by Ken Jennings
V. The BBC’s plan for Queen Elizabeth’s eventual death will pull comedy from the airwaves, but only until her funeral. Things will be back to normal in less than two weeks.
VI. David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon, two fairly apolitical late-night hosts, were replaced in quick succession by, respectively, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, two men who had made their reputation doing fake news behind a fake anchor desk. After brief and fairly unsuccessful attempts at broadening their acts, both reinvented their shows in the Trump era by tacking hard toward political material.
VII. Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is probably the closest, but the movie is very clear that the goofy America it envisions is just an effect, not a cause, of a dumbed-down populace.
VIII. Maybe. One of many horrifying things about the story of the Ik people is the implication that unfunny, joyless comedy could, like cockroaches, even survive a nuclear war.
IX. In rare cases, Comedy Cassandra Syndrome can be fatal. Redd Foxx suffered a heart attack on a TV soundstage in 1991, while cast and crew laughed instead of immediately calling for medical help. They were convinced he was doing his famous “I’m coming, Elizabeth!” routine from Sanford and Son.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© FAITH JENNINGS
Ken Jennings is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Because I Said So!, Maphead, and Brainiac, and a seventy-four-time champion on the quiz show Jeopardy! Jennings lives in Seattle with his wife, Mindy, and two children. His favorite comedian as a child was Sinbad.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Ken-Jennings
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ALSO BY KEN JENNINGS
Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids
Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
Ken Jennings’s Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days
Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
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NOTES
ONE: OUR FUNNY CENTURY
88 percent of millennials: Bill Carter, “In the Tastes of Young Men, Humor Is Most Prized, a Survey Finds,” New York Times, February 19, 2012.
consult Frinkiac: http://www.frinkiac.com. They have the Internet on computers now!
“Nothing disturbing happens”: “Kazakhstan in the 21st Century: Looking Outward,” New York Times advertising supplement, September 27, 2006.
Hingle McCringleberry: Scott Rafferty, “Key and Peele Paid Von Miller’s Fine for Imitating ‘Three-Pump,’ ” Rolling Stone, August 11, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/news/key-explains-why-he-and-peele-paid-von-millers-2015-fine-w497247.
interview the Dalai Lama: “The Dalai Lama Walks into a Pizza Shop . . . ,” Today television clip, June 9, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1IrI80og8c.
interview with Benito Mussolini: Robert Benchley, “Mr. Benchley Interviews Benito Mussolini,” Life, April 8, 1926.
Bugs Bunny terrorized Hitler: The Führer appeared in no fewer than thirteen Looney Tunes cartoons. He and Goering were Bugs’s targets in 1945’s “Herr Meets Hare,” also the first short in which Bugs ever notes that he should have taken that “left turn at Albuquerque.”
Hitler ever even saw it: Chaplin told friends that, according to a Nazi émigré, Hitler had privately screened the film twice, but this is impossible to verify. Henry Gonshak, Hollywood and the Holocaust (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), p. 25. After the war, Albert Speer told American journalists that the Reich had indeed obtained a print of The Great Dictator via neutral Portugal, but Hitler himself had never watched it. Niels Kadritzke, “Führer befiehl, wir lachen!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, January 12, 2007.
“the most blatant act”: Abby Phillip, “North Korea Threatens ‘Merciless’ Retaliation over James Franco and Seth Rogen Assassination Comedy,” Washington Post, June 25, 2014.
rewriting the ending: Meg James, Daniel Miller, and Josh Rottenberg, “Sony Pictures Execs Debated Risk of The Interview Before Cyberattack,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2014.
“Some kind of humanitarian disaster”: Melissa Maroff, “The Interview: An ‘Act of War,’ ” Creative Screenwriting, December 18, 2014.
Bowen made headlines: “Dead Parrot sketch ancestor found,” BBC News, November 13, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7725079.stm.
SeinLanguage: Bill Cosby’s bestseller Fatherhood and its 1980s follow-ups predated SeinLanguage, but Seinfeld’s book was the one that kick-started a trend, selling so many copies that publishers were throwing briefcases full of money at every sitcom comedian in America: Tim Allen, Paul Reiser, Ellen DeGeneres. (By 1996, even Sinbad had a book deal.) Also, unlike Cosby, Seinfeld didn’t use a ghostwriter.
Gloria Steinem and Amy Schumer: Steinem can be seen with the squad on Schumer’s Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/p/BCmUODwKUJ5.
overstated in the press: Ethan Epstein, “The Myth of Jon Stewart’s ‘Millennial’ Following,” Weekly Standard, February 11, 2015.
the same reach as USA Today: Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Jocelyn Kiley, and Katerina Eva Matsa, Political Polarization & Media Habits, Pew Research Center, October 21, 2014.
repeatedly neutered: The travails of the Smothers Brothers are the first of the four case studies in David S. Silverman, You Can’t Air That: Four Cases of Controversy and Censorship in American Television Programming (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
highest-paid performer: Stephen Battaglio and Michael Schneider, “TV’s Highest Paid Stars: What They Earn,” TV Guide, August 20, 2013.
secretly summoned Stewart: Chris Smith, The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History (New York: Grand Central, 2016), p. 359.
