Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  But comedy is no longer just snarking from the sidelines, and maybe that will change the rules. Our modern sense of humor seems more concerned than ever with the real-world effects of our jokes, and less prone to misanthropic shock value. Maybe a more idealistic, less cynical sense of humor will be able to do what many satirists of the past have not: get people to take problems more seriously, not less. When a funny person dabbles in real issues, there will always be someone to criticize them for “getting political”—and that only ever means “poking fun at my political viewpoint.” But in fact, all comedy is political. When hate crimes are on the rise, jokes that still traffic in the old iffy stereotypes about race and gender and sexual identity are a political statement. Even to keep on telling nothing but the same old determinedly apolitical observational jokes in that climate would be a political statement.

  Today one ironclad rule of joke ethics is often given as “don’t punch down”—that is, make sure the targets of your jokes are more powerful than you, not less. This is revolutionary; “punching down” was once the only acceptable form of humor. “As for jest, there be certain things which ought to be privileged from it,” wrote Francis Bacon in 1597, and went on to list “religion,” “matters of state,” “great persons,” and “any man’s present business of importance.” Cicero and Castiglione agreed: it’s bad form to make fun of the rich and powerful. The elite jokesters of the past saw that rule as a way of staying apolitical, above the fray, but leaving the status quo unchallenged has effects as well.

  In a comedy-saturated world, the challenge for socially conscious humorists will lie in choosing the jokes that they tell and not relying on joking alone to fix all injustices. In Mark Twain’s unfinished final novel, The Mysterious Stranger, the title character is the devil himself. “You have a mongrel perception of humor,” Satan tells the narrator at one point. “This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things. . . . Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. . . . Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.” The devil’s desperate hope is that mankind never wises up, never learns to tell the right jokes. Because those could change the world.

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  I. Full disclosure: the Back to the Future bit turns into a bit about what people of color would do with time travel, and the Matthew McConaughey chunk is entirely about the star’s clueless attempt at an LGBT-friendly interview with the Advocate. But the Weezer stuff is about nothing but Weezer!

  II. This effect also lined the margins of protests with trolls holding antisigns they hoped would make the news. “I Made a Sign!” “I Like Turtles!” “Bring Back Crystal Pepsi!”

  III. I know, right?

  IV. I know, right?

  V. Local stereotypes still exist today, of course. They’re just not universal enough to power much pop culture. When I was young, Seattle had a local sketch comedy show called Almost Live! that would air before Saturday Night Live. (Joel McHale and Bill Nye both got their starts as cast members.) Almost Live! was, as you’d expect, full of Seattle in-jokes about local neighborhoods: Renton was white trash, Mercer Island was snobbish old money, Ballard was full of elderly Scandinavians. Comedy Central briefly aired reruns of the show in the 1990s, puzzling America with incomprehensible Ballard jokes.

  VI. He insulted and refused his own sister’s work even though she was living in abject poverty at the time, cut off by her whole family for leaving an abusive husband. What a guy.

  VII. Speaking for clueless white people, I would like to validate Rock’s fear here. I had two different college friends who thought the popular routine entitled them to tough truth-talking about how they had nothing against black people, just against—well, you know.

  VIII. And that sweet gong crash every time the Donger appears on-screen! Hilarious!

  IX. They sued the school district, which apologized and agreed to a $25,000 annuity to help pay for Henderson’s college.

  X. The only actual humor to result from the routine came a week later, when Carl Rowan closed his column on the controversy this way: “I offer no ‘cheers’ to Mr. Danson.”

  XI. I wish this example were hypothetical.

  XII. Goebbels called anti-Nazi jokes “feces of the soul,” but he didn’t want to give people the crazy idea that Germans were humorless. So when the Reich banned cabaret humor, it set up newspaper joke contests with hundred-mark prizes for the winners. One contest in Hamburg was won by a story that turned out to have been plagiarized from a famous Jewish author.

