Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything

ISBN-13: 9781501100604

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Scribner

Publication Date: 07-09-2019

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)

Ken Jennings is the New York Times bestselling author of Brainiac, Maphead, Because I Said So!, and Planet Funny. In 2020, he won the “Greatest of All Time” title on the quiz show Jeopardy! and in 2022, he succeeded Alex Trebek as a host of the show. He is living in Seattle during his mortal sojourn, but his posthumous whereabouts are still to be determined.

Read an Excerpt

Planet Funny
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A man walks into a sex ed class.

In my defense, I was supposed to be there. It was the first night of “For Boys Only,” a popular four-hour seminar on puberty and sexuality given every month or so at Seattle Children’s Hospital. The class, along with its “For Girls Only” counterpart, is the brainchild of a local nurse who thought parents shouldn’t be outsourcing sex talk with their kids to elementary schools. “This is a relationship-building class,” my registration e-mail told me, “so it will be important to your child to have you attend both sessions. Because class includes interactive exercises for the adult and child, our teachers request that you sit together.” The classes have become so popular locally that they’re virtually a rite of passage for Seattle-area fifth-graders and their helicopter parents, and the program has since spread to Oregon and California.

Retaking sex ed with a roomful of twelve-year-old boys wasn’t my idea of a relaxing Monday evening. To make matters worse, my son, Dylan, discovered a week beforehand that two of his best friends from school had been signed up for the same session. So of course we all had to meet up beforehand for burgers, and then I had to sit through two hours of sex ed with my son’s goofy friends and their dads. Also, right before the class was set to begin, a familiar-looking bearded man walked into the auditorium with his young son and sat down a few rows in front of us. It took me a few minutes to recognize him as longtime NBA coach P. J. Carlesimo. This is in no way relevant to the rest of the story, but you can’t just go to sex class with P. J. Carlesimo and not mention it.

The instructor, Greg Smallidge, was exactly who I expected: a friendly-faced middle-aged white guy with receding brown hair, a vaguely professorial air, and an easel stacked with, I could only assume, the same grisly cross-sections of the human reproductive system that I remembered from fifth grade. But when Smallidge began the class, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He was funny! In my day, sex ed wasn’t funny. Maybe the girls’ class was funny? I don’t know, I still have no idea what went on in there. But the boys’ class was only funny unintentionally, like when my friend Glenn asked the teacher, “What if pee comes out instead and you pee inside the lady?” and Mr. Jenkins explained that his wife liked morning sex and even when he really had to go, pee never came out when he ejaculated, and then everyone got incredibly uncomfortable and quiet.

Smallidge was a slow, careful talker, but what I had initially taken for unflappable dullness turned out to be a calculated deadpan, in the vein of Bob Newhart. He introduced the topic of masturbation by saying, “It’s a very personal subject. It’s not like a kid comes home one day and says, ‘You know, I had a rough day at school. I’m going to go up to my room and masturbate for about ten minutes.’” He paused and let the laughter build, then added the topper. “‘Dad, could you make me a sandwich?’”

Later, he asked the room to suggest slang terms for “penis” and jotted down a list on his big drawing pad. Many of the kids had obviously never been given license to yell anatomical slang in a crowded roomful of adults, and they jumped in with gusto, some of them possibly inventing terminology on the spot. “Old one-eyed Mr. Johnson!” shouted a boy two rows back, which I thought was a bit much. The room teetered on the brink of anarchy.I But Smallidge got them back! It was essentially a two-hour stand-up set for the most tentative of audiences, and it was masterful. I felt like applauding at the end.

“It’s like Houdini,” he told me later when I asked him about his crowd work. “How do you get out of this and survive?” Smallidge was a corporate trainer back in the 1990s when a friend at Seattle Public Schools called him out of the blue to see if he’d be interested in teaching puberty classes. He’d been a philosophy major in college and had no background in medicine, psychology, or education. He didn’t even have any kids. “Sure, I’ll do that,” he said. He’s now been a full-time sexuality curriculum guy for more than twenty years.

“It does feel like stand-up comedy,” Smallidge said, but he disagreed with my assumption that “For Boys Only” is a tough room. No one is expecting the instructor in a hospital auditorium to be funny, he explained, so it’s easy to beat low expectations. And he thinks the laughs are what makes it possible to spark real family conversations about sex. When parents come up against issues of sexuality with their kids, he said, the first response is usually discomfort and defensiveness. “But with humor, you don’t have to be defensive for a few minutes, because you’re laughing.”

