Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  This Place Has Everything

  As comedy structures branched into increasingly intricate fractals, the jokes they held had to become more complex and delicate as well. Improv guru Del Close used to tell his students to wait for their third thought—they could avoid stereotypes and obvious comebacks and hackery by not using the first joke idea that came to mind, even if it was funny. Heighten the idea, refine it. Today the air is even more rarefied. Every week, the staff of the Onion generates about five hundred headlines for every one that actually gets published, the comedy version of a sushi chef using only the single fattiest part of the tuna belly and throwing the rest of the hundred-pound carcass into the chum bucket. The image of the lone comedy genius scratching away at a notepad or hunched in front of a typewriter is out of fashion, because no one writer can produce the joke density and novelty that a modern audience expects. Sitcoms and even movies now have rooms like NASA Mission Control has rooms, places where a dozen of the sharpest comedy minds available can sit for days rewriting and polishing every facet of a script.

  “Reference humor” was a relative novelty when Dennis Miller made his reputation on it in the 1990s. Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen had discovered that you could make a joke funnier by adding a current newsmaker or brand name (“Bobby Breen”! “Fresca”!), but Miller’s tortured similes made the reference itself the whole joke. “The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel,” he would smirk, and the laughs would be laughs of self-congratulation: “I understood the gist of that thing he said!” Not to laugh would be tantamount to a confession: I’m a big bonehead. Miller showed that a sufficiently confident head-waggle and hair-preen could put over any reference, no matter what tiny percentage of the crowd had actually seen the Partridge Family episode in question. (A 1999 Simpsons joke called one-in-a-million odds the “Dennis Miller Ratio,” for this very reason.) His HBO “rants” briefly propelled him to comedy superstardom, before 9/11 converted him into a deeply frightened conservative pundit almost overnight.

  The intensification of twenty-first-century comedy upped the ante on references as well. If Dennis Miller is using Moby-Dick and James Lipton as punch lines—well, you don’t want to seem less hip than a Monday Night Football color guy, right? So the comedy/folk duo Garfunkel and Oates dropped rhymes about Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and the decline of the Whig Party after Millard Fillmore’s presidency, and Bill Hader imagined Dan Cortese club-hopping with the principal from Kindergarten Cop as Saturday Night Live’s “Stefon.”VIII Family Guy hoped that everyone remembered the 1997 drunk driving arrest of Ukrainian figure skater Oksana Baiul. Community even introduced a major character, Danny Pudi’s Abed, whose entire shtick was his ability to see quirky pop culture comparisons in every show’s plotline.

  Does it all seem a little lazy, getting laughs by merely mentioning a topic instead of having to, you know, think up an actual joke about it? Maybe. But my jaw dropped when I heard Patton Oswalt name-check “the short stories of Tillie Olsen” on a 2007 album—I felt an instant, visceral connection to the material that I hadn’t before. It’s nice to sometimes be on the right side of the Dennis Miller Ratio, feel like one of the cool kids. If nothing else, there’s nostalgic pleasure in thinking about a pop-cultural footnote for the first time in years, like paging through a high school yearbook. Hey, look, Dan Cortese!

  The Soul of Wit

  If people a generation or two ago were brought to the present and, for some reason, forced to watch television comedy, the first thing they would notice—well, the first thing would probably be the cell phones. But the second thing they’d notice would be the pacing. For evidence of this, put on a show that’s aged a bit but that you still think of as “modern.” Watch an early Seinfeld. It all feels so leisurely now! In the first act of the show, whole scenes sometimes go by without a laugh, just to introduce or advance the relationship or social ambiguity that the plot turns on. Characters cross paths in Jerry’s apartment and just putter aimlessly for a few minutes, like in real life.

  The first speed revolution in humor was a transatlantic one: Americans loved to gloat over how pithy and direct their jokes were, in comparison to the snoozy stuff that passed for “humour” in the mother country. “An Englishman wants hiz fun smothered deep in mint sauce, and he iz willing tew wait till next day before he tastes it,” wrote Josh Billings. (There’s that hilarious frontier spelling again.) “If you tickle or convince an Amerikan, yu hav got tew do it quick. An Amerikan luvs tew laff, but he don’t luv tew make a bizzness ov it; he works, eats and hawhaws on a canter.” The Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock noticed the difference immediately: “Mark Twain can be quoted in single sentences, Dickens mostly in pages.”IX

  At the turn of the century, Wilbur Nesbit, who wrote a humor column for the Baltimore News-American as “Josh Wink,” complained that the American joke speed-up was making his job much harder. “To-day the joke, or the humorous article, is funny all the way through. In other days it was enough to write on and on, with minute and detailed description, leading up to the comic denouement in the last two lines. Now the risibilities of the reader must be aroused with the opening line.” What’s wrong with these kids today, who won’t sit through pages of “detailed description” to get to a punch line?

