Planet Funny

by Ken Jennings

  To a layperson, it may seem as if the most obvious change to modern comedy is the new freedom with sex and scatology. It was once a notable and controversial move for a comedian to “work blue”—comedy slang for using off-color material, which derived from the blue envelopes that vaudeville bosses used to notify performers when they deemed a particular joke too saucy to stay in the act. But today, it’s a surprising novelty when a comedian, a Brian Regan or a Jim Gaffigan, makes it their brand to work clean. Being a parent turned me overnight into the worst kind of comedy crank, a sputtering Steve Allen constantly annoyed that there were so few comedians I could watch with my young kids without wincing a little bit. I wasn’t against R-rated comedy. I just wished there were more options.IV

  Freud wasn’t wrong about how it’s easier to laugh at things we normally repress. Dirty words aren’t funny by themselves, but their aura of mild taboo makes them effective joke punctuation. In fact, they’re so effective at propping up punch lines that comedy now seems strangely anemic when it has to go without. Jerry Seinfeld has argued against profanity for that very reason—it’s a crutch, it makes it too easy to get flat material over. He stopped swearing in his act around 1980, when he noticed that his critique of the George Reeves Superman TV show—“The Daily Planet, supposedly the largest-circulation newspaper in the entire city, they got three reporters. And each week two of them are stuck in a cave!”—only got laughs when it was “Two of them are stuck in a f—king cave!” Personally, I never bought into the comedy principle behind this objection. There are lots of phrasing changes you could make to a punch line to help put it across. Why is this particular kind a cheat?

  On a larger scale, though, the frankness of modern comedy isn’t a new development at all. That’s an illusion, harbored only by two or three generations who happened to come of age during the relatively short period when jokes had to pass through a heavy-handed media establishment to reach the marketplace. The movie industry’s Production Code, for example, was a strict comedy gatekeeper but lasted for less than forty years. During that era, the corner tavern was still full of dirty jokes, but Hollywood made sure it only told neutered versions of them to an audience that, for the most part, knew very well what was going on. When Bob Hope shocked Paulette Goddard by telling her, “I’d like to kiss you ’til your ears fly off!” most viewers could probably hear the actual word that “kiss” was replacing. Our word “obscene” literally means “out of the scene,” which was how the ancients described all the delightfully indecent things an audience has to imagine going on offstage.

  Settings like Victorian England and Eisenhower’s America, when mass entertainment couldn’t work blue, are the exceptions in human history. For the most part, comedy has always been dirty. In the Old Comedy of Ancient Greece, male characters clomped around the stage with big red leather phalluses jutting from their hips, and playwrights got laughs by having their characters repeatedly soil themselves with chronic diarrhea. The surviving comedies of Aristophanes and his peers contain, according to the count of one scholar, 106 different words for male genitalia, 92 for female genitalia, and 178 vulgar names for various sex acts. I can’t think of any modern writer or comic who could compete with that. Petronius, Chaucer, Rabelais—all the big names in comedy wrote about all kinds of degeneracy in perfectly filthy fashion. Even a good Catholic boy like Dante put fart jokes in canto XXI of his Inferno, when he watches the demon Malacoda rally the armies of hell not with a trumpet, but with “his bugle of an ass-hole.” “I have seen scouts ride . . . to the accompaniment of every known device,” Dante deadpans, “but I never saw cavalry or infantry . . . signaled to set off by such strange bugling!”

  So the coarseness of modern comedy isn’t a sign of moral decline; it’s a return to normalcy after a few decades of artificially enforced inoffensiveness. In fact, you could say the same thing about comedy’s modern ascendancy in general: it’s happening in fields that were long allowed to be funny, before a small group of prigs in the academy insisted on seriousness as the new rule. This is true of the comedy resurgence in three diverse genres in particular: pop music, poetry, and award-bait Hollywood film.

  I’m Not Crazy, I Perform This Way

  Readers of a certain age: you might be picturing “Weird Al” Yankovic incorrectly. The sui generis accordionist and novelty song legend has dialed down the “weird” somewhat since his 1980s heyday of “Eat It” and “Like a Surgeon.” A couple decades ago, he revamped his iconic white-and-nerdy image: he got LASIK surgery, shaved the goofy mustache, and retired most of the Hawaiian shirts. Now a teetotal vegetarian with his wavy hair parted sleekly down the middle, he looked ageless and serene when I met him, more yoga instructor than RadioShack employee.

  His chairs, however, were still weird. “Do you want to try these out?” he asked. We were at his home in the Hollywood Hills, in a downstairs den mid-remodel, surrounded by unhung art and gold records and other “Weird Al”–abilia. I briefly settled into one of the odd, red, spinning chairs, furniture straight out of a Jacques Tati movie, but it was like perching in an egg cup. We moved to the boring couch.

  I had been listening to Yankovic for well over thirty years and knew his origin story well. He was a pioneer of the DIY comedy ethos that also produced Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the 1980s. A high school valedictorian from the Los Angeles suburbs, Yankovic was already getting home-taped versions of his comedy songs played on The Dr. Demento Show by the time he started college at the precocious age of sixteen. Nobody was making novelty records in 1976; Barry “Dr. Demento” Hansen was filling his show with a lot of old Stan Freberg and Tom Lehrer songs before Yankovic began sending in his accordion originals. “I filled a vacuum,” he told me.

