Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  KTMA-TV 23 was the most remote outpost of the UHF wasteland in Minneapolis, filling its prime-time hours with Hawaii Five-O reruns and regional pro wrestling. The station’s production manager had approached Joel Hodgson, a Wisconsin-born prop comic recently returned from Los Angeles, and asked if he had any ideas for local programming. Hodgson pitched him a twist on the local TV movie hosts he’d grown up with: what if the mad scientist or the vampire lady didn’t just appear at commercial breaks, but actually watched the movie along with the home audience? He sketched some silhouetted heads watching B-movies from theater seatsI and gave his pitch the campy sci-fi title Mystery Science Theater, later adding the number “3000” to further baffle viewers.

  “It was kind of a big misunderstanding, basically, that it even got on TV,” Hodgson told me. “As time goes on, I see more and more that it’s outside any kind of norm for a TV show and defies a lot of the way TV was done.”

  Every element of the show’s premise stemmed from those first sketches. How to distinguish between a group of cohosts joking in a darkened theater? Make a couple of them robots with distinctive silhouettes. If the movies were so terrible, why wouldn’t the hosts just leave? Well, they must be trapped. Where are they trapped, then? Okay, they’re in space—on an orbiting satellite, forced by an evil scientist to watch lousy movies against their will. On the strength of a hurriedly shot pilot (a cheesy Japanese alien flick from 1968 called The Green Slime), KTMA agreed to air Mystery Science Theater 3000 weekly, every Sunday night. The budget was $250 an episode, so Hodgson and his collaborators built a flimsy satellite set out of Masonite, insulating foam, and toys from a local Goodwill. The night before the pilot was shot, Hodgson jury-rigged together his robot cohosts.

  Suddenly, the station where you could watch The Andy Griffith Show reruns while making dinner had an underground hit. The show’s answering machine filled up every time Hodgson put the phone number on-screen. Some messages were from testy viewers who preferred their monster movies without smart-alecky jokes (“It was like being in a theater with a bunch of rude junior high teenagers!” one scolded), but most were hooked. Hundreds of letters poured in; by spring, there were a thousand members of the show’s official fan club. Less than a year later, HBO bought thirteen episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for its new twenty-four-hour comedy channel, cleverly named the Comedy Channel (and shortly thereafter renamed Comedy Central).II

  A Shoestring Budget and “Minnesota Nice”

  But even as it gained a cult following nationwide, airing on basic cable for over a decade, MST3K, as fans called it, retained its stubbornly lo-fi sensibility, what Hodgson called its “miniature golf aesthetic.” In the age of Terminator 2 and then The Matrix, the robots were still obviously the product of a prop comedian’s junk drawer. “Tom Servo” was a gumball machine with doll arms. “Crow” was a Tupperware set topped with cheap sporting goods: a hockey mask, a plastic-bowling-pin nose, and two Ping-Pong ball eyes. After seven seasons, the Comedy Central–era set was still the same one originally built for $200, and up until the bitter end, the show always taped in a makeshift studio in an industrial park for medical equipment companies in suburban Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

  For Hodgson, staying in Minneapolis was the secret to the show’s success. “They really wanted us to go to New York, and we just knew that would not be good,” he said. “Here’s the thing about comedy: it doesn’t hold up when it’s scrutinized. It doesn’t hold up when people ask you questions about it. It just sort of evaporates. So you have to avoid being in situations where people ask a lot of questions and challenge you and go, ‘Is what you’re doing funny?’ Because if you’re in that situation, it’s over, and you can’t defend it. So that was really what I was going by. Just leave us alone and let us do this.”

  There was no mistaking the show’s origins. Despite the vogue at the time for edgy shock comics like Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay—and much to Comedy Central’s chagrin, at times—Mystery Science Theater 3000 was more prone to gentle in-jokes about crappie fishing, “hot-dish” casseroles, and the Wisconsin Dells. It’s not hard to imagine a version of MST3K that skewers its terrible monster movies with the most caustic put-downs imaginable, but the show’s Midwestern writers and performers preferred good-natured ribbing. “The idea was, you’re watching a movie with companions,” Hodgson agreed when I asked him about the show’s essential sweetness. “And so if you’re an asshole, it’s not sustainable. People don’t want to spend time with you for eighty minutes.”

  Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a word-of-mouth phenomenon—“Keep Circulating the Tapes,” the show reminded us at the end of every episode, blithely encouraging viewer piracy—and every fan (or “MSTie”) probably remembers their first exposure. Mine came in high school, while I was channel-surfing at the rural Oregon home of my grandparents, who had just bought a twelve-foot satellite dish. Satellite TV in the early 1990s was a welter of raw news feeds, televangelists, scrambled soft-core, and weird Spanish-language game shows, but the UHF era of the cheesy rainy-afternoon movie was ending. So I couldn’t have been more surprised, that Saturday, to flip past a dubbed Japanese Planet of the Apes rip-off being gleefully snarked at by robots. “A whole planet of Ron Perlmans,” remarked one puppet, marveling at the simian baddies with the unconvincing rubber masks. “A flea-collar concession would really clean up here,” said the other puppet. It lasted another hour, and then I immediately looked to see what time it would start on the West Coast feed, so I could watch it again. What on earth was this thing?

  The low-production-value host skits on MST3K were funny, but the core of the show was the three buddies talking back to the movie—the riffing, to use the borrowed jazz term. In any given five-minute chunk of the show, Joel and the ’Bots might name-drop Waiting for Godot, the Harlem Globetrotters, the Beverly Hillbillies supporting cast, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and the Warren Commission. This was “reference humor” as dense and as arcane as anything Family Guy or Community would try decades later, but—and here’s the thing—it felt accessible. I had no idea how the jokes on my other favorite TV shows got written, but it seemed hard as hell. Mystery Science Theater 3000 made me laugh just as loudly as The Simpsons or Seinfeld, but at heart it was still just three friends joking around about bad movies—something we’ve all done from our couches, if not as elegantly. Decades before the podcast era, Joel Hodgson and his robot friends weren’t just riffing. They were also teaching millions of viewers to do the same. With its homemade sets, low-key joke format, and a cast that seemed largely plucked from community theater, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was the forerunner of something completely new in comedy: the DIY era.

  The Gifted Amateur

  There has always been a vast gulf separating the truly, professionally funny from the rest of us: the class clowns, the cubicle jokers, the funny-once-you-get-to-know-us, the funny-after-a-few-drinks, the funny-but-not-haha-funny. And there have always been hopefuls trying to figure out a way to cross that gulf. In 1926, Will Rogers wrote, “I have been interviewed in every Town in the United States, by serious-looking young College Boys with horn-rimmed glasses and no hat, on the subject, ‘How would you advise a beginner to be funny.’ ” Rogers was always happy to offer suggestions. “Recovery from a Mule kick is one way that’s used a lot. Being dropped head downward on a pavement in youth has been responsible for quite a few. And discharge from an Asylum for mental cases is almost sure fire.”

  Today’s more conversational comedy vibe, and especially the illusion of intimacy fostered by podcasts and the like, has made comedy feel more accessible, but becoming a practitioner can still seem daunting. In the absence of a handy mule, how does an earnest young funny person make the leap? Keegan-Michael Key told Judd Apatow that, as a child, he saw a TV special about John Belushi and realized he wanted to be a comedian, “but it felt like there was no way to get there, you know? There was no conduit.” But that was changing as early as 1972. In April of that year, the Comedy S
tore opened its doors in West Hollywood, giving Los Angeles its first comedy club, and then just a few weeks later, Johnny Carson moved The Tonight Show from New York to Burbank. Soon the Comedy Store became the place to be seen by television bookers, and maybe land a spot on Tonight or another variety show. When Johnny began announcing that his comedian guests were “playing this weekend at the Comedy Store,” viewers took note. No longer would funny people just emerge fully formed from a confusing demimonde of bohemian coffeehouses and mobbed-up casinos: there was a Comedy Store now, and hundreds more such “stores” on the way. Suddenly, this was a career path. America knew how to try this.

