by Ken Jennings
But the show went on. The show always went on. The 9/11 attacks sidelined The Daily Show for a whopping nine days.V Donald Trump was supposed to be the end of satire, but that was only true if by “the end of satire” you meant “an incredible proliferation of satire.”VI Comedy now seems to be an independent variable, self-sustaining and unmoored to any actual trend in the public mood.
If it’s hard to imagine comedy saturation slowly declining due to burnout, then what happens instead? We may discover whether or not there are hardwired physical limits on human amusement. How fast can jokes get, for example? The speed of sitcom jokes has doubled in the last fifty years; surely that pace can’t continue. Can their complexity, irony, or absurdity escalate indefinitely, or is there a point at which the brain will be unable to process them as humor?
Here’s an easier prediction: I can guarantee you that jokes will continue to squeeze into more and more places where they were once, either explicitly or informally, completely verboten. Ironic eulogies and funny headstones are coming. Funnier appliance manuals, funnier judges giving funnier decisions. Jokes on traffic signs. Jokes in legislation. Jokes in scientific and medical research. “Neutral” and especially “serious” won’t be good enough anymore. Funny is going to colonize every level of human expression and interaction, and that will become the new baseline. I can’t name one area of life where “playful humor” ever became the dominant mode of discourse but then we changed our mind and walked it back. Even the seeming exceptions (the decline of corporate humor consultants, say, or the traditional three-camera sitcom) prove the rule; they were the victims of their own success. Comedy became so endemic to their landscapes that their little specialized niche became unnecessary—or worse, started to seem “corny.” “Corny” is the enemy. We need more, we need new.
Movies have predicted many different futures for media and the public sphere: sterile and dull (2001), fascist (V for Vendetta), annoying (Minority Report), sexy and Asian (Blade Runner). It’s odd that no one has predicted a “funny” future, with every corner of the planet crammed to within an inch of its life with attempts at humor.VII It’s almost certainly coming.
There’s an unpleasant third option: could something so terrible happen to our culture that it would shock us straight, reboot our institutions in a more sober vein? It would have to be worse than Watergate and Vietnam, worse than 9/11, worse than Donald Trump. When I asked David Letterman and The Simpsons writer Tim Long about the modern abundance of comedy, he had had enough. “You kind of just have to throw your hands up and tell the world, ‘Stop being hilarious!’ ” he said. “If there is a third world war, one of the great benefits will be, maybe, a ten-year palate cleansing. The upside of nuclear devastation is no one will be joking around for ten years. And then we can start anew.”VIII
It’s at least possible, I guess, that our comedy decadence is a forewarning of a civilization-wide collapse to come. Under this theory, all the jokes are part of a bigger problem: we’re learning to laugh at problems instead of solving them, or self-medicating with jokes so we don’t have to face ominous facts. The Tirynthians’ addiction to laughter, history tells us, was less permanent than they believed. In the fifth century BC, their city was conquered by nearby Argos. The lower city was overrun and the acropolis abandoned as surviving residents fled to other nearby towns. Today the citadel is still just a deserted hillside surrounded by olive orchards. For twenty-five hundred years, Tiryntha has been laughter-free.
A Momentary Anesthesia of the Heart
My kids are growing up in this world, and they are not unspoiled. My ten-year-old daughter, Katie, inspired by her Jay Leno library book, recently started taking improv classes at a little theater up the street. My son, Dylan, and his friends communicate largely in Internet memes; he seems annoyed and impressed when I know them all too. I don’t know where children first hear of comedy as a language, as a career; it scarcely seems to matter. My little nephew spent a year or two saying, “Waka waka waka!” every time he made a joke, because that’s what the Muppets’ Fozzie Bear always does. He assumed it was a necessary part of the formula.
We were visiting my wife’s parents not long ago, and I wound up comparing notes with my brother-in-law on what it’s like to have your oldest son suddenly be a teenager. Dylan wasn’t hulking and surly yet, but he was suddenly mouthy, as my mom used to say, with an unsolicited opinion or flippant comeback to everything.
“Ah, he’s sarcastic, like you,” said my brother-in-law knowingly.
He didn’t mean anything by it, but it stung me to the quick. Sarcastic, like me? Telling jokes has been a big part of my identity as far back as I can remember, but being reduced bluntly to the Sarcastic One was devastating. I don’t like the Sarcastic One. I’m not sure if anyone does. It’s hard to get to know people who constantly deflect conversation with quippy asides—which is probably why they started doing it, as a way to talk without revealing anything, risking anything. Even if it’s just a tic, even if there’s more to someone than the sarcasm, it’s tiresome as a first response. But here we are: to much of the outside world, I’m—above all else, maybe—the person who can be counted on for a flip, sarcastic take on everything.
Later, when I told my wife about the conversation, Mindy nodded understandingly. “Right,” she said. “You don’t want to be Chandler.” Talk about twisting the knife! Some people worry about turning into their mother or their father. I’m turning into Chandler from Friends. Could that be any more unflattering?
