by Ken Jennings
In other words, the old maxim that “comedy is the universal language” could not be further from the truth. Jokes are the rainforest orchids of the artistic world, too delicate to survive most travel or transplantation. The great all-time international movie stars—Sophia Loren, Toshiro Mifune, Catherine Deneuve, Max von Sydow—are dramatic actors, because good looks and screen presence are near-universal, but every country seems to have some comedy superstar who is almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world: Totò in Italy, Cantinflas in Mexico, Louis de Funès in France. The weird French embrace of a foreign-born Jerry Lewis or Woody Allen is the exception, not the rule. And the divide is culture as much as it’s language: I’ve labored mightily to include non-American comedians among the examples in this book,XXII only to face the dispiriting fact that almost no non-American comedy is universal across the English-speaking world. Americans say they love that quirky British sense of humor, but they can name maybe five British comedy people tops, and one of them is Benny Hill.
When funniness gets lost in translation, I suspect that the fault often lies with lazy translators, who are too quick to boot a joke as “untranslatable” rather than cast about for a better alternative. As I was thinking about telling the French toast joke in Spanish, for example, I realized there is a single word that can be used to mean both kinds of time: momento. That might not be enough to save the joke, but it’s a start. Sometimes, more radical surgery is required to get laughs to travel across boundaries of time and place. I saw a performance of Macbeth at London’s Globe Theatre in 2016 where the famous “knocking at the gate” scene, comic relief after the bloody murder of Duncan, broke with Shakespearean tradition by actually being funny. Every night, the actress playing the porter had been given free rein to improvise jokes about Donald Trump, Brexit, and whatever else was in the headlines. Watching her, I remembered reading an article about how Germans in the mid-1990s discovered a new favorite TV show: Hogan’s Heroes. The thirty-year-old American sitcom, set in a Nazi POW camp, had never found an enthusiastic audience in Germany, for some reason. But in 1995, a German broadcaster commissioned a new dub, with broader, sillier humor nowhere to be found in the English-language original (and, naturally, less likely to bear any actual resemblance to World War II). In the newly christened Ein Käfig voller Helden (“A Cage Full of Heroes”), a plan to bomb London in one episode became a plot to drop condoms there, cutting off the British war effort via population control. The German Colonel Klink now made frequent references to Kalinka, a never-seen cleaning lady in his employ who worked in the nude. The reimagined show became a smash hit, drawing almost a million viewers a day. Are loose translations like these cheats? Or are they the only faithful way to translate comedy, because at least they preserve the laughs?
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.
That’s it. That’s the joke.
Feel free to close this book for a few hours or weeks or years and ponder the punch line—it will get you nowhere. I’m confident that you could spin theories about the bus joke indefinitely and never even get close to the gist of it. It’s French toast during the Renaissance, specific to a single time and place. 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.XXIII
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. Now you’re laughing!
The fragility of comedy means that it’s always transitory, and therefore doomed. The addition of a few catchy tunes can resurrect a timeworn piece of tragedy like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” into a worldwide phenomenon, but that just doesn’t happen to comedy. When comedy is dead, it’s dead. No professionally funny person wants to face this truth, but their very best work, the stuff that left millions rolling in the aisles, will leave no legacy. At the time Booth Tarkington was lamenting “antique funnyings,” he was perhaps the leading humorist in America, acclaimed as the successor to Mark Twain for his Penrod stories of Midwestern boyhood. Today, he’s an antique funnying himself. The Penrod books have been out of print for decades.
Chasing Absurdity
In the 1970s, Andy Kaufman essentially invented a new kind of a laughter, the laugh of incredulity. He would do one of his oddball anticomedy set pieces—singing along with the Mighty Mouse theme, donning an Indian headdress to revive an elderly woman who had collapsed onstage—and people would laugh because they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. It was performance art.
