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Planet Funny

How Comedy Ruined Everything

Ken Jennings

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56 quotes

social-science

Chapter 1

  • For millennia of human history, the future belonged to the strong. To the parent who could kill the most calories, in the form of regrettably cute, graceful animals, with rocks and sticks and things made out of rocks and sticks. To the child who could survive the winter or the scarlet fever epidemic. These were success stories.Mar 16 2024 7:29AM
  • The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Ideas replaced muscles. A century ago, we believed the future belonged to the efficient, those who had discovered the best ways to streamline a manufacturing process. Fifty years ago, our anointed were the best scientific minds. Slide rules and engineering know-how weren’t just going to defeat Communism, they were eventually going to get us into flying cars and domed underwater citiesMar 16 2024 7:29AM
  • A 2012 Nielsen survey found that percent of millennials say that their sense of humor is how they define themselves.Mar 16 2024 7:29AM
  • Six months before The Interview’s planned release, North Korea’s state-run media called the still-in-production movie “the most blatant act of terrorism and war” and vowed “merciless” retaliation. It was one thing to blow up the leader of North Korea in a fiery helicopter explosion onscreen, but now the moviemakers began to get cold feet: what if the carnage spilled over into real life? Sony asked Rogen and Goldberg if they’d consider rewriting the ending so Kim would survive. They refused, but writer Dan Sterling worried openly about his silly screenplay leading to “some kind of humanitarian disaster.” “I would be horrified,” he said. When North Korea threatened terrorist attacks at theaters that screened The Interview, Sony canceled its wide release in favor of a digital rollout—and was criticized by President Obama for capitulating to terrorism. In the end, the only real casualty of the threats turned out to be Sony cochair Amy Pascal, who stepped down after a massive data dump, almost certainly coordinated by North Korean hackers, revealed months of embarrassing studio secrets.Mar 16 2024 7:34AM
  • They should look to the United Kingdom, which got here first. In Britain, comedians are certified public intellectuals. The British have a whole TV genre that we don’t: erudite panel shows on which quick-witted punsters with posh Oxbridge educations try to dazzle Stephen Fry or a Stephen Fry equivalent with their knowledge of current events and general knowledge.Mar 16 2024 7:35AM
  • That cemented the TV status quo for decades: jokes should not have a viewpoint on serious things. The rule worked mostly because the viewership was fine with keeping its news and its comedy in separate time slots. Satire just wasn’t a mass-culture phenomenon; as George Kaufman famously said, it “closes on Saturday night.”Mar 16 2024 7:39AM
  • Jon Stewart’s vehement protesting-too-much that he was “just a comic” was always a reminder that he knew how influential his voice was. The Daily Show take on a policy matter or media skirmish could determine the opinion of millions of people, the same way Fox News’s official line couldMar 16 2024 7:41AM
  • People have always made jokes, and most of them went unrecorded. But the culture of which jokes we tell, and when, and why, does change. Comedy’s like any art form; it evolves over time. Yesterday’s jokes influence today’s, and if today’s seem funnier, it’s largely because we stand on the shoulders of giants.Mar 16 2024 7:44AM
  • But Duchamp’s work was different. It didn’t just have a mildly whimsical air to it; it was a joke, a joke you could “get.” (“Hey, that’s a sideways urinal!”) With works like Fountain and L.H.O.O.Q. (the one where he painted a mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa), Duchamp didn’t just found the Dada movement. He started an avalanche of art that was incomplete without the laugh: the optical illusions of the surrealists, the soup cans and comic book panels and giant puffy hamburgers of the pop artists, the great pains taken by the photorealists to document something silly like a chrome car bumper or glass Automat window. The old masters still cast a long enough shadow that these new jokes could be powered by surprise at their mild subversion. That was their whole impact. Ha, someone made that? And someone else hung it up in their gallery?Mar 16 2024 7:54AM
  • Then he watched George answer a similar question about his next match, against “Classy” Freddie Blassie. “I’ll kill him! I’ll tear off his arm!” the wrestler fumed. “If this bum beats me, I’ll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it’s not gonna happen, because I’m the greatest wrestler in the world!”Mar 16 2024 7:58AM
  • But every wisecracking modern athlete today of every race has the same model: Muhammad Ali.Mar 16 2024 7:59AM
  • The following year, a young Heston Blumenthal bought a run-down sixteenth-century pub in Berkshire and opened a soon-to-be-legendary bistro called the Fat Duck. These two events kick-started the avant-garde cooking movement now called “molecular gastronomy”—using science to prepare foods that no one had ever actually seen beforeMar 16 2024 8:04AM