  ELEVEN

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  NEW TIRYNTHA

  When Mark Twain had Satan hype the lofty possibilities of comedy in The Mysterious Stranger, the Lord of Darkness was clearly speaking for the author. “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing,” Twain had written in an 1895 essay. “The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.” I always picture Martin Starr as the nerdy Bill Haverchuck in the next-to-last episode of Freaks and Geeks, coming home to an empty house after yet another bleak day of getting pushed around at high school. He fixes himself a snack and sits down to watch TV—Garry Shandling doing stand-up on Dinah Shore’s talk show. Bill starts laughing so hard that he’s literally flailing on the couch. Grilled cheese is stuck to his teeth; brownie crumbs fly out of his mouth. It’s a wordless scene that says everything about what comedy can mean to people going through a bad time. For one brief moment in Bill’s life, everything is okay.

  But much has changed since Bill Haverchuck’s latchkey 1980 childhood. Comedy was once a hard-won respite from the drudgeries of life. Today a surprise appearance by a favorite comedian wouldn’t be an unexpected treat, because Bill would come home every day to an essentially unlimited supply of dazzlingly high-quality jokes on his TV or phone. Can comedy still be “the saving thing” in a world where it’s gone from the exception to the rule?

  Nothing Succeeds Like Excess

  When I asked comedy guru George Meyer about the new joke saturation, he remembered something a professor once told him: “Throughout history, man has screwed up good things by concentrating them.” When people were drinking beer, that didn’t lead to a lot of problems, but once we figured out how to distill beer into liquor, drinking alcohol became a harsher experience. Incan coca tea begat powdered cocaine, which begat freebasing. We bred stronger and stronger strains of marijuana until eventually people just started inhaling dabs of pure THC. “At some point,” Meyer observed, “you’re on the catastrophic side of the hill.”

  The comparison between drugs and laughs isn’t just hypothetical. Movie directors today can use digital editing and recorded test screenings to precisely shape comedy for audiences. They’re timing jokes down to the exact twenty-fourth of a second to maximally jolt the brain, the way Chuck Jones used to do in animation. Comedy, in other words, isn’t just a minor relaxant now. We’ve engineered it into a designer drug: ever faster, smarter, stranger, crueler, more ironic. We may be pushing the envelope of just how refined it can get.

  It’s not a coincidence that our bizarre and rarefied comic sensibility, so “advanced” that much of it isn’t even recognizable as jokes to those not in the know, developed in a time of new abundance. Our sense of humor has evolved—or mutated, given the pace of change—to suit the fact that comedy is now the dominant voice of our culture. When taste and technology allow you to hear hundreds of jokes a day, novelty becomes more important, and that’s what pushes speed and absurdity to new heights. It also makes topicality essential. Can you imagine a late-night staff trying to write dozens of joke candidates every day without twenty-four hours of new headlines to prime the pump? I don’t think they could handle the volume. The conversation is now moving too fast for many kinds of joke-tellers to keep up with demand, so a chattier voice has replaced the glib, prepared “routines” of the past. And faster, smaller, more reactive jokes can squeeze their way into ever more corners of modern life, so even more j
okes get told. It’s a feedback loop of nonstop hilarity!

  In the end, the twenty-first-century ubiquity of jokes and the escalation of everything about those jokes aren’t two different things. They’re the same savage more-ness. They’re driven by the same insatiable appetite.

  The stakes are higher now that comedy has been weaponized by its newest establishment practitioners: corporations, political parties, governments. Billions of dollars and the shape of the future are now at stake when organizations crack jokes. It’s easy to imagine a world where the co-opting of jokes by the Man defanged them, reduced them for the lowest common denominator to an inoffensive mush. But in our world, with powerful voices deploying jokes on all sides, it started an arms race. No one’s going to remember the slightly silly ad when there’s a very silly one coming up right behind it. No one’s going to laugh at the prepared zingers of an affable political candidate when there’s an unpredictable force of sheer id on the debate stage. And as long as these jokes are told with a sufficiently ironic wink, the agendas behind them are harder to criticize. Not everyone crafting and telling these jokes is a gifted comedian, of course, but that’s almost beside the point. There’s so much comedy in our culture now that everyone’s internalized its tone and tropes. Anyone can sound like they’re being funny, whether they’ve genuinely made a real joke or not.