  Like his MST3K contemporaries, “Weird Al” is an unfailingly affectionate parodist, not skewering pop songs so much as riffing on them. He favors genial jokes about the most universal slices of everyday life: food, TV, riding the bus. Most Internet song parodies “go for the jugular,” Yankovic said, making “mean-spirited points about the original artist and the original song. It’s a valid way to do parody, but it’s not my personal taste.” In most “Weird Al” songs, the source is irrelevant, except for the shadow cast by the original lyrics. The backing track conditions you for street poetry about gang-banging in Compton, and instead you get silly jokes about Amish barn-raising. The comedy is in the negative space.

  As an aside, Merv Griffin credited the success of Yankovic’s 1984 song “I Lost on Jeopardy” with helping return the venerable 1960s quiz show to the airwaves later that year. If this is true, I owe more than a few polka-fueled laughs to “Weird Al” Yankovic. I owe him my entire career.

  When I spoke to him, Yankovic was at home between two sprawling megatours supporting his recent album, Mandatory Fun. The album had won him a fourth Grammy and spawned a Top 40 single in his fourth consecutive decade (“Word Crimes,” a substantially more grammar-focused version of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”). But most impressively, the record had debuted atop the Billboard album chart. No comedy record had been at number one since the era of Allan Sherman and “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” fifty years before. In prerecorded podcasts Yankovic had joked with interviewers that the new record was a number one smash. “That was the most crazy thing I could think of to say at the time,” he explained. By the time the interviews aired, the tongue-in-cheek prediction had come true and no one could understand what he was laughing about.

  The thirty-five-year “Weird Al” success story says something about niche geekery becoming mainstream American culture in the Internet age, and also something about the decline of music retail sales to the point where an artist like Yankovic, one with a dedicated, multigenerational fan base, could outsell new records by established rock artists like Jason Mraz and Rise Against. But when a comedy record tops the pop charts, it’s something more than that. It’s a moment of reckoning.

  That’s because rock, the dominant mode of popular music for decades, is avidly, st
udiously unfunny. “I once had a girl—or should I say, she once had me” is a pretty good joke. So is “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’ Abe said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ ” But the puckish John Lennon/Bob Dylan school of rock made little progress against a tide of soulful authenticity. “As we got into the sixties and seventies, pop—and rock in particular—started to take itself very seriously,” Yankovic told me. “There became a general feeling that if you were funny with your music, you were of lesser value. You were not an artist, you were not to be taken seriously. You were a clown. So for a long time, people were pretty guarded about their senses of humor.” The ponderousness of rock was a stake to the heart of novelty music.

  I understand the problem: the lower-brain-stem groove of a lot of rock and pop music is a bad match for cleverness of any kind. Henri Bergson believed that “laughter is incompatible with emotion.” He probably wasn’t thinking about the brooding intensity of Eddie Vedder, but he was absolutely right: the amusement reflex doesn’t layer neatly on top of real emotions. You have to ALT+TAB away from anger or sadness or passion to focus on humor. You can’t dance to it; you can’t air-guitar to it. When we’re lost in a driving rock song or a plaintive ballad, that can feel like an experience too primal for something as delicate as laughter.

  But consider: other genres of music have no problem with humor. The seventeenth-century inventors of opera tried unsuccessfully to banish comic opera from the genre, but it was just too popular with audiences; now it’s a respected part of the canon. Show tunes are funny. Rap has its origins in the playful insult-trading of “the dozens,” and its popularity still relies heavily on quick wit and verbal dexterity. Country music is so comedy-friendly that in Nashville, iconic songs regularly get written around good title jokes, like Loretta Lynn’s “You’re the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly” and Jerry Reed’s “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft).” Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Faron Young all had hits with songs by comic poet Shel Silverstein, most notably Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue.” Dolly Parton’s “Single Women” was originally written by Michael O’Donoghue for a 1981 Saturday Night Live sketch. New York magazine, in its regular literary competitions, often asked readers to submit ideas for over-the-top country song titles. I recently discovered that, thanks to a list of past winners that circulated widely on the Internet, two of those joke titles have since inspired real songs: “Ain’t No Trash Been in My Trailer Since the Night I Threw You Out” (Colt Ford) and “She Chews Tobacco but She Won’t Choose Me” (Dierks Bentley).

  In other words, the hegemony of earnestness in popular music—now being challenged on all sides by hip-hop virtuosity, self-aware country corn, sassy pop stars, whimsical indie rockers, and old-school musical comedians like Yankovic—was a temporary embargo enforced by a small cabal of moody rock critics and front men. Rock could have been funny all along.