I told him that my childhood sex ed classes were never funny on purpose. “You could get in trouble for laughing.”

“There’s this one very conservative teacher, he always starts my introduction with, ‘There will be no laughing! You know the rules!’ Because they’ve gone over all the ground rules. ‘I’m going to be watching you!’ Very severe. It’s sort of like having a bad opening act. I’ve got to undo that intro without offending him.”

“Does that guy have a point? Are we giving kids a more casual view of sex because they got dick jokes with their puberty class?”

Smallidge smiled. “Something can be important without being serious,” he said. “That’s what it is for me.”

One joke-heavy sex ed class isn’t exactly headline news. My favorite schoolteachers were always the funny ones, and I’m sure that was true in my parents’ and my grandparents’ day as well. But it’s part of a pattern, one that we sometimes fail to notice, the way a frog in simmering water doesn’t notice each degree of temperature change.

Everything is getting funnier.

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.

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 cities.

Today, in a clear sign of evolution totally sliding off the rails, our god is not strength or efficiency or even innovation, but funny. Funniness.

If you assume that all modern institutions have always been as joke filled as they are now, you’re part of the problem—and probably part of the rising generation. A 2012 Nielsen survey found that 88 percent of millennials say that their sense of humor is how they define themselves. Sixty-three percent of them would rather be stuck in an elevator with a favorite comedian than with their sports or music heroes. “We called them Comedy Natives,” MTV research executive Tanya Giles told the New York Times. She’s now the general manager at Comedy Central. “Comedy is so central to who they are, the way they connect with other people, the way they get ahead in the world. One big takeaway is that unlike previous generations, humor, and not music, is their number one form of self-expression.”

Comedy, in other words, is no longer just a vehicle for selling nightclub drinks or ad time, something people passively consume because it’s an “easier sit” than drama. More and more, we actively seek it out. We’re connoisseurs. Instead of dozing off to a single late-night monologue, we stream highlights the next day from six or seven different late-night shows, assembling our own comedy SportsCenter. Instead of relistening to the same album or two by a favorite comedian, we use newer media like Twitter and podcasts to check in on them weekly or daily or even hourly. Instead of quoting the occasional comedy catchphrase with pals at work, we can consult Frinkiac, an online Simpsons search engine stocked with three million screengrabs, which will produce a Simpsons meme for almost any occasion. (Just found out your boss is out of the office this Friday? Time for a quick “Everything’s coming up Milhouse!”) Being this kind of obsessive comedy geek is now an avocation, and an increasingly mainstream one.

When everyone starts to turn into a comedy expert, very specific comic tropes and references can start to invade real life in surprising ways. The Kazakhstani government took out a four-page ad in the New York Times to rebut Sacha Baron Cohen’s roasting of the Central Asian republic in his movie Borat. (“Nothing disturbing happens to me here,” enthused a Turkish architect quoted in the puff piece.) Professional football players like Von Miller and Lance Moore have been flagged and fined for reenacting the touchdown dance of Hingle McCringleberry, a character from a Key and Peele sketch, in actual NFL games.II In 2011, Australian morning show host Karl Stefanovic, given a few minutes to interview the Dalai Lama, even tried to tell the Tibetan spiritual leader the classic joke about the Dalai Lama walking into a pizza shop. “Make me one with everything!” is the punch line. His Holiness just stared at Stefanovic blankly.

The most shocking comedy/reality crossover came in 2014, when Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg announced they were making The Interview, about two tabloid TV journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The premise didn’t feel particularly edgy to me; it was a comfy throwback to the days when Leslie Nielsen would reenact Three Stooges smack-fights with Ayatollah Khomeini and Muammar Gaddafi in a Naked Gun movie, or Saddam Hussein would show up on South Park. You could even go back fifty years earlier. When Robert Benchley published a silly faux interview with Benito Mussolini, or Bugs Bunny terrorized Hitler and Goering, no one was actually afraid the dictators in question would seek revenge on comedy writers. (Even in the case of Charlie Chaplin’s celebrated The Great Dictator, an international smash hit, there’s no firm evidence that Hitler ever even saw it.)

