by Ken Jennings
“A man narrowly misses”: Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 221.
two comedians golf: This was, believe it or not, a real thing. The two comedians were playing for real, to benefit real charities. The Adult Swim Golf Classic aired on Adult Swim on April 8, 2016.
“at least it’s funny”: As Max Eastman put it, “[The mystic] declares that all the failures and imperfections in the bitter current of time’s reality are a part of God’s eternal perfection, and so he makes himself happy to suffer them. The humorist declares that they are funny, and he accomplishes the same thing.” Max Eastman, The Sense of Humor (New York: Scribner, 1921), p. 24.
“Jokester”: Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, vol. 1 (New York: Broadway, 1990), pp. 123–34.
THREE: THE MARCH OF PROGRESS
his second hit comedy album: Woody Allen, Volume 2, Colpix, 1965.
his 1971 Tonight Show debut: The Tonight Show, NBC, January 8, 1971.
the seat of humor: “This part is also the chief seat of gaiety of mind, a fact which is more particularly proved by the titillation of the arm-holes.” “Titillation of the arm-holes”?! Pliny, Natural History, trans. and ed. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 3:70.
London scientists: Vinod Goel and Raymond J. Dolan, “The Functional Anatomy of Humor: Segregating Cognitive and Affective Components,” Nature Neuroscience 4, no. 3 (March 2001), pp. 237–38.
one done at Stanford: Dean Mobbs et al., “Humor Modulates the Mesolimbic Reward Centers,” Neuron 40 (December 4, 2003), pp. 1041–48.
zapping a certain area: Itzhak Fried et al., “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter,” Nature 391 (February 12, 1998), p. 650.
expanded into a book: Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams Jr., Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
“benign violation” theory: McGraw and Warner, Humor Code, p. 10.
modern jokes are cheats: The Inside Jokes authors memorably refer to this process—creating artificial incongruities for ourselves that we can quickly debug—as “a sort of mental masturbation, rewarded not with orgasm but with mirth.” Hurley et al., Inside Jokes, p. 294.
the character Gelasimus: Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, p. 149.
“When the garrulous barber”: Philogelos, trans. and ed. William Berg (London: YUDU, 2008), p. 55, http://publishing.yudu.com/Library/Au7bv/PhilogelosTheLaughAd.
politician Enoch Powell: Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, p. 213. Beard points out that Powell—best known for his race-baiting 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, about the evils of immigration—was a classical scholar before entering politics, and may have been very aware of the ancient origins of his joke.
Mark Twain was right: Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 60.
a standard baseball routine: Kliph Nesteroff, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy (New York: Grove, 2015), p. 31.
Milton Berle lifted: Ibid., p. 19.
“According to my records”: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 93.
unforgettable sixth episode: Freaks and Geeks, episode 6, “I’m with the Band,” NBC, November 13, 1999.
“Advances are made”: Mike Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers (New York: Penguin, 2014), p. 12.
his second one-man show: Mike Birbiglia, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, Comedy Dynamics, 2013.
a 1971 Esquire article: “Albert Brooks’ Famous School for Comedians,” Esquire, February 1971. The subsequent short film aired later that year on PBS’s The Great American Dream Machine and was finally released on home video by S’more Entertainment in 2015.
interview with Noel Gallagher: David Walliams, “The Gallagher Interview in Full,” Observer Music Monthly, June 2005. “They’re not even English!” his brother Noel patiently explains to him. “One of them is married to Jamie Lee Curtis.” “ ‘I’m not f—kin’ ’avin’ that,” Liam replies, and marches right out of the Spinal Tap concert. I laugh every single time I read this interview.
first comedy record: Hannibal Buress, My Name Is Hannibal!, Stand Up! Records, 2010.
the audience remembered: In 2014’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, Burr introduces a bit about buying a .22 by saying, “The last time I came through town, I wanted to get a gun.” The Atlanta audience immediately laughs, remembering the first line of You People Are All the Same—“I wanna buy a gun!”—which Burr recorded in 2012 at the very same theater.
a full year: Episodes 30 (March 15, 2015) and 65 (March 20, 2016), respectively, of the HBO hit.
