For the record, I really do own this shirt, which was $1.50 at Goodwill, so even my millennial-scolding here is winking and self-aware, and therefore okay.

  VIII. I don’t know if I remember what Steve Martin’s laugh sounds like. Have I ever heard him genuinely laugh? Would any of us really be that surprised if his real laugh sounds just like a fake laugh?

  IX. For the record: “heats,” “rice,” “moss,” “ties,” “needs,” “lens,” “ice,” “nurse,” “leaks,” and “meats.”

  X. Spy is probably best remembered today for its feud with Trump, who was always referred to as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in its pages. For decades, editor Graydon Carter has said, Trump would send him an occasional envelope of magazine photos, in which Trump would circle his hands with gold Sharpie and write, “See, not so short.” Trump wasn’t the only prescient name on Spy’s enemies list. I also remember eyebrow-raising profiles on then-beloved family men Bill Cosby and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  XI. Within five years, pretty much every lifestyle and entertainment magazine on the newsstand was aping Spy’s playful “charticles” and layouts and sidebars.

  XII. Even if, as I still maintain today, it was a little lackluster. Lackluster!

  XIII. The show’s final episode, in which writer Larry David foregrounded the characters’ near-sociopathic narcissism for the first time, was widely regarded by viewers and reviewers as a tone-deaf misstep.

  XIV. A comedy writer once told me that her brother and his fiancée had decided to send out ironic (but nonpoisonous) wedding invitations. Their names are Alec and Eliana, and the front of the save-the-date was the
A&E network logo. “I guess I have to give you credit for making a joke out of literally everything in your life,” she told him.

  XV. Unless you are in your early twenties and in the throes of a serious crush. Those folks should go right ahead. That kind of heedless, intoxicating sensitivity is invulnerable in its own way.

  XVI. He does not propose a “Soylent Green”–like trade name for his new Irish food staple, but I suggest “Tater Tots.”

  XVII. “Thanks, Obama” was a rare political slogan that became widespread on three different irony levels. A supporter, jazzed about health care reform or same-sex marriage, might offer a sincere “Thanks, Obama,” while an opponent might give an ironic “Thanks, Obama” on the subject of, say, the Iran deal. But the meme really caught on when used faux-ironically by supporters to blame any random mishap or inconvenience in life on the president. “Christmas is on a Sunday this year? Thanks, Obama.” In a 2015 video, the president himself was seen sitting in the White House library, unsuccessfully trying to dunk a too-large cookie into a glass of milk. “Thanks, Obama,” he mutters.

  XVIII. Which in itself is crazy! Why, in important business and personal communication, do we routinely write things that we assume will be badly misinterpreted 22 percent of the time?

  XIX. Let the record show that, this being designed-within-an-inch-of-its-life Spy, the pause was actually a little red glyph of an umbrella.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  MIRTH CONTROL

  The comedy boom of our era is the story of a decline as well: the declining influence of the forces of anticomedy. In the usual comedic parlance, “anticomedy” is a self-aware performance that mines laughs from its utter lack of conventional punch lines. It’s Norm Macdonald telling a meandering shaggy-dog joke to a talk show host, or Eric Andre shouting belligerently at a stunned guest. But I mean a different, more literal kind of anticomedy. I’m thinking of forces devoted to stomping out comedy in all of its forms, the way antiaircraft guns shoot at aircraft or antimatter cancels out matter. Jokes have long felt threatening to many, many people, and as a result, as far back as we have a record of laughter, we also have evidence of grim, self-serious folks devoted to stifling it. But the influence of the buzzkills and the critics is waning.

  The Dour and the Glory

  Plato and Aristotle, as we’ve seen, were deeply skeptical of jokes and worried at length about the effect they could have on impressionable youth—one of the earliest examples of “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!?” in the history of moral panic. But by the Middle Ages, with the great comedies of antiquity largely forgotten, the most powerful force arrayed against comedy was religion.

  John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, was the first church father to condemn jokes, noting that “to speak jocosely does not seem an acknowledged sin,” but it nevertheless often leads to sins, like ridicule and scorn. Saint Basil wrote that “unrestrained and immoderate laughter is a sign of intemperance, . . . of failure to repress the soul’s frivolity by a stern use of reason.” What seems to have worried the early bishops most about laughter was the loss of control it brings, the embrace of a pleasurable feeling. Laughter feels good in the moment, just like lots of sins do. Therefore, they reasoned, laughter must be sinful, or at least highly suspect. In particular, the carnal relationship between humor and sex seemed obvious to them. Both are, after all, a tickling of our pleasure centers that can lead to a noisy bodily eruption. On more than one occasion, Saint Jerome advised young women not to encourage flatterers by indulging in any “buffoonery” or laughing at men’s jokes. (If pickup lines in the third century were as funny as they are today, this was probably pretty easy advice to follow.) John Chrysostom went one step further: for virgins, with their chastity teetering above a gulf of sin at every moment, even the slightest smile was a bad idea.

  There was also a scriptural basis for restraining laughter, the early church fathers reminded their flocks. In the Bible, as in Homer, laughter is almost always a cruel act of mockery, whether at the expense of man or God. In Ephesians, Paul specifically condemns eutrapelia, Greek for “wittiness.”I Sure, the Book of Proverbs recommends a “merry heart” and a “cheerful countenance,” but the church took pains to clarify that passages like that refer to a deeply spiritual kind of joy, nothing so coarse as laughter. When theologians from Saint Augustine down to Bernard of Clairvaux denounced laughter, their trump card was a scripture that didn’t exist: in the four Gospels, the church fathers repeatedly pointed out, Jesus doesn’t laugh once, and therefore we shouldn’t either.II It doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone that, by this justification, Christians also shouldn’t cough, clip their nails, or go to the bathroom.

