A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and
record-setting Jeopardy! champion **** Ken Jennings relays the
history of humor in "lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy
factlings," (Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go Bernadette)--from
fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and
Facebook memes.
Where once society's most coveted trait might have been strength or
intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off
the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness.
Consider: Super Bowl commercials don't try to sell you anymore; they try
to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials--those terrifying laminated
cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and
drowning--have been replaced by joke-filled videos with
multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media,
we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the
world at all hours of the day--and many of them even get popular enough
online to go pro and take over TV.
In his "smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes--pretty darn funny"
(Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this
brave new comedic world and what it means--or doesn't--to be funny in it
now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy
middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python's game-changing silliness
to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we
built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from
comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the
United States purely on showmanship. "Fascinating, entertaining and--I'm
being dead serious here--important" (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of
Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned
and defines the modern sense of humor.