“Army Surplus Office Supply”: Arrested Development, season 2, episode 11, “Out on a Limb,” Fox, March 6, 2005.
their third thought: Adam McKay interviewed in Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog, p. 123.
five hundred headlines: Todd Hanson interviewed in Sacks, And Here’s the Kicker, p. 141.
“The current tax code”: Dennis Miller, I Rant, Therefore I Am (New York: Broadway, 2001), p. 173.
“Dennis Miller Ratio”: The Simpsons, season 10, episode 22, “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” Fox, May 9, 1999. (For the record, Professor Frink uses it to describe his “C:DOSRUN” T-shirt.)
dropped rhymes: Garfunkel and Oates, “Fadeaway,” Secretions, No One Buys Records, September 10, 2015.
imagined Dan Cortese: Saturday Night Live, season 40, episode 3, NBC, October 11, 2014. Mulaney copped to swapping in jokes hoping to get Hader to “break” in Miller and Shales, Live from New York, p. 611.
Oksana Baiul: Family Guy, season 2, episode 20, “Wasted Talent,” Fox, July 25, 2000.
“Tillie Olsen”: Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops, Sub Pop, 2007.
“An Englishman wants”: The Complete Works of Josh Billings (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1876), pp. 435–36.
“Mark Twain can”: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 170.
“To-day the joke”: W. D. Nesbit, “The Humor of To-Day,” Independent, May 29, 1902.
“The New Yorker will be”: [Harold Ross], “Of All Things,” New Yorker, February 21, 1925.
no New York paper: Nesbit, “The Humor of To-Day.”
“astonished and alarmed”: [Harold Ross?], “Of All Things,” New Yorker, February 28, 1925.
“like their roads”: The Essential Samuel Butler, ed. G. D. H. Cole (London: Jonathan Cape, 1950), p. 519.
“Its essence lies”: Stephen Leacock, ed., The Greatest Pages of American Humor (Garden City, N.Y.: Sun Dial Press, 1936), p. 271.
“The minimum amount”: Talking Funny, HBO, April 20, 2011.
one more example: I am indebted here to Art Spiegelman (as related by Scott McCloud), who once noted cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller’s economy in always drawing exactly three rocks to convey “some rocks” in his minimalist comic strip Nancy. Two rocks would not be “some rocks,” you see. Four rocks would be “some rocks,” but it would be one rock more than was necessary!
“Today, I was”: Steven Wright, The Tonight Show, NBC, August 6, 1982.
“Tonight’s forecast”: From his variety show character Al Sleet, the “hippie-dippie weatherman.” George Carlin, FM & AM, Little David Records, 1972.
court stenographer: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 299.
bit cost $12,000: Horace Newcomb, ed., Encyclopedia of Television, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 814. In today’s money, that would be well over $100,000 that Dutch Masters cigars paid to, quite literally, be thrown into a hole. Kovacs left his wife, Edie Adams, deep in debt when he died in a 1962 car accident. He lost control of his car while trying to light one of his trademark cigars.
“That’s not a television show!”: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 200.
forty million American adults: The Anxiety and Depression Association of America, https://adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics.
the Good Samaritan: John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, “ ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, no. 1 (July 1973), pp. 100–8.
“Where am I going to get”: Plautus, Persa 157–60.
“I do this kind of stuff”: “Wabbit Twouble,” Merrie Melodies, Warner Bros., 1941.
“Now’s the time”: The Road to Bali, Paramount, 1952.
“What an odd remark!”: The Simpsons, season 4, episode 20, “Whacking Day,” Fox, April 29, 1993.
“There’s got to be”: Arrested Development, season 2, episode 1, “The One Where Michael Lives,” Fox, November 7, 2004.
Kindler wrote: Andy Kindler, “The Hack’s Handbook: A Starter Kit,” National Lampoon, February 1991.
New York Times piece: Jason Zinoman, “Andy Kindler Gives the Funny Business Its Annual Review,” New York Times, July 22, 2015.
every comedy record: Billy Crystal, 700 Sundays (New York: Warner, 2005), p. 90.