  We’ve caught on to the influence of jokes enough to police them more carefully in ourselves. We indulge in long debates over what targets are appropriate for jokes, and which jokes are on the right side of the issue. But as carefully as we’re now monitoring the ethics of comedy, we haven’t really turned that same careful eye on the most powerful joke-tellers. No one is asking if presidential debates should be funny, if the CIA should be funny, if a huge demographic should be getting most of its news from comedy shows. It all changed so gradually we didn’t really notice it.

  Are powerful organizations getting quippier today because we are, or are we getting quippier because of them?

  Mandatory Fun

  The modern comedy glut has, paradoxically, made life harder in many ways for people who tell jokes for a living. Most obviously, they’re now competing in a more crowded market. Who will pay for their jokes when there’s no shortage of others to choose from? Since 1986, a “humor consultant” named Malcolm Kushner has published the annual Cost of Laughing Index, tracking the effects of inflation on expenses like whoopee cushions, Mad magazine, and novelty singing gorilla telegrams. “Are we paying more bucks for less yucks?” he asks.I But his calculations are a relic from a strange and ancient culture that lived very differently. Today, essentially unlimited access to thousands of hours of comedy, more than you could ever possibly watch, can be yours for less than ten dollars, via a monthly subscription to a streaming video service. Access to the avalanche of daily jokes on social media is free.

  And what happens to the sense of newness and discovery that draws young people into comedy? “Everything’s been done,” writer-comedian Stephen Merchant has said. “You’re just doing variations on a theme.” We’ve seen it all. I played a board game once that said, “Fun for kids from 5 to 105!” and made a joke on Twitter about how hurtful that must be to 106-year-olds. The first reaction was a disapproving reply from a reader who considered this to be a “hacky” subject for a joke. Ah yes, board game age recommendations. That old comedy saw.

  It can be joyless to have to keep on constantly producing more and more jokes in a world that clearly already has plenty of them. What good is enforced merriment? Don Marquis, the American writer who created Archy and Mehitabel,II came to see his humor column for the New York Herald Tribune as “a grave, twenty-three inches long, into which I buried myself every day.” I think about Marquis’s words every time I open Twitter and see that empty white rectangle with the “What’s happening?” prompt. The rectangle just wants more and more jokes. It’s never satisfied.

  For the comedy audience, the problem is the acceleration of the hedonic treadmill. We have come to see our daily mega-calorie dose of jokes as the new normal and take it for granted. “The audience becomes inured to it, and jaded, and un-entertainable,” said George Meyer. “I think about people watching a dozen Curb Your Enthusiasms in a row. The bingeing seems almost manic and pathological to me. At the end of it, are you really going to enjoy the twelfth one you watched as much as the first one?” The old Anglo-Saxon custom was to literally roll around on the floor when amused. Today, that’s diminished down to a knowing nod: “Yes, this joke meets with my approval.”III

  And the same audience is getting more and more savvy; it can’t be surprised anymore. That can be fatal to jokes; so much of laughter is defamiliarization, seeing something about life in a new and unexpected way. Preparing their 2006 book on humor Only Joking, writer Lucy Greeves and comedian Jimmy Carr sorted through over twenty thousand jokes, looking for the best ones. Greeves wrote that she “went temporarily ‘joke-blind’—an affliction that renders the sufferer incapable of distinguishing a funny joke from a hopeless one.” Carr, interestingly, “was completely unaffected” by this immunity to humor. As a professional comic, he was in many ways already there.

