by Ken Jennings
“No hugging, no learning”: At Larry David’s insistence. Francis Davis, “Recognition Humor,” Atlantic, December 1992.
“Well, it was nice knowing you”: Arthur Marx, Life with Groucho (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 245–46.
“the end of the age of irony”: Seth Mnookin, “In Disaster’s Aftermath, Once-Cocky Media Culture Disses the Age of Irony,” Inside.com, September 18, 2001.
“Can we be funny?”: Saturday Night Live, season 27, episode 1, NBC, September 29, 2001.
the eve of September 11: The newly transplanted Wisconsinites celebrated with a party at the Bowery Ballroom, at which They Might Be Giants performed. Dylan Stableford, “The Onion Looks Back on ‘Cathartic’ 9/11 Issue,” Yahoo! News, August 23, 2011, https://www.yahoo.com/tv/bp/the-onion-looks-back-on-cathartic-9-11-issue.html.
a comedy classic: All these stories are from the Onion, vol. 37, issue 34, September 26, 2001.
“A young healthy child”: Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal, and Other Satirical Works (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1996), p. 53.
“very fit for table”: The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Constable, 1814), 17:315.
ironically pro-Soviet demonstration: Srdja Popovic and Matthew Miller, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), p. 107.
“This is all America’s fault!”: Sunghui Moon and Richard Finney, “North Korean Citizens Warned Against ‘Hostile’ Speech,” Radio Free Asia, September 2, 2016, http://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/warned-09022016160227.html.
a too-large cookie: “Things Everybody Does but Doesn’t Talk About,” BuzzFeed News, February 12, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewgauthier/the-president-uses-a-selfie-stick. The video was (of course) a promotion for the HealthCare.gov Obamacare website.
“sarcasm detector”: Katie Zezima, “The Secret Service Wants Software That Detects Social Media Sarcasm. Yeah, Sure It Will Work,” Washington Post, June 3, 2014.
in a 2005 study: Justin Kruger and Nicholas Epley, “Egocentrism over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, no. 5 (December 2005), pp. 925–36.
the percontation point: Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 219.
“The moment has come”: Kurt Andersen, “No More April Fools’ Shenanigans,” Spy, April 1989.
EIGHT: MIRTH CONTROL
“to speak jocosely”: Charles Marriott, ed., A Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church, vol. 9, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Statues, trans. W. R. W. Stephens (London: Walter Smith, 1885), p. 236.
“unrestrained and immoderate”: The Fathers of the Church, vol. 9, Saint Basil, Ascetical Works, trans. M. Monica Wagner (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1962), p. 271.
any “buffoonery”: “Abandoned men often make use of a single light expression to try the gates of chastity,” warns Jerome. “To Demetrias,” trans. and ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, vol. 6, Letters and Selected Works (New York: Scribner, 1893), p. 267.
the slightest smile: John Chrysostom, On Virginity; Against Remarriage, trans. Sally Rieger Shore (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1983), p. 100. See also Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion (London: Routledge, 1997), which was invaluable to me here.
condemns eutrapelia: Eph. 5:4.
“merry heart”: Prov. 15:13 (King James Version).
Jesus doesn’t laugh: Karl-Josef Kuschel, Laughter: A Theological Reflection (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 43.
the word Aristotle used: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 33.
the master’s “faint smile”: Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins, p. 132.
he’s eating dates: This story doesn’t have the strongest sanad (sourcing) of the hadith, but it is found in both the Sunni and Shia traditions.
Jesus’s parables: Mary Douglas, “Jokes,” in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 99–100.
God being sarcastic: Hershey H. Friedman and Linda Weiser Friedman, God Laughed: Sources of Jewish Humor (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2014), p. 206.
Jonah best understood: John A. Miles Jr., “Laughing at the Bible: Jonah as Parody,” Jewish Quarterly Review 65, no. 3 (January 1975), pp. 168–81.
from John 12:8: Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York: Delacorte, 1981), p. 300.