  • Just like a circus act, an avant-garde food menu is designed to elicit laughter and gasps in alternation—and sometimes in combination.Mar 16 2024 8:04AM
  • Does it sound gimmicky? It was absolutely gimmicky. Funny food can’t literally taste funny. That wouldn’t go over big in a Michelin-starred restaurant. So the humor in high-end cuisine has to come from something incidental to the way a dish tastes, like a surprising texture or the way it’s plated. But even so, Achatz and his peers achieved the apparently impossible: wringing laughs from the simple, metabolically necessary act of eating.Mar 16 2024 8:06AM
  • It’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to be a single overarching cultural shift behind the race toward funny. In each of these four case studies, the push for more and more humor was powered by something completely different. In art, it was driven by mechanization. The invention of photography lifted from artists the responsibility of mimicking reality on canvas, and allowed them access to a broader palette of approaches and effects—humor among them. The change in sports came from technology as well, but this time from the invention of modern media culture. Mass media created an instant demand for athletes whose ability to entertain a home audience was just as important as whether they won or lost. The irreverent comic books of the same era were mostly a symptom of the growing cultural influence of youth. Baby boom America had just invented the teenager, and that new market demanded its own light entertainment, with comedic markers that would differentiate it from the routine, serious world of working adults. Funny food at the end of the century felt like something a little more ominous: a decadent sign of the fin de siècle, like Roman elites feasting on roast peacock and hummingbird tongues while civilization collapsed around them. But all these trends eventually converged into one spot: a rising tide of comedy, everywhere we looked.Mar 16 2024 8:07AM
  • “There were more jokes written in one minute on the web today than were written in all of the twentieth century,” the Onion’s Joe Randazzo has observed, only halfway joking. Once you start noticing it, funny is everywhere—even the tiniest, dumbest places. The last time I waited on the phone for a corporate conference call to begin, the recorded hold music wasn’t Vivaldi or smooth jazz; it was a faux-earnest novelty ditty about . . . the travails of being placed on hold. “Yes, I’m waiting on this conference call all alone / And I’m on hold, yes I’m on hold . . . I hope it’s not all day!”VIII The yoga studio up the street from my house added a laughter yoga class. The corner drugstore has replaced its “Video Surveillance in Use” security notice with a sign that says “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!” The bag of organic dried mangoes sitting on my desk right now has “Tropical Humor!” as a label slogan. Not only has this company decided that the biggest selling point of dried mango snacks is how funny they are, they’ve decided to advertise the fact with a confusing pun!Mar 16 2024 8:09AM
  • This is largely hindsight, by the way. I don’t remember ever identifying as a comedy geek at the time. Things were on; you watched them. If they were good, you taped them so you could watch them over and over. But being a funny kid was a big part of my identity, almost as far back as I can remember. Bothering grown-ups with riddles, asking them to explain the jokes you still didn’t understand.XI Do you remember? Making an adult genuinely laugh is a huge thrill when you’re five or six and nobody really pays much attention to you.Mar 16 2024 8:12AM
  • The research bears out my childhood intuition on the benefits of being the Funny Kid. When psychologists ask fourth-graders to rate their class members on humor and popularity (“classroom social distance” is the nicer way to say this in the literature), the two variables are always closely linked—and the pattern of variances strongly suggests that popularity is predicted by funniness, not the other way around.Mar 16 2024 8:13AM
  • In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman worried that the trivialities of mass media were going to be the death knell for American culture. In his view, the West had successfully avoided the authoritarian dystopia of 1984 only to embrace the narcotized “soma” culture of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan,” he wrote. “Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?”Mar 16 2024 8:16AM
  • My favorite part of Khlebnikov’s “Incantation by Laughter” is the neologism that the translator renders as “laughterhood.” It seems to encompass everything about a culture’s funniness: not just the voice of its comedy, but its social clusters and media and genres and fan bases, its techniques and tropes, its lineage and influence. We don’t really have a word like that in English. But even when they don’t know what to call it, groups always have a laughterhood. Families have one, offices have one, online communities have one, ethnic groups have one. Zoom out and civilizations have one.Mar 16 2024 8:19AM
  • Funny art has always been dangerous art, however. The Greek artist Zeuxis is said to have died laughing at his own painting of an old woman who had insisted on posing herself as the goddess Aphrodite.Mar 16 2024 8:20AM