But this time, things couldn’t have gone more differently. 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.

It was a rude awakening to open the newspaper one morning and realize that James Franco and Seth Rogen would probably be appearing in my kids’ and grandkids’ history textbooks. (That was the best case. Worst case was North Korea getting a missile that could reach the Pacific Northwest, and my kids and grandkids not existing to read history textbooks.) Stern, saber-rattling statements between two nuclear powers, followed by one of the biggest acts of cyberterrorism in history, had been provoked by a goofy stoner comedy. It was all almost as unfunny as the movie itself turned out to be.

What changed between The Great Dictator and The Interview? Sure, you could chalk it up to the unprecedented paranoia and strategic chaos practiced by the North Korean regime. But the real takeaway is that Kim probably wasn’t wrong. North Korea has always survived by trading on larger countries’ perception of its government as dangerous and unpredictable. Seth Rogen’s painting “Supreme Leader” as a buffoon and then blowing him up for big movie laffs might have a real effect on how long his regime will last.

Today, we’re savvy enough about the influence of comedy that we take it very, very seriously. Just ask Seth Rogen and James Franco, who were issued hulking round-the-clock studio bodyguards in 2014. Just ask advertisers paying five million dollars to show a goofy, cameo-filled comedy sketch during a Super Bowl time-out. Just ask ordinary people who have lost their jobs when the wrong joke attempt went viral on Twitter. Just ask the staff of Charlie Hebdo.

But in the main, it’s a good time to be in the business of being funny. Comedians, accustomed to their longtime roles of put-upon underdogs and insecure sideline snarkers, are adjusting slowly to their growing prestige. 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. In 2008, Lancashire stand-up Jim Bowen made headlines for going onstage at a London comedy club and doing a full act of fourth-century Roman jokes, not a gambit you’re likely to see on Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents anytime soon.III Or take the former members of Monty Python: Michael Palin is a past president of the Royal Geographical Society who has explored the poles and directed documentaries on World War I and Matisse. Terry Jones, an avid medievalist, tried to solve the death of Chaucer in a 2003 book. John Cleese has a species of lemur named after him, for his conservation work in Madagascar. In American post-comedy life, the closest thing we have to this is Steve Martin, who is now a passable banjo player.

But this is changing! Writing a book or two of funny essays is now a virtual requirement of comedy legitimacy and led to seven-figure publishing advances for hot commodities like Tina Fey, Aziz Ansari, and Lena Dunham. This isn’t a venerable trend in American publishing; it really only goes back to Jerry Seinfeld’s 1993 bestseller SeinLanguage. Around the same time, we started putting legendary comedians on postage stamps: Jack Benny, Laurel and Hardy, and Abbott and Costello in 1991, then Bob Hope, Groucho, and Burns and Allen in 2009. Gloria Steinem and Amy Schumer started hanging out together at comedy clubs—and why not? They’re both feminist icons. The unlikeliest comedy hangers-on were the fabulously good-looking ones. Celebrities like Jon Hamm and Justin Timberlake were among the biggest sex symbols in the world, but they were tired of lounging on beaches with supermodels. What they really wanted to do, apparently, was hang out with comedians! Only a Funny or Die director telling them how great that improv was on the last take would fill the comedy-shaped hole inside of them. It was the exact reverse of generations past, when an alpha dog like Frank Sinatra might let one comedy goofball—a Joey Bishop, say—join his gang. In 2014, Esquire even began a monthly feature where a rotating series of comedians were pressed into service as advice columnists. After all, is there a demographic more stereotypically famed for having their lives together than stand-up comics? Ask a comedian; they always know what to do.

