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 âlively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,â (Maria Semple, author of Whereâd You Go Bernadette)âfrom fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.
Where once societyâs 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 donât try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorialsâthose terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowningâhave been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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 dayâand many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV.
In his âsmartly structured, soundly argued, and yesâpretty darn funnyâ (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it meansâor doesnâtâto be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Pythonâs 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. âFascinating, entertaining andâIâm being dead serious hereâimportantâ (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.