  But American jokes really kicked into high gear with the 1925 debut of the New Yorker. In a prospectus that appeared on posters all over New York City, and was reprinted in the magazine’s first issue, founding editor in chief Harold Ross famously wrote, “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” It’s hard to believe now, but in the early twentieth century, the dominant voice in American humor was rural. A full third of the country still lived on farms, and jokes were droll and folksy, yarns spun by slow talkers. (It’s no accident that old-fashioned jokes are still called “corny,” literally springing from the cornfields.) At the turn of the century, no New York paper even had a humor columnist—that was a Midwestern thing, a regional phenomenon centered in Chicago.

  No longer! Today the reputation of the New Yorker is mostly built on its highbrow cultural commentary, but for its first decade or two, it was read first and foremost for laughs. As early as the second issue, Ross was purporting to be “astonished and alarmed as much as anybody else at the tone of levity and farce that seemed to pervade it . . . above all we don’t want to be taken as a humorous magazine.” But these faintly disingenuous protests were to no avail. The New Yorker ushered in a new era in American humor writing, one in which the jokesters—Thurber, Benchley, Clarence Day, S. J. Perelman—were contemporary and sophisticated. Timelessness was out. The new tone reflected the blithe, world-weary conviviality of Manhattan society, and the pace reflected the rapid-fire immediacy of big-city talk in general and Jewish humor in particular. The magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section captured city life in vivid, witty little snapshots, with the camera lens moving on to the next theater opening or nightspot before the reader could tire of the last. Cartoons, which had begun as full-page, elaborately captioned engravings in Punch and then shrank to strips in Life, were now just a single panel, often doodled as simply as possible to convey the joke. “Its essence lies in its brevity,” wrote Stephen Leacock of modern humor. “It must be as short as possible, and then a little shorter still.”

  This new economy wasn’t forced upon jokes; it was a natural fit for them. If, as Ricky Gervais once said, a joke is “the minimum amount of words to get to a punch line,” then by definition each setup needs to convey all the information necessary for the laugh, but no more. Any additional detail isn’t just extraneous—it’s actively confusing to the listener. (“But why did the first salesman have to be Catholic?”) It’s a plot hole, an undropped shoe. This is why jokes sometimes even come with their own clipped syntax, like a telegram, dropping any article or linking verb that might delay the punch line by even a syllable. Man walks into a bar. Your momma so ugly. The smallness of jokes is
so essential that comedy routines are even called “bits.”X

  Brevity even explains the comic “rule of three” principle, which holds that groupings of three items are funnier than those of any other size. Like this: Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun telling a woman, “Jane, since I’ve met you, I’ve noticed things that I never knew were there before: birds singing, dew glistening on a newly formed leaf, stoplights.” Note that there’s nothing inherently magical or mathematically perfect about the number three. Three is funny only because it’s the shortest list that can set up a pattern and then break it with a surprising final item. A set of two is just a pair; there’s no rhythm. A set of four works in theory, but it feels cluttered, because the audience can sense that it’s one more example than you actually needed.

  One casualty of the new comedy pace was the double act, the familiar comedy duo of the straight man and the clown. Once the dominant form in comedy (Laurel and Hardy, George and Gracie, Abbott and Costello, Lewis and Martin), the double act had a hard time competing in a faster comedy ecosystem. “Why is half the material here coming from someone whose role is not to be funny?” an audience member could be forgiven for wondering. “Do we need that guy? Would this have twice as many laughs without him?” Solo comedians, by contrast, can make a playground out of joke brevity. Steven Wright, who constructs sets out of a seemingly endless series of non sequitur one-liners, got delighted applause out of a seven-word joke: “Today, I was . . . no, that wasn’t me.” But even that is a rambling shaggy-dog story compared to George Carlin’s famous three-word joke, “Tonight’s forecast: dark.” Robin Williams sped up comedy without lowering the word count, zipping through a manic flail of voices and poses so fast that his manager once had to hire a court stenographer to transcribe the material. Williams had made the same discovery as the Marx Brothers: speed is inherently funny. In Duck Soup, Groucho notes that Chico “may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.” Slow it down and that’s not actually a clever line. The turn doesn’t make any logical sense—but the rat-a-tat sells the joke. Similarly, when Robin Williams switched from a Jamaican accent to a Yiddish one in the middle of his Pacino impression, it didn’t even matter what the joke was. You were laughing at the sheer dexterity, the hyperactive whir of it.

  Faster than Life

  The New Yorker brought humor into the twentieth century, but the real speed explosion came with radio and television. The surprising torpor of early Seinfeld—a show that otherwise still feels very contemporary—inspired me to take a closer look at the rising pace of sitcoms over the past fifty years. I watched a sample episode of a popular sitcom from each of the last six decades (the second-season premiere of each, for uniformity) and counted laughs—not just places where I necessarily laughed out loud, or the laugh track did, but every point where an actor or writer might reasonably hope to amuse. Just for kicks, I tacked the fastest-paced contemporary comedy I could think of—Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—onto the end of the graph. Here’s how the LPM (laughs per minute) changed over time.