“My Favorite Jokes”: Judd Apatow, Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (New York: Random House, 2015), p. 306.
green tape recorder: Ibid., p. xiv.
most successful documentaries: The Aristocrats earned $6.3 million at the U.S. box office, putting it among the top ten highest-grossing documentaries ever at the time of its release (not allowing for inflation). Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=documentary.htm.
an expensive flop: James L. Neibaur, The Fall of Buster Keaton: His Films for MGM, Educational Pictures, and Columbia (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2010), p. x.
Harrison mortgaged: Eric Idle interviewed in The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003), p. 285.
women’s lawn bowling: Stephen Merchant interviewed in Sacks, And Here’s the Kicker, p. 22.
“The most successful”: Mitchell Hurwitz interviewed in Sacks, And Here’s the Kicker, p. 177.
“If you want to make”: Virginia Hefferman, “Anchor Woman,” New Yorker, November 3, 2003.
FOUR: NOTES FROM AN EPIDEMIC
Gary Gilmore: David Gianatasio, “Nike’s ‘Just Do It,’ the Last Great Advertising Slogan, Turns 25,” Adweek, July 2, 2013.
“Be serious”: David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (London: Southbank, 2004), p. 166.
“To Wake Up GAY”: Jim Heimann, ed., All-American Ads 40s (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), p. 410.
“I don’t know what I hate”: Mad Men, season 1, episode 3, “Marriage of Figaro,” AMC, August 2, 2007.
“It’s either a big bargain”: Melvin Helitzer, Comedy Techniques for Writers and Performers (Athens, Oh.: Lawhead, 1984), p. 287.
“We have agencies”: Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon, 2003), p. 193.
refused to shill for tobacco: Stan Freberg, It Only Hurts When I Laugh (New York: Times, 1988), p. 117.
last network comedy show: Ibid., p. 118.
“the father of the funny commercial”: Douglas Martin, “Stan Freberg, Madcap Adman and Satirist, Dies at 88,” New York Times, April 7, 2015.
twenty-one Clio awards: Ibid.
120,000 encyclopedias: “Encyclopedia Britannica Ends 244 Years of Print,” Associated Press, March 14, 2012.
“Smell Like a Man, Man”: “Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” February 4, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE.
viewed thirteen million times: Andrew Adam Newman, “Old Spice Argues that Real Men Smell Good,” New York Times, July 15, 2010.
Ogilvy famously recanted: David Ogilvy and Joel Raphaelson, “Research on Advertising Techniques That Work—and Don’t Work,” Harvard Business Review 60, no. 4 (July–August 1982), pp. 14–16.
buying the gorditas: Greg Hernandez and Greg Johnson, “Taco Bell Replaces Chief, Chihuahua as Sales Fall,” Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2000.
“funny or light-hearted”: “Does Humor Make Ads More Effective?” Millward Brown Perspectives 6, no. 3 (September 2013), p. 23. Of the most impactful ads, fully 69 percent used humor.
just 2.5 percent: Anupreeta Das, “Berkshire Sees Green with Geico,” Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2014. Over the next decade, Geico’s annual advertising expenditure increased sixteen-fold.
Sixty-four percent: Gerry Smith, “Some Hits, Misses in Super Bowl Ads,” Boston Globe, February 2, 2015.
left Nationwide: Ashley Rodriguez, “Nationwide CMO Exits in Wake of ‘Dead Boy’ Super Bowl Ad,” Ad Age, May 6, 2015.
362 paid media ads: Media Dynamics, America’s Media Usage & Ad Exposure: 1945–2014, September 21, 2014.
Beard opined: Fred K. Beard, “Advertisement,” in Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, ed. Salvatore Attardo (London: SAGE, 2014), p. 4.
Williams admitted: Kevin Maney, “Why Twitter Is More CB Radio Than Uber,” Newsweek, August 8, 2015.
DID YOU KNOW!: Ken Jennings (@KenJennings), Twitter, February 15, 2011, https://twitter.com/KenJennings/status/37504161998180352.
the brothers Grimm: Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997), p. 8.
corn that grew so fast: These colorful examples are drawn from Constance Rourke’s monumental work on frontier jokes, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 47, 49, 60.
“an existence of jumpiness”: James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), p. xx.
“look so swell”: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 343.
Fourth of July picnic: Wes Gehring, “Oh, Why Couldn’t It Have Been Robert?” Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 6, no. 3 (1993), pp. 285–98.