And once comedy is done fixing your love life and roommate troubles, why not put it to work on public policy? The rise in comedy prestige was most notable on late-night TV, where a stand-up veteran like Jon Stewart, someone you might have seen on cable in 1992 telling jokes about “Just Say No” ads in a black leather jacket, acquired the moral authority of an éminence grise during his sixteen-year tenure on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. He was the closest thing millennials had to a Walter Cronkite, and his mere proximity had the power to create similarly endowed acolytes, a Legion of Substitute Stewarts that grew to include Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Samantha Bee. Stewart knew that hosting an MTV talk show in the early Clinton era wasn’t exactly the same journalistic training as covering the London Blitz, like Edward R. Murrow had, and was always the first to remind commentators that he was a comedian, not a reporter. But this was mostly just a (pretty transparent) way to preempt criticism. Stewart’s influence among young people was sometimes overstated in the press,IV but in 2014, 12 percent of the country told Pew Research that they got their news from The Daily Show, roughly the same reach as USA Today. When you’re a news source for as many people as the country’s top-circulation newspaper, you’re effectively a journalist, whether that’s how you imagine your résumé or not. “My Comedy Channel Is Fox News. My News Channel Is Comedy Central,” read the popular bumper sticker.

This change is often framed as a decline of traditional media, but to my mind, the real story was the new legitimacy and relevance of comedy. In the late sixties, when the Smothers Brothers were doing the edgiest, counterculture-friendliest comedy on TV, the network still carped about every joke that mentioned Vietnam, the most important news story of the day. (Pete Seeger was censored for singing “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a folk song that didn’t even mention Vietnam.) It’s not always remembered today that Tom and Dick Smothers lost their battle with CBS’s Program Practices division: the show was repeatedly neutered and then, in 1969, abruptly canceled. 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.”

That was all upended in the Daily Show era, when a comedy host could do an eight-minute tirade against the Iraq War, full of moral outrage—at a time when even the New York Times was banging the drum about Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction—and keep the full support of his network and his audience. In fact, they loved him for it. He was free to layer the editorial commentary in silly pop culture asides (when George Bush called Saddam Hussein “a deceiver, a liar, a torturer, and a murderer,” Stewart asked if he was also “a picker, a grinner, a lover, and a sinner”) and puns (“Mess O’Potamia!” read the chyron) without anyone asking if war was too serious a subject for that sort of thing. He could even snipe at his own network. When President Bush said that the arguments over Iraq were like “a rerun of a bad movie, and I’m not interested in watching it,” Stewart noted that, by an amazing coincidence, that was also the official slogan of Comedy Central. Instead of getting fired like the Smothers Brothers, he became the highest-paid performer on television.V Bush’s successor secretly summoned Stewart to the White House twice to consult on policy, and petitioners tried to draft him to run for president himself in 2016.

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 could. Was it any wonder that jokes began to receive more scrutiny and Monday-morning quarterbacking than ever before? It wasn’t enough to be funny; every joke was held to strict ethical standards of fairness, civility, compassion. And why not? This was now serious business; comedy could quite literally change the world.

How did we get to this point? Our gradual descent into nonstop comedy started in the early decades of the twentieth century, and I’m going to blame it all on one man: an eccentric Russian futurist poet named Velimir Khlebnikov. The futurists, as the name of their movement implied, were young artists besotted with the speed and dynamism and violence of mechanized modernity, and eager to replace the tired old art of the past with experimental new forms in their new century. The most famous poem of the futurist movement is probably “Incantation by Laughter,” which Khlebnikov wrote in 1909 while he was (nominally) studying mathematics at a Saint Petersburg university. It’s a series of escalating nonsense riffs on the Russian word smekh, meaning “laughter.” An English translation might look something like this:

O, laugh, laughers!

O, laugh out, laughers!

You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly

O, laugh out laugheringly

O, belaughable laughterhood—the laughter of laughering laughers!

O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists!

Laughily, laughily,

Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings

Laughlets, laughlets.

O, laugh, laughers!

O, laugh out, laughers!

I don’t know for sure what was on young Velimir’s mind the day he wrote this poem, but his “Incantation by Laughter” turned out to be a pretty accurate look ahead at the twentieth century, with the simple command “laugh” endlessly branching and innovating into complex new forms, just as comedy itself would. The poem came true.

Am I implying that this little verse, scratched out over coffee and cigarettes in a bohemian Saint Petersburg cellar café, actually was some kind of magic futurist spell, invoking a new century of endlessly escalating laughs? You’d better believe I am. Khlebnikov saw himself as a prophet even as a teenager, and believed that he was destined to decipher the “laws of time” and predict the future. His essays imagine modern urban planning and even the internet with some accuracy, and he earned great fame for having predicted, in a 1912 pamphlet, the “fall of a state” in 1917—the year of the Russian Revolution. So why not make him a prophet of comedy as well? The secret history of the twentieth century is, after all, largely a history of humor. The old gods were dead, and what was left to us was the laughter of laughering laughers.