  This isn’t an exhaustive survey, of course. The upward trend might have been a little less clear if my 1950s sitcom episode had been a frantic I Love Lucy instead of a sedate Father Knows Best,XI or if I’d used the joke-rich Friends for the 1990s and followed that up with two decades of more organically paced semi-mockumentaries (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Modern Family). But there’s no getting around it: twenty-first-century comedies can pack in two to three times the jokes that our grandparents were accustomed to.

  The speedup wasn’t just a result of shorter attention spans in the postwar era—it helped create them. Accelerated comedy had to be invented. Ernie Kovacs discovered that the abruptness of a joke could be the whole point, like his famous sight gag in which a used-car dealer taps the roof of a car, only to have it fall through the pavement. (This six-second bit cost $12,000, to the annoyance of Kovacs’s sponsors.) Then Laugh-In discovered you could construct an entire hour of quick blackouts like these.XII Monty Python discovered that sketches didn’t need to end with a neat capper—you could wring a few laughs out of an idea and then just move on to something else. Faster faster faster.

  But the game changer, without question, was The Simpsons. Today it’s a TV institution, timeworn yet beloved, but in 1989 The Simpsons felt like a lightning bolt. Matt Groening’s creation was a pretty conventional family sitcom on paper. But because it was animated, The Simpsons could dispense with much of the tiresome “shoe leather” of television comedy—all that crossing the set, rummaging for props, traveling to new locations, explaining offstage action in dialogue—and draw instead on a seemingly bottomless well of new ideas: cutaway gags, parodies, non sequiturs, impossible slapstick, blink-and-you’d-miss-it puns. Animation meant that even fundamental principles of the universe like physics and causality were no longer barriers to comedy. “The Simpsons made you do a little bit of work,” longtime writer-producer Tim Long told me. “There was a lot going on.”

  “It was just culturally dense and firing in so many brand-new directions,” added Matt Selman, about to enter his third decade writing for the show. “Every week you had to turn it on and see what they were going to do. And it said to a generation, ‘Oh, TV can be better,’ more than any other show.”

  The secret to the brisk pace of The Simpsons was, above all, the one thing the show didn’t have: a studio audience. It’s hard to overstate how much sitcom time and propulsion have been lost over the decades to the laugh track, or to actors shifting in their seats waiting for audience applause to end. George Meyer, the Simpsons writer who’s probably more responsible for the show’s comic DNA than any other, grew up watching staid three-camera sitcoms, but he always preferred the comedies that tried something a little less claustrophobic, a little more ambitious: I Dream of Jeannie and Get Smart and Batman. “Actors would almost always prefer being in front of a live audience, and that’s one reason that form persisted as long as it did,” he told me. “There was almost a moral superiority to performing it straight through.”

  “Sometimes they would even reassure you at the top of the show,” I remembered. “ ‘Filmed before a live studio audience.’ ”

  “Your seal of quality! Yes, the audience imposes their own lame pace on stuff.”

  The Simpsons influence on animated TV is obvious: the legacy of South Park and Family Guy, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. But when you look at television comedy overall during the last three decades, what you’re largely seeing is shows trying to recapture in live action what The Simpsons did in animation. The flashbacks and cutaways on Arrested Development and How I Met Your Mother,XIII the screwball tempo of 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt, the sprawling supporting casts of Gilmore Girls and Parks and Recreation, the whoosh-ing whip pans of Malcolm in the Middle and Scrubs, even the heightened reality of Louie and Atlanta—they all reflect the cartoonification of the sitcom into its current breakneck, single-camera form.

  The accelerating pace of modern life in general has not been an unalloyed good. Anxiety has been on a steady upswing for most of the twentieth century, and forty million American adults—almost one in five—have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Heart disease is up; so are attention disorders. And there’s even evidence that speed is bad for the soul. In 1973, two Princeton seminarians reenacted the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan on campus. They instructed subjects to head over to a different building to participate in a study but planted in their path a man slumped in an alley, who would moan and cough twice as they passed. Sixty-three percent stopped to help the man. But if participants were told that they were already late for their appointment and had to hurry, only 10 percent stopped. Sometimes, all it takes to turn a caring person into a callous one is a ticking clock.

  The stakes may be lower when it comes to jokes, but the fever pitch we’ve achieved might be just as unhealthy for comedy—and maybe just as unsustainable. At 6.38 jokes per minute, a show like Unbreakabl
e Kimmy Schmidt already feels breathless to me. It’s as sharply written as anything on television, but you almost can’t laugh at it—there’s no time. No joke can be savored, because it’s probably just a setup for a new joke. Emotional beats tend to feel a little tacked-on and even unwelcome, because they cause a jarring lull in the joke barrage. Most importantly, the audience knows that no one in real life tells a joke every nine seconds, so it’s very hard for a show this fast to feel real, for the characters to seem lifelike and empathy-worthy. The viewer is constantly aware of how “written” it all feels—and there’s nothing wrong with an ornate little operetta of a sitcom, but that’s not the only thing (or the most interesting thing) that comedy can do.

  Is there a mathematical limit to the speedup? I asked the Simpsons writers. A comedy singularity that we are asymptotically approaching, like the event horizon of a black hole?