“O, laugh, laughers!”: This translation drawn from From the Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, an online archive translated by Tatiana Tulchinsky, Andrew Wachtel, and Gwenan Wilbur, http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/texts/invocation_laugh.html.
“laws of time”: Raymond Cooke, Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 148.
a lavatory urinal: Sophie Howarth and Jennifer Mundy, “Fountain,” Tate Modern, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573.
“is a machine for living in”: Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1986), p. 95.
“For a building, is it funny?”: Bruce Handy, “A Spy Guide to Postmodern Everything,” Spy, April 1988.
young Cassius Clay: David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 120.
to a man, not funny: Babe Ruth was a sleepy-eyed white man with a beer belly, but he was also a quotable, larger-than-life megacelebrity, making him the most prominent exception here.
“What a revoltin’ development!”: Lee himself always credited Durante. The Thing first borrows the radio catchphrase in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, “Calamity on the Campus,” The Fantastic Four 35, February 1965.
“Well it’s not Dr. Kildare”: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, “Nothing Can Stop . . . the Sandman!,” The Amazing Spider-Man 4, September 1963.
“I sure ain’t Albert Schweitzer”: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, “The Strangest Foe of All Time . . . Doctor Octopus,” The Amazing Spider-Man 3, July 1963.
“Like costume heroes?”: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, “Spider-Man!,” Amazi
ng Fantasy 15, August 1962.
chic novelties: These sound like made-up dishes, but they’re real. The mango ravioli and black-olive Oreos were mainstays at elBulli before it closed in 2011. The edible fob watch and mandarin orange “meat fruit” are Heston Blumenthal’s, from the Fat Duck and Dinner, respectively.
“There were more jokes”: Joe Randazzo, Funny on Purpose: The Definitive Guide to an Unpredictable Career in Comedy (San Francisco: Chronicle, 2015), p. 43.
The headline in the print edition: Kate Murphy, “Killing a Patient to Save His Life,” New York Times, June 9, 2014.
a YouTube-famous band: The musicians are Scott Bradlee and Postmodern Jukebox, and the recording can be viewed on UberConference’s corporate blog at http://blog.uberconference.com/2014/05/im-on-hold-with-scott-bradlee-postmodern-jukebox.
“the best buns”: Jena McGregor, “Even on This, America Is Divided: Was Cinnabon’s Carrie Fisher Tweet Offensive?” Washington Post, December 28, 2016.
popularity is predicted: Lawrence W. Sherman, “Humor and Social Distance in Elementary School Children,” Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 1, no. 4 (1988), pp. 389–404.
“Comedy is controlling”: WTF with Marc Maron, episode 578, February 19, 2015.
“An Orwellian world”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 156.
“junk entertainment”: Ibid., p. 159.
the “Weekend Update” desk: Al Franken and Lorne Michaels agree that this is why Franken left SNL in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of “Saturday Night Live” (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), p. 410.
TWO: FUNNY FOR NO REASON
“Whenever we go out”: Premium Blend, season 2, episode 1, Comedy Central, May 23, 1998.
“That comes with”: John Mulaney: New in Town, Comedy Central, January 28, 2012.
“Analyzing Humor”: The actual quote is substantially less pithy than the version usually quoted today: “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” Is this how White sounded when he wasn’t being edited by Harold Ross? E. B. White and Katharine S. White, eds., A Subtreasury of American Humor (New York: Coward-McCann, 1941), p. xvii.
“a man with any tincture”: Cicero, De Oratore 2.54.
“In order to laugh”: Robert Benchley, “Why We Laugh—or Do We?” New Yorker, January 2, 1937.
cringe-y story: Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 18.
“The passion of laughter”: Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (1640; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 54.
“intensely melancholy”: George Henry Lewes, The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte, 3rd ed., vol. 1, Ancient Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), p. 203.
“was never seen to laugh”: Or so said Heraclides of Lembos, according to Diogenes Laertius. Alice Swift Riginos, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato (Leiden, Neth: E. J. Brill, 1976), p. 151.
“As sad as Plato”: Lewes, History of Philosophy, p. 204.
“Most people delight”: Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 78.
a David Mitchell bit: American readers may not be familiar with Mitchell, who is a major TV star in his native Britain. Please consult the Internet for Mitchell’s most essential panel show appearances and highlights from his several series done with sketch partner Robert Webb. That’s Numberwang!
“Nervous excitation”: Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter,” in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), 1:453.
our mothers’ nipples: “So far as I know, the grimace characteristic of smiling, which twists up the corners of the mouth, appears first in an infant at the breast when it is satisfied and satiated and lets go of the breast as it falls asleep.” Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), p. 179.
Shurcliff conducted: Arthur Shurcliff, “Judged Humor, Arousal, and the Relief Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8, no. 4 (April 1968), pp. 360–63.
