Planet Funny

How Comedy Took Over Our Culture

By: Ken Jennings

Narrated by: Ken Jennings

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terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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.

Sincere, Sweeping

This is an excellent, sweeping history of humor that comes to sharp, earnest point. Written by a man who is actually funny, it rewards listening as much with amusement as with education. Great work, Ken! (And I mean that in a totally un-ironic way).

insightful and funny

very informative and horseshoe to take a new unapproached look at an everyday subject, comedy. full of information I would have never considered knowing before this book. The history of comedy the effects of comedy identifying comedy in my everyday life.

Though provoking

Very solid book! Big Ken Jennings fan as well as comedy in general. I will admit there were small portions of the book I feel he droned on about the point he was trying to make. Overall though, some very funny stories, and thought provoking points from points of view I'd never considered. Which makes it well worth a read!

Pleasant read, nothing more nothing less

Ken Jennings, for those who don’t remember, was the guy who won Jeopardy 70-something times in a row. I’ve been a fan of his since then, originally for his old blog entries, sporadically for his hilarious Reddit AMA’s, and recently for his ‘historical detritus’ podcast The Omnibus. I never got into Twitter but apparently he’s the bee’s knee’s over there too.

What I like about his writings, I think, stems from his massive knowledge base. He’s like an old stoic war veteran calmly rattling off life stories, except instead of grizzled tales of torture and beheadings, he speaks of Damn Girl memes and old episodes of Freaks and Geeks. What I mean by that is that he doesn’t embellish meaning or overstate significance. I imagine that for his trivia-stuffed brain, no one piece of information feels overly significant.

This is appropriate here because this is a minor work. I don’t mean that in any negative sense - the book just takes a social trend, delineates it well, explains it concisely, and does so in an enjoyable package. The main thesis of the book is that due to various technological and social trends, humor has pervaded modern lifestyles to an all encompassing degree. There’s some thought put into whether this is a good thing, but the only consequence mentioned is that it may be taking something from sincere expression of emotion. The most biting the book becomes is from a short section against the vaguely fascist humor troupe Million Dollar Extreme, but even that’s more generally against the inherent uncertainty associated with that infinitely-ironic dadaist style of humor they use.

The most enjoyable moments of the book to me came in Ken’s recollection of his own humor background. His admiration for MST3K, his citing of random twitter jokes, and even just minor stories about his quaint family life. Perhaps the slightness of the book also comes from Ken’s own sense of humor, since it’s inevitably hard for a constant-joker to argue a case that humor has any seriously deleterious effect on the world.

Kinda long for the points made

The premise is that comedy has entered all sorts of places in our lives: news (e.g., The Daily Show), etc. However, the book is really long to make the point. I would listen sometimes and wonder why something is being discussed beyond simply being related to comedy. It wasn't bad enough to return but not good enough to recommend to someone else.