Chapter 2

  • That’s true to a point, but look: all humor is a web of cultural associations. No elemental thing is that funny in a vacuum, as a pure Platonic ideal. But let me be clear: my list isn’t just a collection of “things that I’ve learned are stock stand-up material or have been the punch line of a particularly memorable Simpsons gag.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a joke about a cranberry bog in my life, or even seen a cranberry bog, but let’s be honest: cranberry is a pretty funny kind of bog.Mar 16 2024 8:31AM
  • The alchemy of where the laugh comes from remains mysterious and ineffable. It’s the comedy equivalent of the unanswerable metaphysical question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Why a laugh here but not here? What makes one story/quip/cartoon/breakfast cereal funny and another one not?Mar 16 2024 8:32AM
  • To most of the world, the animals most closely associated with author E. B. White are a pig and a spider, because he wrote the universally loved 1952 children’s classic Charlotte’s Web.II But in the rarefied world of humor studies, E. B. White’s spirit animal is the frog. In the preface to a 1941 humor collection, White first used the simile later popularly paraphrased this way: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.”Mar 16 2024 8:33AM
  • Relief theory is usually traced back to English political theorist Herbert Spencer, best known as the guy who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” When he studied “The Physiology of Laughter” in 1860, Spencer decided that it was an outlet for built-up psychic energy. “Nervous excitation always tends to beget muscular motion,” he wrote. Sometimes we vent that energy via aggression or flight, but sometimes we laughMar 16 2024 11:48AM
  • This line of argument was given a big boost in the twentieth century by Sigmund Freud, who saw humor in much the same way he saw dreams. Both were ways to release all the pent-up strain of reality, particularly repressed hostility and—Freud being Freud—sexuality. Laughter was a primal pleasure satisfied, our mouths open wide in imitation of the release from our mothers’ nipples as babies. The Freudian take on humor is a good match for the way laughter feels—liberating, a release—as well as the undeniable fact that edgy overtones of taboo subjects like sex or violence can make a laugh bigger.Mar 16 2024 11:48AM
  • In 1968, a psychologist named Arthur Shurcliff conducted an experiment in which he told one group of subjects that they’d have to hold a mouse, a second group that they’d have to draw blood from a mouse, and a third group that they’d have to draw blood from an angry rat. In all three cases, the “rodent” was then revealed to be a stuffed toy. As Spencer and Freud would have predicted, laughter did correlate with relief. All the subjects laughed, and the ones who’d been feeling the most anxiety before the reveal laughed the most.Mar 16 2024 11:49AM
  • More popular today among scholars than relief theory is incongruity theory, the notion that we laugh when something violates the normal order of things, or when two mismatched concepts are juxtaposed: a monkey on roller skates, a bottle of shampoo in the fridge. It’s often summed up using Immanuel Kant’s 1790 declaration that “laughter is an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Our mental patterns must quickly shift to adjust to some unexpected collision of concept with reality.Mar 16 2024 11:50AM
  • He was pointing out that sometimes, incongruity itself can be funny. The humor is sometimes in the sheer oddity of something, not the neat resolution of it.Mar 16 2024 11:51AM
  • We know that a child watching her pet die violently is sad, not funny. So why did we laugh? A superiority theorist would say we were laughing at the unfortunate rabbit, because Kermit’s troubles made us feel good about not currently being carried off by a hungry hawk. A relief theorist would say we laughed to vent our own discomfort around that most taboo subject of all: death. An incongruity theorist might say we were laughing because the hawk entered the frame at such an unexpected and inopportune moment, violating everything we know about the bittersweet decorum of releasing a pet back into the wild.Mar 16 2024 11:56AM
  • Today’s preference for out-of-left-field, why-am-I-laughing-at-this gags seems more closely linked to the guileless stage persona of Steven Wright: I went into a place to eat, it said, “Breakfast anytime.” So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance. Or the “Deep Thoughts” of Saturday Night Live writer Jack Handey: If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let ’em go, because, man, they’re gone.XIVMar 16 2024 2:58PM
  • Animator Chuck Jones once quantified the exact margin of error on one of his most famous jokes: Wile E. Coyote, when falling off a cliff, had to hit bottom exactly fourteen frames after he disappeared from sight. “It seemed to me that thirteen frames didn’t work in terms of humor, and neither did fifteen frames. Fourteen frames got a laugh.”Mar 18 2024 10:33PM
  • At any performance of Shakespearean “comedy” today, you’ll have a hard time mustering a genuine chuckle at the zany Elizabethan antics of the clown. “Aha, he’s thrusting his hips and leering at the crowd! That must have been a sex joke!” It doesn’t take five hundred years, either. Watch a typical sitcom from the 1950s, and then watch something from the same era that was dead serious when it was written—an advertisement for cream of wheat, an educational film about good hygiene. Guess which one gets bigger laughs today? It’s not fair, but unintentional humor just has a longer shelf life than the intentional kind. Booth Tarkington summed up this Bizarro-world effect of old-timey humor perfectly: “Antique funnyings in print bring on a pleasant melancholy.”Mar 18 2024 10:34PM
  • The observation that some jokes are “referential” and can survive translation, while others are “verbal” and cannot, goes back to Cicero. But referential humor can fail too, as soon as the references fade. Here’s a joke that was insanely popular in Egypt in 1968. A man narrowly misses a bus, and takes off down the street in pursuit. He’s so fast that he catches up with the bus at the end of the block, and hops aboard. The conductor, seeing this feat, only charges him half fare.Mar 18 2024 10:36PM
  • To understand it, you need three crucial pieces of information that Egyptians in 1968 would have known off the top of their heads: 1. Military personnel pay half fares on Egyptian city buses. 2. Egypt in 1968 had just lost the Six-Day War to Israel in decisive and demoralizing fashion. 3. As a result, jokes were often powered by the stereotype of the cowardly Egyptian soldier, the kind of jokes that got told about the Italians a century ago and are still heard about the French today.Mar 18 2024 10:37PM
  • Now you can probably piece it together: the conductor saw how fast the man was running, realized that only a soldier who had recently been running away from the Israeli army could be so fleet of foot, and charged him the soldier’s discount.Mar 18 2024 10:37PM
  • The rise of the non sequitur is, in large part, just the hunger for novelty. We got so good at comedy that “well constructed” no longer seemed funny—it was “inspired” or nothing. But the jokes that match this new sensibility are more subjective and more fragile than ever before, because we scarcely know what we’re laughing at ourselves. These new funny-for-no-reason jokes are even more vulnerable to the endless scramble for novelty, because they rely so much on a mysterious, reflexive response.Mar 18 2024 10:39PM
  • It’s not a coincidence that the rise of comedy and the decline of faith happened in the same century. Religion says of life, “This sucks, but it’s God’s will.” Humor says, “This sucks, but look, at least it’s funny.Mar 18 2024 10:39PM
  • In Isaac Asimov’s 1956 short story “Jokester,” a computer scientist of the future becomes obsessed with the mystery of humor—where jokes come from, what makes things funny. He programs the world’s jokes into a supercomputer and asks the computer to trace them back to their starting point. The answer that comes back is startling: “Extraterrestrial origin.” According to the infallible computer, higher intelligences have seeded our culture with jokes as a psychological test, and once humanity discovers this fact, the experiment will become useless and therefore must be brought to a close. The computer scientist and his colleagues sit staring glumly at the results, and none of them can think of a single joke. “The gift of humor is gone,” one of them realizes. “No man will ever laugh again.”Mar 18 2024 10:40PM