“violet trick”: Eckehard Simon, “The Rustic Muse: Neidhartschwänke in Murals, Stone Carvings, and Woodcuts,” Germanic Review 46, no. 4 (November 1971), pp. 243–56.
Origen read: Johan Verberckmoes, “The Comic and Counter-Reformation in the Spanish Netherlands,” in Bremmer and Roodenburg, A Cultural History of Humour, p. 80.
“blessed are ye”: Luke 6:21 (King James Version).
Rule of Saint Benedict: Benedict, “Rule for Monasteries,” in Readings in Medieval History, 4th ed., ed. Patrick J. Geary (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), pp. 164, 167.
Duyfken and Willemynken: Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 156.
more than twenty times: E. K. Grootes and M. A. Schenkeveld-Van der Dussen, “The Dutch Revolt and the Golden Age, 1560–1700,” in A Literary History of the Low Countries, ed. Theo Hermans (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2009), p. 248.
“Saint Nobody”: We only know about Radulphus from a 1290 refutation of this “abominable sermon” by his contemporary Stephanus. Lucie Dolezalova, “Absolute Alterity in the Cult of Saints: Saint Nobody,” in Identity and Alterity in Hagiography and the Cult of Saints (Zagreb: Croatian Hagiographic Society, 2010), pp. 89–102.
a 1937 broadcast: Jon Tuska, The Complete Films of Mae West (New York: Citadel, 1992), pp. 134–36.
“I believe in censorship”: Nora Gilbert, Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 150.
“The Daily Planet”: Talking Funny.
“I’d like to kiss you”: Nothing but the Truth, Paramount, 1941. Hope’s character is uncharacteristically forthright about his attraction to Goddard because he’s made a wager that he can’t go twenty-four hours telling the unadulterated truth about everything, essentially the same gimmick as Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar almost sixty years later. This telling example of thinly veiled sexuality in Hays Code–era Hollywood is in Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 399.
the Old Comedy: All these examples of cheerful Attic vulgarity are from the exhaustive survey in Jeffrey Henderson, The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).
“his bugle of an ass-hole”: The Divine Comedy: Inferno, in The Portable Dante, trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 116–17.
Merv Griffin credited: Or so Yankovic has been told, though I’m not 100 percent sure the timeline holds up. “I Lost on Jeopardy” was released in June, and Jeopardy! was back on the air by September. Maybe the “Weird Al” hit helped boost viewership for the already-in-the-works revival.
fourth consecutive decade: The only other artists with new Top 40 hits in each of the last four decades are Michael Jackson, Madonna, and U2. Gary Trust, “U2 Joins Michael Jackson, Madonna & ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic with Top 40 Hot 100 Hits in ’80s, ’90s, ’00s & ’10s,” Billboard, April 27, 2017.
the era of Allan Sherman: Mikael Wood, “ ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic Hits No. 1 on Billboard Chart with Mandatory Fun,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2014.
“I once had a girl”: These two lyri
cs are, of course, the first lines of the Dylan-influenced “Norwegian Wood,” by the Beatles, and Dylan’s own “Highway 61 Revisited.”
“Single Women”: Saturday Night Live, season 7, episode 2, NBC, October 10, 1981.
list of past winners: Mary Ann Madden, “Competition #940,” New York, May 3, 1999.
fanciful images: “Shoveling Snow with Buddha” is in Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), p. 37. “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House” and “Flames” are from Billy Collins, The Apple That Astonished Paris (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), pp. 27, 50. “The Lanyard” and “Litany” have both been reprinted in Billy Collins, Aimless Love (New York: Random House, 2013), pp. 32, 60.
a six-figure advance: Bruce Weber, “On Literary Bridge, Poet Hits a Roadblock,” New York Times, December 19, 1999.
funny contemporary verse: Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, eds., Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
“tragedy is a representation”: Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 22.