  Today, in the words of the old lament, literally everyone is a comedian. There used to be just one day a year when regular people tried to be funny: it was April 1, and it sucked. Now it’s a yearlong pursuit. Twelve thousand people sign up for comedy classes with the Upright Citizens Brigade troupe every year, and UCB is just one of hundreds of groups teaching improv and sketch comedy nationwide. Alternately, you can become a comedian without even having to brave a single open-mic night, because now we have the Internet.

  Twitter: Jokes for Dummies

  There are people trying to be funny in thousands of ways online, but “riffing” in particular—not on Japanese monster movies but on the events of the day—is the lingua franca of Twitter. When I first signed on to Twitter, I eagerly followed the accounts of people I knew would be funny: Albert Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Conan O’Brien. And they were funny! But to my surprise, literally thousands of oddball Twitter civilians were funnier.

  Mary Charlene @IamEnidColeslaw

  do people who run know that we’re not food anymore

  chuuch @ch000ch

  hi, grandma? can u come pick me up from my rap battle? it’s over. no, i lost. he saw u drop me off & did a pretty devastating rhyme about it

  Fred Delicious @Fred_Delicious

  science defines a baby as “a small smooth poopy man, no taller than a lamp”

  jon hendren @fart

  i saw an ad on craigslist once that said “free firewood, u collect it” so i wrote the guy and said “bud you just wrote an ad for the woods”

  stefan heck @boring_as_heck

  Next, on TLC’s Lunchbox Wanters

  RON: Back off, Jim. That box is mine.

  [CUT TO INTERVIEW]

  RON: No way was I letting Jim get that lunchbox.

  If you’re a Twitter veteran, you already know this. There are legendary stand-ups and Pulitzer-winning satirists and top-shelf comedy writers who use the site, and yet on any given day, the funniest tweet might very well be from a college dropout in Oregon or a bored computer programmer in Atlanta. His or her name is likely a pseudonym; the avatar photo might be a raccoon or an African dictator or an eighteenth-century woodcut. The joke might be a hot-off-the-presses political zinger, or a silly personal anecdote, or a Mitch Hedberg–style head-scratcher, or a little one-act play. Even with the impassable character-limit moat around each joke, Twitter comedy is surprisingly versatile.

  “I think that it feels like a video game,” Megan Amram told me about her Twitter habit. Amram moved out to Los Angeles in 2009 in hopes of breaking into TV, and got hooked on Twitter as a way of polishing her joke-writing skills. “There is some tweet out there that no one has written yet that completely sums up the human experience in a hundred forty characters, and every day I wake up and hope that I figure it out. And it’s a weird, almost masochistic game: can I think of the thing that resonates with the most people today?”

  For generations, comedy writers and performers have grappled with this question: are the professionals, the big-name stand-ups and showrunners, truly the world’s funniest people? When asked about this in 1983, Jerry Seinfeld came down unequivocally on the side of the professionals, because stand-up is so difficult. “If everyone in the country decided to be a comedian,” he said, “there would still be only six terrific ones, like there are now.” A decade later, the overheated expansion of the comedy circuit made Seinfeld look prophetic. Suddenly there were hundreds of hacky white guys in sports jackets standing in front of brick walls at clubs and even on our TVs, all doing the same Nicholson impressions and telling the same jokes about airline snacks and shopping carts with one stubborn wheel. Sure enough, even most of the people who thought they could do this couldn’t really do this.

  But let’s leave out the stagecraft. Presence, timing, crowd work, all the hard stuff that takes decades of apprenticeship. What about raw funniness? Many comedians are on record saying that, just as not all the world’s best-looking people are models, not all the funniest people go into comedy. Megan Amram always cites her twin brother as the real funny person in the family. He’s an ophthalmologist. Another TV writer told me about Matt, a college friend “who just seemed like the funniest, cleverest guy in the world. He was so much funnier than me that it sort of unnerved me.”