Chapter 3

  • In 2001, a group of London scientists used MRIs to scan the brains of people listening to jokes, as well as those of a control group listening to unfunny jokelike constructions.II This study, and a similar one done at Stanford in 2003 using cartoons, found that there is no one “humor area” of the brain. Instead, when humor was processed, the whole brain lit up like Times Square. Neural activity rose in all four lobes of the cerebral cortex, though different areas were more involved in different types of jokes.Mar 19 2024 8:38AM
  • Conceptual jokes led to activity in parts of the brain that process language semantically, while puns were handled by the part of the brain that interprets the sounds of speech.Mar 19 2024 8:38AM
  • I can watch It’s a Wonderful Life twenty Christmases in a row and get a little weepy every time, but the same jokes in Groundhog Day weren’t laugh-out-loud funny to me anymore on a second or third rewatch.Mar 19 2024 8:46AM
  • The stereotype of the unoriginal jokester goes back to the Roman playwright Plautus, who in his comedy Stichus introduced the character Gelasimus (“laughable”). Gelasimus is a social parasite who uses a book of prewritten jokes to wangle invitations to things, the ancestor of the twentieth-century traveling salesman trying to close a deal with tired jokes and saucy French postcards.Mar 19 2024 8:47AM
  • In the sitcom, everything is okay: all families are happy, and all problems get resolved in twenty-five minutes.Mar 19 2024 8:49AM
  • The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock noticed the difference immediately: “Mark Twain can be quoted in single sentences, Dickens mostly in pages.Mar 19 2024 12:54PM
  • Tina Fey famously described that difference this way: “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”Mar 19 2024 1:03PM
  • Comedy also needs brevity because it doesn’t sustain the way other art forms do. There’s a reason why no comedian will do a set the length of a Springsteen concert: the audience would burn out. The modern TV convention of “half hour = comedy, hour = drama” isn’t new. Even in ancient Athens, the satyr plays were much shorter than the tragedies.Mar 19 2024 1:04PM