Evelyn Waugh always maintained: David Wykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 153.
most successful box office genre: In terms of total box office, comedy in toto has led the box office since the mid-1990s for a total take of $43 billion domestically, even if you separate out “romantic comedy” into its own category. (Of course, this is largely because comedies are more numerous than any other movie genre except drama.) In 2017, “adventure” surpassed comedy for the first time, a result of the superhero movie boom. The Numbers, http://www.the-numbers.com/market/genres.
within a whisker: Paramount actually avoided the word “comedy” completely in its Oscar campaign for The Big Short, knowing that was the kiss of death. Glenn Whipp, “Best Picture Predictions: It’s The Big Short for the Win,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2016.
humor in office: Emily Antenucci and Carol Glatz, “Jokes, Quips, Wisecracks: John XXIII Lived with Keen Sense of Humor,” National Catholic Reporter, March 24, 2014.
short, clever jokes: Several signs in this section are taken from Steve Paulson, Church Signs Across America (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2006).
“number-one outreach tool”: Christian Davenport, “Churches Offer Spiritual Advice in Tiny Bites, Goofy or Poignant,” Washington Post, March 25, 2006.
simple slapstick idea: “Top Soccer Shootout with Scott Sterling,” Studio C television clip, November 14, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F9jXYOH2c0.
caffeinated sodas: BYU lifted the sixty-year Coke ban in September 2017 as this book was in its final edits, presumably just to spite me and force me to add this endnote.
“enough of tragedy”: Horace G. Whitney, The Drama in Utah: The Story of the Salt Lake Theatre (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1915), p. 29.
NINE: A BLURRY, AMORPHOUS THUD
without a single member: Wayne Whipple, The Story-Life of Lincoln: A Biography Composed of Five Hundred True Stories (Chicago: John C. Winston, 1908), pp. 481–82.
ribald British jokebook: Keith A. Erekson, Everybody’s History: Indiana’s Lincoln Inquiry and the Quest to Reclaim a President’s Past (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. 98.
battled clinical depression: Joshua Wolf Shenk, “Lincoln’s Great Depression,” Atlantic, October 2005.
“As a rule”: Lincoln’s Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections), ed. Daniel Kilham Dodge (New York: Longmans, Green, 1910), p. xvii.
“The occasion is too serious”: Ibid.
“as a handy peg”: Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (San Diego: Harvest, 1982), p. 562.
rex facetus: Simon R. Doubleday, The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance (New York: Basic, 2015), p. 116.
dining and trading wisecracks: “He used to send trifling verses from court to the Scriblerus Club almost every day; and would come and talk idly with them almost every night, even when his all was at stake,” Pope remembered. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (London: Murray, 1820), p. 167.
“Never make people laugh”: Gilded Age diplomat and gadfly Donn Piatt claimed Corwin gave this advice to him, not President Garfield, though the latter undoubtedly makes for a better story. Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (New York: Belford, Clarke, 1887), p. 95.
“infinite humor”: Life and Speeches of Thomas Corwin, ed. Josiah Morrow (Cincinnati: W. H. Anderson, 1896), p. 20.
“How do you entertain”: “Flatulence Joke Is World’s Oldest,” BBC News, August 1, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7536918.stm.
comedians warned him: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 161.
Joe Kennedy tried: Ibid., p. 199.
“degrading to the presidency”: Peter M. Robinson, The Dance of the Comedians: The People, the President, and the Performance of Political Standup Comedy in America (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), p. 133.
fastest-selling record: Sales figures and stories about Meader’s quick fall from fame drawn from Tim Carvell, “Exactly 40 Years Ago, for a Brief Shining Moment, Vaughn,” Entertainment Weekly, March 28, 2003.
complicit in murder: Newcomb, Encyclopedia of Television, p. 2310.
last-minute Plan C: Hal Erickson, “From Beautiful Downtown Burbank”: A Critical History of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” 1968–1973 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012), p. 168.