Let’s be clear: this was not a complete break with the past. 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.



The funnying-up of modern life has mostly been an organic and imperceptibly slow process, like a glacier inching toward the sea. But sometimes there are watershed moments on a cliff where the ice cracks all at once, and everyone on the cruise ship claps and the landscape in a certain place is changed forever. The glacier just doesn’t flow back uphill.

April 9, 1917—seven years after Khlebnikov published his incantation—was such a date. On that day, New York’s Society of Independent Artists rejected an entry for its first annual exhibit, a show that was supposed to be open to all artists. Unbeknownst to most of them, the sculpture had been submitted by one of the society’s own board members, who later resigned in protest. The artist was Marcel Duchamp, and the work was the first of his “readymade” sculptures of found objects. It was a lavatory urinal, bought from a plumbing supply house, signed with a fanciful “R. Mutt” signature, and laid on its back. Duchamp called it Fountain.

Now, it’s certainly possible to name older works of art that viewers found humor in. Paintings were primarily decor for centuries, and funny canvases sold because television hadn’t been invented. If you’re going to hang something pretty on the wall of your house, why not have a laugh as well? VI That explains those sixteenth-century Arcimboldo portraits where some Saxon elector or naval hero is constructed entirely of fruit and fish, or those Jan Steen tableaux of merry domestic chaos, where chubby children are chasing each other around a table and the dog has just knocked over a platter of something.

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?

The playful postmodern impulse eventually bled into all the other visual arts—even architecture, where it had been axiomatic since the days of the Bauhaus that function and efficiency were all that mattered. “A house,” Le Corbusier had said, in one of the century’s most depressing pronouncements, “is a machine for living in.” There was only one possible future, and it was going to be defined by the clean, uniform glass-and-steel boxes of the International Style, dammit. It wasn’t until the 1970s that architects woke from their reveries of rectilinear purity, squinted at their blueprints, and started to wonder where the jokes were. And so the pendulum swung back toward the winking neon of Charles Moore and the cheekily ornamented faux casinos of Michael Graves and the rippling titanium currents of Frank Gehry. As fans of John le Carré and James Bond spy fare know, even the British secret service, that least funny of all institutions, now operates out of a bizarrely kitschy postmodern Aztec temple on the Thames that employees call “Legoland.” These new buildings aren’t exactly hilarious, of course; it seems almost beside the point that no one in history has ever lol’ed at the sight of one of them. But it was enough that the architect seemed to have acknowledged that fun exists. As Spy magazine memorably asked, in a 1988 cover package on postmodernism, “For a building, is it funny?”

Let’s fast-forward from Marcel Duchamp’s Paris to June 22, 1961. That’s the day a young Cassius Clay did a morning radio interview in Las Vegas alongside the legendary wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner. In response to the host’s questions about his upcoming bout against Duke Sabedong, just the seventh of his fledgling pro career, Clay was confident but restrained, in keeping with his public persona at the time. 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!” Clay was astounded at George’s sheer force of personality and started to see how he could reinvent his persona as a boxer. “Keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous,” Gorgeous George told him later when they met backstage after his wrestling match.

Sports heroes in those days were, almost to a man, not funny. They were sleepy-eyed white dullards with pomaded hair and beer bellies. When athletes got laughs back then, when Jim Thorpe told Gustav V of Sweden, “Thanks, King!” after receiving his Olympic medals or Yogi Berra issued one of his trademark cockeyed aphorisms, like “You can observe a lot just by watching,” those quips were invariably unintentional or apocryphal. Or both, if that’s even possible. It was all so dire that the funniest athlete of the 1930s—you can look this up—was actually Seabiscuit. Compare that to today’s mischievous, smart-aleck sports heroes. The hinge on which that change turned was Gorgeous George strutting down the aisle in a satin robe, accompanied by a rose-water-spritzing valet, and his newest fan Cassius Clay sitting up tall in his seat and seeing an alternate future in his head: the self-aware boasting, the flirting with reporters, the well-rehearsed comic verse, all of it.VII

Every sport didn’t become funny overnight, of course. Even in my day as a young sports fan, everyone knew who the