Chapter 4

  • That was a surprisingly recent discovery for the advertising industry. “Be serious. Don’t use humor or fantasy,” wrote ad guru David Ogilvy in his 1963 book Confessions of an Advertising Man. “Good copywriters have always resisted the temptation to entertain.”IIMar 19 2024 1:05PM
  • According to Millward Brown, in 2013, 52 percent of all advertising in North America was “funny or light-hearted” in nature, more than any other part of the worldMar 19 2024 1:09PM
  • There’s also the question of what modern ads could even fall back on to replace humor. Craig Allen explained that old-school ad gurus of David Ogilvy’s generation preferred factual product rundowns to jokes for a very good reason: there were just fewer products then. “They didn’t have to differentiate themselves very much. They actually had something to talk about.” Back when there were only three kinds of mayonnaise, you could convince a consumer just by demonstrating that your brand was creamier, or lasted longer on the shelf, or used real lemon juice, or something. No jokey distraction required. “I don’t know why you would need to make a joke if you have something like that in your back pocket,” Allen told me. “I pray for briefs that have that clear of a product benefit.” That’s why cell phone and car ads can still be lengthy, fact-filled encomia to higher-resolution cameras and better fuel mileage: the product is still improving. Mayonnaise, in the absence of new advances in the condiment field, has to resort to making you laugh. Laugh about mayonnaise.Mar 19 2024 1:10PM
  • The history of jokes is like the history of sexuality: the most important stuff was never written down.Mar 19 2024 1:11PM
  • Laughing makes people feel good and pay attention, and that’s a powerful combination for anyone whose job is to make people feel good about something: a product, a place, a point of view, a political candidate. It’s a simple process psychologists call “affect transfer”: I laughed when I saw the funny ad about Old Spice, and I will spend the rest of my life vainly trying to recapture that flash of happiness, by buying Old Spice. “A brief moment of happiness is pretty good,” said Jerry Seinfeld in 2014, speaking to a room full of ad industry folks giving him an honorary Clio award. It was a sardonic joke at the expense of advertising, but he wasn’t wrong. Sometimes everything’s bad, and it’s nice that someone cleverly crafted a hopeful little moment to make you feel good about something. That’s what advertisers do; it’s what comedians do too.Mar 19 2024 1:14PM

Chapter 5

  • One of the worst qualities of a Roman jokester, according to Cicero, was that he used jokes “brought from home” instead of ones made up on the spur of the moment. Obviously prewritten quips, Cicero cautioned his fellow orators, “are generally frigid.”Mar 19 2024 1:16PM
  • Neuroscientist Robert Provine has spent his thirty-year career studying the psychology of laughter, recording untold hours of conversation in order to quantify how and why people laugh. He and his grad students sat in shopping centers, parks, office cubicles, and food courts, eavesdropping on strangers and creepily notating in thousands of notebook pages the laughter that dotted the conversations around them, like Amazon explorers recording birdsong. His discovery, in short, was this: everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. Most real-life laughs, for instance, didn’t follow comments that were funny at all. Even the percent that were provoked by mildly funny remarks weren’t linked to real jokes, nothing so quotable you’d want to retell it to a friend later. Speakers, surprisingly, laughed percent more than their audiences. And laughter may feel like a freeing paroxysm in the moment, a near-complete loss of control and composure, but Provine found that it actually followed strict mechanics: no laughs that interrupt speech, a reliable 210-millisecond gap between “ha”s, and striking temporal symmetry. (In other words, if you play a laugh backward, you don’t get subliminal satanic messages. You still get a human-sounding laugh.)Mar 19 2024 1:21PM
  • In 2004, two Stony Brook psychologists studying the effects of humor found that jokes told in a first encounter will bond two people faster than shared values.Mar 19 2024 1:22PM

Chapter 6

  • “I think that it feels like a video game,” Megan Amram told me about her Twitter habit. Amram moved out to Los Angeles in 2009 in hopes of breaking into TV, and got hooked on Twitter as a way of polishing her joke-writing skills. “There is some tweet out there that no one has written yet that completely sums up the human experience in a hundred forty characters, and every day I wake up and hope that I figure it out. And it’s a weird, almost masochistic game: can I think of the thing that resonates with the most people today?”Mar 19 2024 1:26PM

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