It stung because I knew there was truth to it. If you have children, you already know this: watching them use habits and mannerisms they picked up from you is taking a long, unpleasant look at the man in the mirror. With Dylan, the snarky, reflexive jokes are a constant barrage.
ME: Set the table, Mom’s going to be home soon.
DYLAN: Your face is going to be home soon.
Repeat ten to twenty times a day.
It’s performative; he knows it’s silly. But he’s just mimicking things he’s heard grown-ups like me say and do. The same stupid jokes I made without thinking are boomeranging back on me. I’m the latest person who knows me—but probably not the last!—to become incredibly annoyed by my sense of humor.
For all that gets written about the therapeutic power of good humor and its imagined ability to cure pretty much every ill, I have been forced to confront a difficult truth: being funny is not making me a better person.
It seems like a generous impulse, to always be looking for openings to make others laugh, but most joke-tellers are interested in the validation, the approval. The laugh doesn’t mean “I’m happy” to them; it just means “You’re good” or “You’re smart.” They’re not overly concerned with the broader effects of humor—as they often learn when a joke cuts a little closer than intended, or isn’t recognized as a joke, or has an unintended victim. Then the Sarcastic One isn’t merely off-putting; he or she might be actively making people feel bad. As science fiction author John Scalzi once wrote, in response to the default snarky tone of Internet conversation, “the failure mode of clever is ‘asshole.’ ”
Why does nothing ever come out sounding nicer than we meant it? Why only meaner? I am weary, deeply weary, of people who always have something quick and clever to say. I find great solace in the company of people who are quiet and filled with a great light and generosity of spirit, like tall trees in a sunny glade, though I know I am not one of them, and perhaps never will be.
It’s easier to tell a negative joke than a positive one, and so the undercurrent of a lot of humor is ridicule and scorn. In the process of writing this very book I find my unguarded tone slipping sometimes into the withering condescension of the critic—even on subjects I don’t particularly dislike, even on subjects I don’t particularly care about! The superiority is a coping strategy, the same insecure self-protection mechanism that made me a class clown as a kid. Have a funny take, get people laughing at something else, anything else, as long as it’s not y
ou. It takes effort and energy to fight the pull. In Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Darcy grumps about people “whose first object in life is a joke,” Elizabeth Bennet stops short. “I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good,” she replies. That sentence should be in the text entry box of every comments section on the Internet.
I love those moments in comedy when the audience rallies around a performer baring his or her soul: Richard Pryor at the Palladium, Tig Notaro at Largo. But those sets were notable because they’re so rare; they require a gifted performer and a tuned-in congregation, like in a revivalist’s tent. The modern sense of humor, as we see it in daily life, is not often a voice of warmth and fellow feeling. Generally, we laugh instead of feeling empathy. Bergson was so sure that laughter was incompatible with emotion that he claimed that comedy demands “something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart.” Clinical studies agree: people who enjoy cutting or macabre humor are less emotionally responsive to the situations of others. I tend to take pride in the fact that I’m not easily offended by jokes, but that’s nothing to brag about if it blinds me to the sensitivities of others, because I wrongly assume they’re as impervious as I am.
I recently clicked through to a web video of a car accident that had happened in my neighborhood. It was nighttime surveillance footage from a service station, looking down on two deserted lanes of gas pumps. Suddenly, after a few long seconds of stillness, an SUV careered into the frame, not down one of the lanes, but plowing across them all at a ridiculous speed. It collided with the gas pumps at the right edge of the frame, producing a massive fireball. Just like when the hawk swooped down on Kermit the baby bunny, my first reaction was a quick bark of laughter—even though I already knew from the headline that the accident took place just a few miles from my house and had, in fact, been fatal for a bystander. It’s hard to imagine a scenario less fertile, on paper, for comedy. But the unexpected ending of the video, straight out of a violent cartoon, anesthetized my emotional response and replaced it for a fraction of a second with a comedy response. I laughed, and then I felt terrible about it.
The great satirist Tom Lehrer once wrote in his liner notes, “If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.” He was being sardonic, but he wasn’t wrong. The effects of the jokes we tell aren’t just limited to ourselves. Comedy can make us callous, and that callousness can radiate outward if we make “getting a laugh” our highest goal in life. We might be making other people meaner as well.
Inveterate jokers can also find themselves unable to escape their reputation: like the boy who cried wolf, no one takes them seriously when they’re not trying to get laughs. Allen Funt, the host of Candid Camera, was flying with his family to Miami in 1969 when hijackers took over the plane, put a knife to the neck of a flight attendant, and demanded to be flown to Cuba. Everyone was terrified—until one woman recognized Funt. “It’s a Candid Camera stunt!” she said. The whole plane started laughing and ignoring the hijackers. Some passengers even sent airsickness bags up to Funt’s seat to be autographed. The merriment ended when the plane actually landed in Havana and the Cuban military boarded the plane. All the passengers filed by Funt one at a time, angry at him for “tricking” them. “Smile, my ass,” said the last man as he passed.IX I’ve never told so many jokes that I was blamed for terrorism, but I’ve certainly had the unpleasant experience of saying something into a mic, getting a laugh, and then having to insist that, hold on, that wasn’t really the funny part. “When a man once puts on the cap and bells,” wrote Josh Billings, “the world will insist upon hiz wearing them.”