YouTube’s reputation: Nate Anderson, “Did ‘Lazy Sunday’ Make YouTube’s $1.5 Billion Sale Possible?” Ars Technica, November 23, 2008, https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/11/did-lazy-sunday-make-youtubes-1-5-billion-sale-possible.
This chart: Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946–Present, 9th ed. (New York: Ballantine, 2007), pp. 1687, 1692.
“bits of humor”: Daniel Yee, “With a Wag of the Finger, Delta Produces Safety Video,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 2, 2008.
“Thirty-three percent”: Relayed to me by Conan writer Rob Kutner.
plans to do so: Matt Kempner, “Funny Flight Videos Might Keep Us Alive. Or Not,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 13, 2015.
In a 2014 experiment: Brett R. C. Molesworth, “Examining the Effectiveness of Pre-Flight Cabin Safety Announcements in Commercial Aviation,” International Journal of Aviation Psychology 24, no. 4 (2014), pp. 300–14.
“A brief moment of happiness”: Zachary M. Seward, “Jerry Seinfeld Ripped Apart the Advertising Industry on Its Biggest Night,” Quartz, October 5, 2014, https://qz.com/276396.
FIVE: A LITTLE MORE CONVERSATION
a scurra: Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, pp. 152–53.
“brought from home”: Cicero Orator 89.
then memorize them: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 300.
an emergency understudy: Drummer-turned-comic Herkie Styles. Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 226.
arrested fifteen times: Paul Krassner, “Remembering Lenny Bruce, 50 Years after His Death,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2016.
“Christ and Moses”: Lenny Bruce, The Carnegie Hall Concert, Blue Note, 1995.
Berman telephone routines: Today, we associate this kind of comedy monologue with Bob Newhart, but Newhart got it from Berman. These routines are on The Sick Humor of Lenny Bruce, Fantasy, 1959.
Netflix special: Todd Barry, The Crowd Work Tour, Netflix, 2014.
“I’m sorry”: Ralph Gleason, “The Trials of Lenny Bruce,” Guardian, April 27, 1965.
Forty-two million Americans: The listenership statistics here are all drawn from The Podcast Consumer 2017, Edison Research, April 18, 2017, http://www.edisonresearch.co
m/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Podcast-Consumer-2017.pdf.
musician John Roderick: About a year after we had this conversation, Roderick and I decided to start up our own podcast, Omnibus.
overtipped waiters: Charlotte Chandler, Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 516–17.
Jack Roy had no success: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 91.
“I’m thinking it over!”: The Jack Benny Program, NBC, March 28, 1948.
“punch lines in 1959”: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 33.
half-hour monologue: Andrew Marantz, “Good Evening. Hello. I Have Cancer,” New Yorker, October 5, 2012.
double-mastectomy scars: Andrew Marantz, “Tig Notaro’s Topless Set,” New Yorker, November 7, 2014.
“It’s stream of consciousness”: I Seem Fun: The Diary of Jen Kirkman, Episode 1, “What’s the Hook?” May 16, 2013.
famous storytelling moment: Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, Columbia, 1982.
attention for her candor: Lara Zarum, “Jen Kirkman on Election-Night Anxiety, Touring as a Woman, and Dealing with Rumors,” Village Voice, September 18, 2017.
“IV drip of entertainment”: Jason Zinoman, “Bo Burnham, Discovered on the Internet, Now Challenges It,” New York Times, June 3, 2016.
Michaels famously hates it: Miller and Shales, Live from New York, pp. 479, 613.
“Did you have a national anthem”: Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, 2,000 and One Years, Capitol, 1961.
George Burns and Steve Allen: Ari Karpel, “A Shtick with a Thousand Lives,” New York Times, November 12, 2009.
to watch Jeopardy! together: Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, season 1, episode 9, “I Want Sandwiches, I Want Chicken,” September 20, 2012.
“The backstroke, I think”: Earl Wilson, “Tales of Lindy’s Waiters Revived,” Dallas Morning News, September 22, 1969.
The first celebrity roast: Aristophanes, Clouds, ed. K. J. Dover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. xix.
“Bob has a beautiful face”: Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget, August 17, 2008.
“Oz the Great and Powerful?”: Comedy Central Roast of James Franco, September 2, 2013.