  The most common defense of comedy is to describe it as a self-evident good because it feels good. It provides a moment of comfort and distraction in a dark world. “If I laugh at any mortal thing / ’Tis that I may not weep,” as Byron wrote. And that feels truer than ever today: the stress and alienation of modern life is indeed the commonality that underlies consumerism and secularism and prolonged adolescence and all the other drivers of the West’s growing appetite for comedy. Humor is a coping mechanism deeply wired in the human brain; we can see that every time we recall a once-painful experience and realize it’s somehow funny now. But that impulse can lead to some dangerous places. Unless comedy is used very carefully, it’s a reaction to modern problems that does nothing to remedy them. There are many accounts of Holocaust Jews maintaining their sense of humor in the ghettos and camps, usually told to demonstrate defiance and pluck in the face of suffering and oppression. “I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else,” a prisoner says sardonically to Elie Wiesel in Night. “He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” Journalist Steve Lipman has called these mordant jokes in the midst of a collapsing world “the currency of hope.”

  But I can’t read about gallows humor in the face of tragedy without being overwhelmed by the sense of how heartbreakingly inadequate it all was. Viktor Frankl wrote that a popular running gag in the camps was to joke about how strange the episode would all seem once everyone was free and life was back to normal. A man might ask his hostess at a fancy dinner party to stir up the soup from the bottom—the least watery part of the meal, back in Dachau—and everyone would laugh. Frankl survived the Holocaust with his humanity intact, and maybe a sense of humor helped, I don’t know. But the fact remains that millions of people did not survive. In hindsight, we hear their jokes about returning to their old lives, and we know that never happened. It all seems so small and ineffectual in the face of systematic murder.

  The endpoint of laughter as a survival strategy can be glimpsed in Colin Turnbull’s book The Mountain People, about the eighteen months he spent living with the Ik people of northeast Uganda. The Ik were subsistence farmers being slowly winnowed into extinction by drought and famine, and their lives were an endless parade of the worst hardships imaginable. All ideals of family and compassion were utterly lost to them. But Turnbull marveled at one thing: how, amid their hopelessness, they laughed constantly. They laughed with unfailing amusement, but without joy. Mothers laughed as babies crawled into the hot coals of a fire; young people laughed as they pulled morsels of food from the mouths of their own weakened grandparents.

  The fact that gallows humor is all that survives in the face of dehumanizing catastrophe isn’t an argument for gallows humor. It’s an argument against dehumanizing catastrophe.

  Predicting the Hot New Dystopia


  The Greek philosopher Theophrastus related the strange story of Tiryntha, or Tiryns, the Peloponnesian city where Heracles once lived. The Tirynthians, said Theophrastus, were addicted to laughter. They were amused by everything, and it was ruining their lives and endangering the city. They sent to the oracle at Delphi to see what could be done, and were instructed to sacrifice a bull to Poseidon and throw it into the sea without laughing. The Tirynthians, determined to follow the oracle’s pronouncement to the letter, barred children from the ritual to ensure that no one cracked up. But one boy stole into the crowd to watch the sacrifice, and when he piped up to ask what was going on, he made an accidental punIV that sent the whole crowd into gales of laughter. The sacrifice was spoiled. “They perceived,” wrote Athenaeus centuries later, “that the god meant to show them by a fact that an inveterate custom cannot be remedied.”

  Over the past century, and particularly in the last twenty years, we have seen an accelerating crescendo of humor in our culture. Like the Tirynthians, we seem to be unable to navigate life or conduct business without it, but it’s hard to imagine what comes next. It’s easy to say that comedy booms, like all fads, are cyclical, and that this one will peter out just like the club boom of the 1980s did. But that underestimates the ways in which our current age has embedded jokes deep in our corporate cultures, politics, journalism, technology, and other institutions in ways that are unprecedented and completely unrelated to the comedy industry. It also ignores the fact that our postwar comedy crescendo has survived generational upheavals, unspeakable tragedies, and existential crises while barely skipping a beat. Kliph Nesteroff tells a story about the Saturday Night Live crew backstage on September 29, 2001, as the show prepared to display a stiff upper lip by going back on the air less than three weeks after thousands of people had been killed by terrorists just a short cab ride away. The mood was not upbeat. “I’m not ready to watch this,” said one unenthusiastic prop guy.