“Laughter is an affection”: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. and ed. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1892), p. 223.
a famous 1970 experiment: Göran Nerhardt, “Humor and Inclination to Laugh: Emotional Reactions to Stimuli of Different Divergence from a Range of Expectancy,” Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 11, no. 3 (September 1970), pp. 185–95.
a web video: “Bunnies Can Fly . . . Proof,” September 25, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxFfxTZA6ao.
“The correct explanation”: Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Halcyon, 1939), p. 41.
genesis of the joke: “Such a Clean Old Man,” A Hard Day’s Night DVD supplement, Miramax, 2002.
six thousand nonsense words: Chris Westbury et al., “Telling the World’s Least Funny Jokes: On the Quantification of Humor as Entropy,” Journal of Memory and Language 86 (January 2016), pp. 141–56.
except in two areas: Willibald Ruch and Sigrid Rath, “The Nature of Humor Appreciation: Toward an Integration of Perception of Stimulus Properties and Affective Experience,” Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 6, no. 4 (1993), pp. 363–84.
Charles Addams drew: “The Skier,” New Yorker, January 13, 1940. Addams was paid $45 for the cartoon that, to his surprise, made him world-famous. Linda H. Davis, Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 62.
“the lunacy is no longer incipient”: Wolcott Gibbs, introduction to Addams and Evil (New York: Random House, 1947), p. iii.
Hammer was bewildered: “The Press: Puzzle,” Time, October 7, 1946.
the word “Zamboni”: Schulz’s 1970s-era conviction that ice sports were terribly funny is one of Peanuts’s odder legacies, and probably owes much to the Santa Rosa, California, ice rink that Schulz opened in 1969.
“sweaty” comedy: Mike Sacks, And Here’s the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers About Their Craft (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest, 2017), p. 208.
“ready-to-sting bees”: The Simpsons, season 11, episode 22, “Behind the Laughter,” Fox, May 21, 2000.
“Election Night Special”: Monty Python’s Flying Circus, series 2, episode 6, “It’s a Living (or: School Prizes),” BBC, November 3, 1970.
“We know the degree”: George Meredith, “On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” in The Works of George Meredith, vol. 23 (New York: Scribner, 1910), p. 49.
“Nothing odd will do”: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: John Sharpe, 1830), p. 304.
“The highest part of this mountain”: These excerpts from Ward’s stage lectures, as well as the review that ends this paragraph, from “Artemus Ward,” Spectator, November 24, 1866.
“that true Transatlantic type”: Ward’s conquest of England is considered in Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 173.
“He conkerd the world”: Melville D. Landon, “Traveling with Artemus Ward,” Galaxy, September 1871. “Eli Perkins” was the pseudonym of Melville Landon, just as “Artemus Ward” was a creation of Charles Farrar Browne and “Josh Billings” was Henry Wheeler Shaw.
“Essa on the Muel”: David B. Kesterson, “The Literary Comedians and the Language of Humor,” Studies in American Humor 1, no. 1 (June 1982), pp. 44–51.
gelotophyllis: Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 25.
“I went into a place”: Steven Wright, I Have a Pony, WEA International, 1985.
“If you ever drop”: Jack Handey, Deeper Thoughts (New York: Hyperion, 1993), p. 3.
a 2006 experiment: Jennifer Uekermann, Shelley Channon, and Irene Daum, “Humor Processing, Mentalizing, and Executive Function in Normal Aging,” Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 12, no. 2 (March 2006), pp. 184–91.
Simon & Simon opening credits: This was, believe it or not, a real thing. The Greatest Event in Television History aired on Adult Swim on October 12, 2012. Subsequent installments reenacted the credits of Hart to Hart, Too Close for Comfort, and Bosom Buddies.
a 2015 episode: Rick and Morty, season 2, episode 10, “The Wedding Squanchers,” Cartoon Network, October 4, 2015.
“Why are cobs so terrifying?”: “A Rick and Morty Opera: The Terrible Cobs,” September 14, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2cCwEP1SiA.
“There are few good”: Gene Perret, Comedy Writing Step by Step (Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), p. 49.
making of a sketch show: W/ Bob & David, episode 5, “Behind the Making of the Scenes,” Netflix, November 13, 2015.
“won’t stand much blowing up”: White, Subtreasury of American Humor, p. xviii.
“Life is a tragedy”: The quote was attributed to Chaplin by Richard Roud, cofounder of the New York Film Festival, in 1972. Carol Kramer, “ ‘Little Tramp’ Triumphs: Chaplin Savors His Renaissance,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1972.
“It seemed to me that”: Hugh Kenner, Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 47.
a Simpsons episode: The episode was the Lego-centric “Brick Like Me,” which eventually aired on May 4, 2014.
“Antique funnyings”: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 213.
Hogan’s Heroes: Greg Steinmetz, “In Germany, Hogan’s Heroes, Loosely Translated, Is a Hit,” Wall Street Journal, May 31, 1996.
back to Cicero: In De Oratore 2.59–61, Cicero distinguished between jokes contained in the wording (de dicto) and those contained in the thing itself (de re); the latter kind of joke, he noted, will “lose its pungency” if the words are changed.