“too angry”: Brian Abrams, “Sock It to Me: Behind the Scenes of Richard Nixon’s Laugh-In Cameo,” Death and Taxes, November 5, 2012, https://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/190513.
head writer Paul Keyes: Lorne Michaels and other Laugh-In writers remember that the conservative Keyes was forever stripping Nixon jokes out of the show. Erickson, “From Beautiful Downtown Burbank,” p. 170.
“A few timely touches”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 309.
“She was losing popularity”: Jonathan Lynn, “Margaret Thatcher Hijacked My TV Show,” CNN, April 10, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/10/opinion/lynn-yes-prime-minister-thatcher/index.html.
Humphrey said no: Erickson, “From Beautiful Downtown Burbank,” p. 167.
“Look,” she said: “Clinton,” American Experience, PBS, February 20–21, 2012.
fastest turnaround: S. Robert Lichter, Jody C. Baumgartner, and Jonathan S. Morris, Politics Is a Joke: How TV Comedians Are Remaking Political Life (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2015), p. 184.
“the association with jazz music”: The Walters-Wicker exchange from This Week with David Brinkley, recorded in Joseph Hayden, Covering Clinton: The President and the Press in the 1990s (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), p. 20.
“because I’m the president”: Michael Parkin, Talk Show Campaigns: Presidential Campaigns on Daytime and Late Night (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 26.
“The separation between theater and state”: Robert Klein, “This Funny Business About Comedy and Politics,” New York Times, November 3, 1996.
Political candidates appeared: Lichter et al., Politics Is a Joke, p. 5.
Pryor to Louis C.K.: WTF with Marc Maron, episode 613, June 22, 2015.
blunt antijoke: Karen Tumulty and Sean Sullivan, “McConnell Responds to Obama Joke with Glass of Wine,” Washington Post, April 29, 2013.
tooling around the South Lawn: Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, season 7, episode 1, “Just Tell Him You’re the President,” Netflix, December 30, 2015.
“like Hitler’s dream”: “Brad Pitt,” Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Funny or Die, October 27, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnF-zTrHvGs.
Portman was asked: “Natalie Portman,” Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Funny or Die, November 3, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOVq_UL48o0.<
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Obama was the last: “President Barack Obama,” Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, Funny or Die, March 13, 2004, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnW3xkHxIEQ&t=2s.
“the Galifianakis bump”: Other experts were more measured, attributing the March uptick to the looming enrollment deadline, not the video. Philip Bump, “Bradley Cooper Did Not Save Obamacare, the Calendar Did,” Atlantic, April 2, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/bradley-cooper-did-not-save-obamacare-the-calendar-did/360021/.
his after-dinner speech: “President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” C-SPAN, April 30, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mzJhvC-8E.
“Trump’s humiliation”: Adam Gopnik, “Trump and Obama: A Night to Remember,” New Yorker, September 12, 2015. It’s worth noting that not all writers agreed with Gopnik’s hindsight. Roxanne Roberts, who sat immediately to Trump’s left that night, said he was a good sport and repeatedly told reporters he felt “honored” to be roasted by Obama. Roxanne Roberts, “I Sat Next to Donald Trump at the Infamous 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Washington Post, April 28, 2016.
language of comedy fans: Emma Roller, “Can You Insult Your Way to the White House?” New York Times, June 21, 2016.
Trump heard a baby: Ashley Killough, “Trump: ‘You Can Get the Baby Out of Here,’ ” CNN News, August 3, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/donald-trump-ashburn-virginia-crying-baby.
“the Austrian comedian”: Heinrich Mann, Essays und Publizistik, eds. Wolfgang Klein, Anne Flierl, and Volker Riedel (Bielefeld, Ger.: Aisthesis, 2009), 6:80.
“The laughs”: Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greaves, Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 206.
a 2008 experiment: Jody C. Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “One ‘Nation,’ Under Stephen? The Effects of The Colbert Report on American Youth,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 52, no. 4 (December 2008), pp. 622–43.
an MSNBC clip: “Black Voter Flashes Pro-Trump Hat While Voting During Live MSNBC Broadcast,” November 8, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNIKBIEHby8.