  Freed Verse

  The world of poetry has also been stuck in a similar state of affairs, poet Billy Collins told me. For centuries, the poetic canon accepted comedy at its highest levels: the dick jokes of Chaucer, the sitcom misunderstandings of Shakespeare, the wordplay of the Metaphysical poets, the satire of Pope and Dryden. “But then you get to the Romantic poetry, into Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley, and then humor dies. What I imagine is that those three poets go into some kind of back room and lock the door and pull down the blinds and they make this deal. And the deal is that they’re going to remove from poetry sex and humor, and substitute in landscape—which is a crappy deal, I think.”

  Collins credited twentieth-century trailblazers like Philip Larkin and Charles Simic with reassuring him that poets could be funny. “I didn’t think humor was allowed in poetry—and my thinking was quite correct there. It wasn’t allowed, really. If you were humorous in poetry, you risked being demoted to this condition of light verse.” That’s the poetry equivalent of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s novelty ghetto, and Collins has certainly wandered right up to the edge. He writes colloquial, “hospitable”V verse that mines humor out of fanciful images (the Buddha shoveling snow, an annoying barking dog joining the percussion section of an orchestra, Smokey the Bear finally snapping and burning down a forest) or observations that escalate into funny exaggerations, the way a comedian builds a bit. “The Lanyard” trades on the lame insufficiency of summer camp gifts for parents; “Litany” bites the hand that feeds by making fun of loopy poetic metaphors. Thanks largely to the element of comedy, his verse read aloud to audiences like a dream, and Collins’s success on the lecture circuit and public radio soon made him the bestselling poet in America. He received a six-figure advance, unprecedented in the poetry world, when he moved to Random House in 1999. Two years later, he became poet laureate of the United States.

  Collins took pride in the 2010 publication of Seriously Funny, an anthology of funny contemporary verse, which includes four of his poems. “Humor has recovered its place in poetry, but it’s still anathema to people who take things quite seriously.”

  “I guess I can see the immediacy of humor not working well with many poems—like dense, elliptical Wallace Stevens things,” I said. “You only get a laugh when something’s not opaque, when everyone understands it instantly.”

  “But there’s something very authentic about humor, because anyone can pretend to be serious,” Collins replied. “Anyone who has had a job or sat in a classroom knows how to pretend to be serious. You just put on the serious look and maybe put your hand under your chin and wrinkle your brow. But you can’t pretend to be funny. It’s either funny or it isn’t, so there’s something kind of authentic about that. It can’t be faked.”

  Collins’s ultimate nod to reader “hospitality” might be his boyish first name—“more like a third baseman” than a poet’s name, he says—which he adopted as a young poet to avoid confusion with the very serious eighteenth-century English lyric poet William Collins. Today, the two are listed back to back in the index of The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

  The Not Ready for Subprime Time Players

  In popular music and poetry, funny work was ghettoized because the critical establishment didn’t think it was worth their time. In part, this is the dead frog problem: What is there to say about a joke? What analysis improves it? The rigid barrier between real work and funny counterfeits was enforced with implacable semantics: This song is pop or rock, because it isn’t funny. This other one in the very same musical style has jokes, so it goes into the trash heap of “novelty songs.”

  The presumption that drama is inherently superior to comedy can be traced back to Aristotle, who held that “tragedy is a representation of men better than ourselves,” but “comedy . . . is a representation of inferior people,” “a species of the base and ugly.” The simplicity of comedy works against it here—its one goal is to make us laugh. A YouTube video of a teen magician running into a door frame and falling down can make me laugh so hard that I can’t breathe, but it’s hard to argue that, as art forms go, this seven-second video is the equal of Paradise Lost or the Sistine Chapel. As a result, high schoolers reading Shakespeare are inevitably assigned Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet instead of Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, either of which might be an easier sell. And when comedy does get a little respect, it’s often reserved for a very particular kind of comedy. Evelyn Waugh always maintained that the only two great artists in Hollywood were funny ones, Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin—but note that he chose those two men over, say, their contemporaries Tex Avery and Buster Keaton. Disney and Chaplin were the comedians who larded their work with plenty of mawkish sentiment on top of the laughs, to make sure the critics could see that they weren’t doing mere comedy.

  You might not immediately think of the Academy Awards as a joke-hostile colossus along the lines of the medieval Christian church, but the most influential gatekeeper of film “prestige” has never been too impressed by funny movies. Comedy is the most successful box office genre of the modern era, but niche categories like
war movies and biopics have each won more Best Picture Oscars than comedies have. In fact, the last capital-C Comedy to win the Best Picture Oscar was Annie Hall in 1978.VI But that’s changing. In 2016, many handicappers believed that Adam McKay, of all people—the longtime writing partner of Will Ferrell—came within a whisker of defeating the Very Serious Issue Movie Spotlight with his Best Picture nominee The Big Short.

  The Big Short was also an issue movie, an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s deadly serious 2010 book about the recent U.S. housing bubble collapse, in which ten million Americans lost their homes and the world economy plowed into a severe recession. It’s never easy to adapt a dense nonfiction book to the screen, but The Big Short faced a particularly steep uphill climb: to convey the full weight of the crisis, it needed a lay audience not only to understand the mechanics of hedge funds, subprime mortgage trading, credit default swaps, and tranches of collateralized debt obligation, but to see the inherent drama in them.