  Did Matt go into comedy? “He didn’t—he’s a social worker somewhere in Canada now. I tried shooting him a message a few years ago through Facebook, and his response was embittered and unfunny. So it goes.”

  Twitter gave the rising generation of aspiring jokesters an outlet, but more importantly, it gave them a community, a place to play together. There’s a reason why comedy is often collaborative—why comics enjoy telling jokes to each other, why TV shows have writers’ rooms. Ideas spark, jokes cross-pollinate, sensibilities evolve. Twitter is a global writers’ room, and it’s making everyone a little sharper.

  I recently ran across an old tweet of mine, and I did what you’re not supposed to do: scroll down to read the replies. I was pleasantly surprised: people were riffing!

  Ken Jennings @KenJennings

  It’s actually illegal to wear your sunglasses on the back of your head unless you have ID proving you’re an assistant Little League coach.

  * * *

  - “GOOD EYE THERE, BLUE!”

  - I’ve got a warrant for one “Guy Fieri”

  - sales reps for Yeti coolers are legally allowed to wear these as well

  - that seems really unfair to lifeguards.

  - Professional Bass Fishermen are grandfathered in

  - I think it counts if you have a Coors Light in one hand and a motorboat steering wheel in the other

  I didn’t know who left these replies—I’m going to go with “random millennials”—but they are perfectly serviceable sunglasses-on-back-of-head jokes, my friends. You’ll see the same thing anywhere on the Internet. Sure, the top comments on your local newspaper’s website (average commenter age: 110) are going to be a cesspool. But the top exchanges on the same story on Reddit or some other younger-leaning forum are almost always jokes, and most are good for a slight smile, or even the elusive brief chuckle. The only downside is that you’ll have to spend time on Reddit.

  Scratching Away in the Chinese Room

  The Twitter joke boom strongly suggests that a sense of humor can be learned—at least to some degree. Cicero didn’t think so, writing in De Oratore, “This talent cannot possibly be imparted by teaching.” I asked humor researcher Peter McGraw if that was really true. Surely science has advanced in the two thousand years since Cicero.

  No dice. “No one has done that work,” McGraw said. “There’s absolutely zero research that tries to make people funnier. None at all.” There are interventions on countless other positive traits: ways to make people more grateful, forgiving, and so forth. “But nothing on comedy.”

  I’ll volunteer as a case study here. My time cracking wise on Twitter seems to have made me funnier—or at least better at Twitter. Looking back on my old tweets, I see lots of jokes that were confusing, or pointless, or “edgy” in a cheap way, or contrived, or overexplained, or any number of other offenses. But over time, I got a little smoother. You can’t spend all day watching hundreds of bored, funny people trade jokes and not start to pick up some tricks.

  But is that really the same as getting funnier? In artificial intelligence resear
ch, there’s a thought experiment called the “Chinese room,” first presented by philosopher John Searle in 1980. We’re asked to imagine a computer programmed to communicate with human users by exchanging snippets of text in Chinese. This computer can pass the famed Turing test—that is, users actually think they’re interacting with a human Chinese speaker. Now imagine a human being in a room who speaks no Chinese but has a hard copy of the same computer program handy. As a result, when given a set of Chinese characters as input through a slot in the door, he can laboriously trace through the program and produce the same output symbols that the computer can. It would seem like he was speaking Chinese. But we know he can’t, right? He’s just mindlessly stepping through a printout. Therefore the computer doesn’t understand what it’s doing either, and artificial intelligence is bunk. QED.

  I think about the Chinese room a lot when I’m on Twitter—and not just because I’m usually sitting in a small room trading garbled messages with a bunch of strangers. What if I’m like the English speaker in the room, learning a trivial set of basic manipulations that cleverly simulate humor but never really getting to the soul of what makes things funny? The more time you spend on Joke Twitter, the more you see that this is surprisingly plausible. A lot of the funny stuff that gets tweeted relies heavily on joke formats. These canned templates cycle in and out of fashion, but when one is at its peak, literally hundreds of people will be trying their hand, and even the funniest people won’t be immune.