Kaufman’s act was iconic because it was completely unprecedented, but today, the incredulity laugh is everywhere in comedy. Now it’s the mainstream. On Saturday Night Live, experimental sketches that would once have been quarter-to-one filler can go viral overnight and become water-cooler catchphrases by Monday morning. An uncategorizable and eccentric genius like Reggie Watts can be a beloved late-night sidekick. On Conan, Tig Notaro might stop telling jokes altogether and push a squeaky stool across the stage for two or three minutes. Comedians Kurt Braunohler and Kristen Schaal can go as long as ten minutes onstage with their endlessly repeating, increasingly maniacal “Kristen Schaal is a horse” hoedown dance.XXIV Good luck trying to explain to your ninety-year-old grandpa, who fought in Korea, why you’re in hysterics over a half-hour Adult Swim special where two comedians golf very badly. (“The one playing golfer John Daly is a comedian named Jon Daly, and the one playing golfer Adam Scott is a comedian named Adam Scott. That’s what’s so funny, Grandpa! They have the same name.”) I don’t think any particular historical theory of humor will ever explain all laughter, but the incongruity theory has never been more convincing. The “unresolved incongruity” joke, the kind that starts weird and stays weird, is now our default joke.XXV
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. If you don’t “get it,” there’s nothing to get. Cranberry bogs seem marginally funny to me today only because they are, in my experience, an untapped vein for comedy. (And also, in some cases, for cranberries.) If I were to run across an old Family Guy episode with sixteen cranberry bog jokes, that would about do it. From then on, it would probably take a different, more obscure kind of bog to crack me up.
But the modern taste for absurd jokes also says something about the times we live in. For centuries, religion provided people with a sense of meaning and order in a cruel, random world. 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.” The effect is largely the same, but it’s easier, and lowers the
stakes considerably. (A lousy sense of humor might annoy your peers, but you won’t burn forever in hell.) As Eric Idle sings during the crucifixion scene in Life of Brian, “life is quite absurd and death’s the final word,” but that doesn’t mean you can’t look on the bright side of life. And we shouldn’t be surprised when that means making jokes that are just as inexplicable as the universe itself.
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.”
In our alternate future, we also became hyper-savvy about the DNA of jokes, and developed abstruse academic disciplines to study them.XXVI But for the most part, we dodged Asimov’s bullet. The old joke forms did start to seem stale and joyless over time, but we found new, stranger stuff to laugh at. We started to see the humor that could be inherent in smaller things: an eccentric turn of phrase, an old-timey trope, a funny reference to some bit of cultural detritus. I’m not sure if this can continue indefinitely, if we can keep finding more and more unlikely things to laugh at. But so far we’ve come out smelling like roses—which may or may not contain ready-to-sting bees.
* * *
I. My brother tells this joke sometimes, and the grasshopper always has a British accent. Why is the grasshopper British, Nathan?
II. He also wrote Stuart Little, but it’s wrong to associate him with mice because Stuart Little was not a mouse. White is very clear on this point. He was a human baby who was born to human parents but just happened to look exactly like a mouse, which is repulsive.
III. WHIM published the annual World Humor and Irony Membership Serial Yearbook, or WHIMSY. Acronyms! So funny, right out of the gate.
IV. 2014 was a simpler time, before Louis C.K.’s history of sexual misconduct was widely known. The woman in the lobby had no idea that she could have asked any number of female comedians about the size of C.K.’s penis.
V. I assume McGraw, a genuine comedy fan, was starstruck. When I spoke briefly to him for this book, he was friendly and helpful and didn’t ask me about my genitals once. He is the director of the University of Colorado’s Humor Research Lab, or “HuRL.” Again with these guys and their funny acronyms!
VI. The argument is sometimes made by superiority theorists that the target of a pun is an implied dumber person who isn’t so good at puns. Aren’t we clever, to get the joke? That’s not an insignificant part of comedy, as you know if you’ve ever seen an audience member laughing especially loudly at some highbrow joke, so everyone sees they got it. “Somebody should write a history of knowing self-congratulatory laughter, from Shakespeare down through watching Woody Allen on the Upper East Side,” comedy writer Tim Long once suggested to me. But if we water the definition of superiority theory down this much (basically “anything, even a hypothetical, that makes us feel good about ourselves”), it could explain almost any human interaction.
VII. The history of perfectly attractive female comedians having to pretend in their acts that they are graceless, hideous Gorgons is a long and troubled one, to be revisited in chapter 10.
VIII. I’ve never been to a “humor research lab” like Peter McGraw’s, but I picture them all looking something like Q’s workshop in a James Bond movie: a long tracking shot where the background is a series of people bursting into nervous laughter at stuffed mice and dummy weights, while serious-looking scientists with white coats and clipboards look on.
IX. Sometimes this goes for whole comedic works as well. Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels are revered as milestone comic novels today, but modern readers probably have no clue that both were written as elaborate genre parodies (of chivalric romances and travelogues, respectively). They’re Scary Movie installments, essentially—and possibly funnier today without that baggage.