  Today, there’s lively debate among scholars as to which Bible stories, if any, can be read comedically. Could Jesus’s parables have been delivered as jokes? (“Did you hear the one about the sower?”) Is God being sarcastic when he asks rhetorical questions to Moses and Job? Is Jonah best understood as a bumbling comic loser, Larry David as prophet of doom? Kurt Vonnegut once gave a sermon in which he explained Christ’s puzzling observation to Judas Iscariot from John 12:8—“You will always have the poor among you, but you will not always have me”—as a mordant joke. In Vonnegut’s mind, Jesus was smiling wryly as he told his most disappointing apostle, “Judas, don’t worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I’m gone.”

  But these readings are largely modern inventions. For centuries, the dour and monastic strain of Christianity dominated Europe. We even have records of religious scholars tut-tutting about specific medieval joke fads. In the fourteenth century, the most popular funny folktale was the story of the Veilchenschwank, or “violet trick.” The joke concerns a sensitive court poet named Neidhart who’s overjoyed to discover the first violet of spring and places his cap over the flower to mark the spot. While he’s gone, some passing prankster lifts up the cap, picks the flower, and squats down to leave his own souvenir in its place. Neidhart returns with the entire court, does a celebratory dance around the cap, and then removes it with great ceremony and aplomb . . . revealing a fresh, steaming pile of human shit. This was the funniest thing anybody in medieval Germany had ever heard, and variations on the story were recycled in song, dance, prose, drama, and art for decades. For a time, it was even fashionable for people to replace the portraits of the saints in their homes with paintings of the violet trick, as we know from a sermon in which the Augustinian monk Gottschalk Hollen gloomily lamented the joke fad’s popularity. He’s the patron saint of every conservative scold writing editorials about the tasteless depths to which Garbage Pail Kids or Beavis and Butt-Head have sunk modern comedy, every grown-up who wouldn’t let you watch South Park or buy Mad magazine.

  The subtext of all the clerical hand-wringing over jokes is clear: life shouldn’t be too fun. The thought of heaven—the thing that keeps us on the straight and narrow—only appeals if our mortal life seems gray and miserable by comparison. So when the early Christian ascetic Origen read about “a time to weep and a time to laugh” in Ecclesiastes, he decreed that the time to weep was now; the time to laugh was in the next life. Anybody laughing now was Doing It Wrong, and forfeiting Jesus’s promise that “blessed are ye that weep now, for ye shall laugh” in heaven. And so “No jokes!” became the standard of Christian conduct for hundreds of years. The medieval Rule of Saint Benedict decreed that monks could be booted from their orders for laughing aloud—or even making someone else laugh.

  A typical moral fable from this climate is the popular seventeenth-century Dutch chapbook Duyfken and Willemynken, in which the two title sisters go to a town fair. Willemynken (“I Pursue My Will”) can’t get enough of the puppet show, maypole dance, singing contest, and other entertainments. “I have to laugh every now and then!” she insists to her sister Duyfken (“Little Dove”), who objects primly to these time-wasters. At every turn, the laughing girl gets her comeuppance: she gets lice from the
puppets, is splashed with goat manure at the dance, and is awarded rotten fruit for winning the singing contest. In the end, Willemynken is literally lured down to hell. But her pious sister has wisely postponed her joy—saved her virtue, even—for heaven.

  Words You Can’t Say

  Duyfken and Willemynken was reprinted more than twenty times across the Netherlands and loved by generations of enthusiastic young girls. But ironically enough, most readers probably enjoyed the comic antics of Willemynken more than her sister’s dull sermonizing. I hope none of them laughed out loud while reading—or if they did, I hope they were immediately splashed with goat poop.

  Even the strictest of priests couldn’t keep Europe a comedy-free zone for centuries, just as puritan attitudes toward sex didn’t prevent plenty of illegitimate children and venereal diseases. Although many orders of monks were theoretically bound by vows of soberness, we know that much of the medieval humor that survives was preserved by clerics, since they were the largest educated class. Monasteries were popular stops for traveling troupes of performers, and monks circulated their own joke books on the down-low. A thirteenth-century monk named Radulphus created the enormously popular mock sermon “Saint Nobody,” which he gave as a present to the future Pope Boniface VIII. Its central joke is still kind of funny today: compiling all the Bible verses that use the word “nobody” and conjoining them into one confusing hagiography. (“Nobody conquers God”? “Nobody can serve two masters”? Who is this guy?)

  The Renaissance and the birth of humanism largely ended the broad religious stigma against comedy—in Christianity, anyway. In the Muslim world, the last decade has seen a sharp rise in blasphemy trials, many targeting satirists and other public quipsters. But in the West, the last gasp of religious control over humor came in the form of twentieth-century obscenity crusades against comics like Mae West, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin. West’s travails aren’t as well remembered as Bruce’s or Carlin’s, but she was banned from national radio for over a decade after a 1937 broadcast in which she talked dirty to, of all people, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. She praised the ventriloquist’s dummy as her perfect man—“all wood and a yard long”—and provided America with a truly disturbing mental image when she confided that she still had splinters from their last rendezvous.III In 1930, West even served a ten-day jail sentence when her Broadway debut, Sex, was found to be indecent. She could have paid a fine but thought the jail time was better publicity. “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it,” she later laughed.