Surely You Can’t Be Serious
There’s an old joke about a man who’s walking down the street and runs into a friend he hasn’t seen in years. He immediately notices his friend has a big, round, bright orange head.
“Wow, what happened to you?” he asked.
“Oh, that,” the friend says. “It’s a long story. A few years ago I found an old lamp, and when I rubbed it, a genie came out and granted me three wishes. For my first wish, I asked for a hundred million dollars, which is how I got all my money. For my second wish, I asked to have the most beautiful woman in the world fall in love with me. And that’s how I met my wonderful wife.
“For my third wish—and this is where I think I may have gone horribly, horribly wrong—I asked to have a big, round, bright orange head.”
It’s important to remember that the reason for our comedy-choked world is that we wished it this way. It feels undeniably good to laugh; that’s how our brains evolved. And there’s nothing wrong with that! In writing this book, I come to praise comedy, not to bury it. You could tell the story of my life in the things that have made me laugh, and even spool it up like the supercut of kisses at the end of Cinema Paradiso. Buster Keaton battling a windstorm, Groucho dancing with Margaret Dumont, the SNL “men’s synchronized swimming” sketch, that old Batman comic from 1951 where the Joker keeps saying “boners,” Patrice O’Neal sparring with the chicken fingers lady, Holly Hunter crying in Raising Arizona, any sentence in any Charles Portis novel, the bathroom nosebleed scene in Veep, David Letterman tugging on his jacket lapels so his striped tie would dance, that web video where the dog gets his head stuck under the couch, any web video where a skateboarder wipes out, Jack Soo eating the hash brownies on Barney Miller, Joel and the ’Bots roasting Attack of the Eye Creatures, General Ripper’s “precious bodily fluids,” the game show episode of BoJack Horseman, Eddie Murphy calling his stepfather at the end of Raw, the megaphone crooners from Mr. Show, “Marriage” by Gregory Corso, Bart Simpson tricking Milhouse into thinking he never had a goldfish, the Onion piece about the fun toy banned thanks to “three stupid dead kids,” the credits of The Palm Beach Story, Amy Sedaris flirting as Jerri Blank, the way Owen Wilson says “Look at these assholes” in The Darjeeling Limited, Lucy Ricardo with her head stuck in a trophy, the incomprehensible tweets of Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), that home run that bounced off Jose Canseco’s head, “Business Time” by Flight of the Conchords, Jackie Chan with or on a ladder, Artie heckling Hank Kingsley in the mermaid costume, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam on the high-dive platform. It could go on for days.
But what I’m saying is this: Comedy already had comedy. Did it also need news and politics and advertising and all the rest? Our wish for an endlessly amusing world came true, but my fear is that we didn’t consider the risks. What if it all went horribly wrong?
Maybe it’s too late for me, or society at large, to change our smart-alecky ways. The Tirynthians may very well have been right that “an inveterate custom cannot be remedied.” But it might do us good to try. If I were to make a Jonathan Swift–style modest proposal, it wouldn’t be that we cook and eat comedians, or even their babies. It would be as simple as this: let’s keep some part of the public sphere laughter-optional, so that serious engagement and earnest emotion don’t become completely taboo.
We can do this in small ways. We can advocate for things we believe sometimes, instead of satirically adopting the opposing view. We can supplement our diet of comedy news shows with actual journalism. We can ensure that our decisions—as both consumers and citizens—are based on the merits of the products or issues or candidates involved, not just on the funny messaging. We can take breaks from social media, so our brains don’t settle on hundreds of jokes an hour as the new normal. We can spend time in nature, which hasn’t gotten notably funnier since the platypus evolved twenty million years ago.
We can look for chances to talk about things we enjoy, not just ridicule the things we don’t. We can ask ourselves what others need to hear, not what we could amuse ourselves by saying. We can genuinely listen to them, rather than look for openings to crack jokes. We can acknowledge compliments instead of deflecting them with nervous quips. We can skip the affectionate jabs and roasts sometimes and just tell the people we love how much they mean to us.
* * *
I. Shouldn’t it be “fewer yucks”? I’m intrigued by Kushner’s grammatical position that “yucks” is an uncountable noun.
II. Archy and Mehitabel are a cockroach and an alley cat, respectively, and they’re best friends. If you’re not yet familiar with Marquis’s light verse, you’re in for a treat.
III. Or, even more annoyingly, the opposite. One of Twitter’s great gifts to comedy is the chance for audience members to send disappointed replies like “Do better” or “A rare miss” every time they’re let down by a joke. Oh no, a rare miss! I’m so sorry this free eight-word joke wasn’t up to your usual lofty standards, m’lord!
IV. He meant to say, “Are you afraid I’ll upset the sacrificial bowl?” but confused the very similar Greek words for “bowl” and “victim,” and asked if they thought he would knock over the bull. I guess you had to be there.