X. The last candidate in the sketch has a fifty-word name that also includes various sound effects, animal noises, song titles, and punch lines from other jokes, and is far too silly to reproduce here.
XI. Ward and his contemporaries went so far as to make their spelling funny, using comically misspelled words wherever possible. Ward’s friend Josh Billings was quick to see the difference: he had no luck publishing his “Essay on the Mule,” but when he rewrote it as “Essa on the Muel,” it was a hit. Billings soon found he was locked into the device, which scholars call cacography. “I adopted it in a moment ov karlessness,” he lamented, “and like a slip in chastity, the world don’t let me back tew grace again.” Today cacography is back in a big way on social media forums like Twitter, where nonstandard capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are commonly used to convey a casual-but-woke comic sensibility.
XII. Back when we could listen to Bill Cosby records without feeling sad and angry.
XIII. It’s not particularly hard to tailor jokes to stoners. You know what kind of joke weed fans will laugh at? Any joke that mentions weed.
XIV. Oh man, is that Jack Handey “One thing that’s funny . . .” diction ever deep in the comedy DNA now. McSweeney’s wouldn’t exist without it.
XV. In 2015, the median viewer of an episode of Louie was thirty-seven years old. The median NCIS viewer was sixty-one, and doesn’t think you call home enough.
XVI. Fine, Chevy Chase was thirty-one. The real outlier? Garrett Morris, who was a full decade older than his costars.
XVII. In predictably bizarro Adult Swim fashion, the network posted a video of the exchange—but with the audio replaced by opera singers performing the dialogue to music.
XVIII. It’s unclear whether corn exists on the cob planet.
XIX. The Simpsons offices are on the Fox lot. On this day, they were mixing at the Sony lot for some reason.
XX. You don’t need access to a Culver City mixing stage to experiment with the limits of this phenomenon yourself. YouTube is a great place to sample The Office with a laugh track added, Friends with its laugh track removed, The Big Bang Theory with Ricky Gervais’s laughter replacing the studio audience, and all manner of other comedy-killing abominations.
XXI. Neither of them, interestingly, is tiempo, the dictionary translation for “time.”
XXII. In hopes of getting a book deal in the UK! I’m no dummy. It’s like a parallel-universe America where people still buy and read books.
XXIII. Did you hear about the new French tanks with fifteen gears? Fourteen are reverse, and one goes forward . . . in case the enemy attacks from behind.
XXIV. The sketch can’t really be described. You’re going to have to find a clip.
XXV. And it’s only getting weirder. When the web video series Lasagna Cat began in 2008, straight-faced reenactments of old Garfield strips were cutting-edge weirdness. By the time the show returned in 2017, however, it took more to push the envelope. The new crop of Garfield-themed “comedy” videos included a five-hour recitation of real-life responses to a telephone sex survey, with a graphic horror-movie conclusion.
XXVI. Even, sometimes, using computers, as we will see in chapter 6.
THREE
* * *
THE MARCH OF PROGRESS
In April 1965, a young Woody Allen took the stage at a Washington, D.C., nightclub called the Shadows, on M Street near Georgetown University. At the urging of his manager, Jack Rollins, the playwright and wunderkind TV joke writer had taken up touring as a stand-up comic, developing the gulping nebbish persona that would propel him into his film career. Th
e set was recorded and released later that year as his second hit comedy album.
At one point in the set, Allen tried out a joke about “the pill,” still a hot topic in 1965. “I must pause for one fast second and say a fast word about oral contraception,” he said. “I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said no.”I
Listening to the record today, the audience response is hard to believe. There’s a second or two of silence before one guy gets the joke and guffaws loudly. It’s fully three to five seconds before most of the crowd catches on and starts laughing along. But then the laughter goes on and on, giving Allen one of his best responses of the night.
What amazed me when I first heard the record was that moment of complete silence. I kept listening to the pause over and over: dead air, the sound of a joke making its way through a crowded room completely unnoticed. Here’s the deal with the silence: everyone is still waiting to hear what happened after the girl said no! When, they wondered, is this going to get back around to birth control pills? When one person finally gets the joke, the crowd, hearing him laugh, suddenly has to consider that they’ve missed the punch line. It takes them a second of backtracking to connect the “oral” in the setup to “she said no,” but when they do, it’s a cascade of laughter.