Planet Funny
Page 37
“Everything is changing”: Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams, vol. 3, The Hoover Years, 1931–1933, ed. James Smallwood (Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Press, 1979), p. 241.
46 percent of young voters: In 2008; these numbers are presumably higher today. Lichter et al., Politics Is a Joke, p. 34.
Marco Rubio stumbling: Timothy P. Carney, “With Penis Jokes and Spray-Tan Riffs, Rubio Gets in the Mud with Trump,” Washington Examiner, February 28, 2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2584485.
more time on Trump: David Bauder, “2 Studies Point to Lack of Campaign Substance on Newscasts,” Associated Press, October 26, 2016. If you include the primary season, the Tyndall Report calculated an even starker difference, with Trump scoring 2.2 times the nightly newscast coverage that Clinton did. See http://tyndallreport.com/yearinreview2016.
more cynical about politics: Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan S. Morris, “The Daily Show Effect: Candidate Evaluations, Efficacy, and American Youth,” American Politics Research 34, no. 3 (May 2006), pp. 341–67.
“I leave it to”: This particular joke is probably apocryphal, as it was told about other politicians, including Minnesota congressman Frank Eddy, long before being attributed to Lincoln. Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal, January 20, 1900, p. iii.
“Don’t buy a single vote more”: Kennedy’s and Goldwater’s self-deprecating jokes from Charles E. Schutz, Political Humor: From Aristophanes to Sam Ervin (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977), pp. 167–69.
“dispels extremely ugly matters”: Cicero, De Oratore 2.58.
“We can neither confirm nor deny”: Erik Wempel, “Want to Talk to the CIA? Tweet @CIA,” Washington Post, June 6, 2014.
“the end of political satire”: Darby Maloney and Elizabeth Nonemaker, “Aaron Sorkin: Donald Trump May Be ‘the End of Political Satire,’ ” The Frame, KPCC, December 10, 2015.
“political satire became obsolete”: Nachman, Seriously Funny, p. 139.
“Clinton was wildly generous”: This quote and Clinton’s late-night monologue ubiquity from Lichter et al., Politics Is a Joke, pp. 50–52.
the line was taken directly: The two versions of the answer are not verbatim, but are so close as to be hard to tell apart; Palin’s confusion isn’t heightened. “Katie Couric Interview,” Snopes, October 1, 2008, http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/interview.asp.
“How can there be mirth”: Dhammapada, 146, as translated in Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins, p. 132.
TEN: WE SHALL OVERCOMB
“Telling me that I’m obsessed”: Sarah Sahim, “Hari Kondabolu: ‘My Comedy Is Very American. It’s Aggressive,’ ” Guardian, December 11, 2015.
a live comedy record: Hari Kondabolu, Waiting for 2042, Kill Rock Stars, 2014.
“clapter”: Jim Downey, interviewed in Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog, p. 3.
retired from comedy almost completely: Ben Brantley, “Advice from an Authority: Laugh!” New York Times, December 15, 1995.
“Every time Congress”: Ray Robinson, American Original: A Life of Will Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 267.
his columns: William R. Linneman, “Will Rogers and the Great Depression,” Studies in American Humor 2, no. 2/3 (Summer–Fall 1984), pp. 173–86.
“Well folks, sure glad”: Ibid.
Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang: The publisher was claiming 1.5 million readers by December 1921, though “Captain Billy” Fawcett was a notorious exaggerator.
“so dark”: Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter, p. 353.
“Negro ghost story”: Mark Twain, How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1909), pp. 12–13.
Lincoln loved minstrel shows: Richard Lawrence Miller, Lincoln and His World, vol. 3, The Rise to National Prominence, 1843–1853 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2011), p. 328.
the “Negro Minstrel”: Rourke, pp. 78–104.
at least some of the music: Because minstrel shows also drew heavily from white Appalachian culture, this lineage isn’t always clear. See, for example, William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
African American performers: This history is treated exhaustively in Henry T. Sampson, Blacks in Blackface: A Sourcebook on Early Black Musical Shows (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2014).
Redd Foxx single-handedly invented: Nesteroff, The Comedians, pp. 191–92.
a daredevil’s leap: Jerry Seinfeld, On Comedy, Laugh.com, 2005.
“Polack jokes” boomed: Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World, p. 161.
“A man from Abdera”: Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome, p. 191.
forty-five different regional fooltowns: Christie Davies, Jokes and Their Relation to Society (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), p. 12.
eat weird food: Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World, pp. 276–306.
cannier opposite numbers: Ibid., pp. 102–30.
“To treat [Jewish] jokes”: Ibid., p. 121.
women were even allowed: Graham Ley, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 49.
a big old phallus: Carr and Greaves, Only Joking, pp. 39–41.
Marietta Holley: Kate H. Winter, Marietta Holley: Life with “Josiah Allen’s Wife” (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), pp. 6, 68, 79.
incognito: Gwendolyn B. Gwathmey, “ ‘Who Will Read the Book, Samantha?’: Marietta Holley and the 19th-Century Reading Public,” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 1 (1994), pp. 28–50.
“Fanny Fern”: Joyce W. Warren, “Fanny Fern, Performative Incivilities, and Rap,” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 6 (1999), pp. 17–36.
“There is a reason”: Kate Sanborn, The Wit of Women (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1885), pp. 205–6.
when women are the butt: Martin D. Lampert and Susan M. Ervin-Tripp, “Exploring Paradigms: The Study of Gender and Sense of Humor Near the End of the 20th Century,” in The Sense of Humor: Explorations of a Personality Characteristic, ed. Willibald Ruch (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), p. 239.
a 2011 study found: Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller, “Humor Ability Reveals Intelligence, Predicts Mating Success, and Is Higher in Males,” Intelligence 39, no. 4 (July–August 2011), pp. 188–92. In a similar study published the following year, men’s captions were only slightly funnier—and, tellingly, participants of both genders tended to misremember the funny captions as coming from men and the unfunny ones as from women. Laura Mickes et al., “Who’s Funny: Gender Stereotypes, Humor Production, and Memory Bias,” Psychonomic Bulletin Review 19, no. 1 (February 2012), pp. 108–12.
that build solidarity: See, for example, Jennifer Hay, “Functions of Humor in the Conversations of Men and Women,” Journal of Pragmatics 32, no. 6 (May 2000), pp. 709–42.
“It does help”: Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of “Saturday Night Live” (New York: Beech Tree, 1986), p. 245.
“outright hostility to women”: Megan Beth Koester, “Why It Sucks to Be a Woman in Comedy,” Vice, December 3, 2015, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvx49x/why-it-sucks-to-be-a-woman-in-comedy-1202.
“Wouldn’t it be funny”: All quotes about this incident are taken from Amanda Holpuch, “Daniel Tosh Apologises for Rape Joke as Fellow Comedians Defend Topic,” Guardian, July 11, 2012.
her late father: This American Life, episode 545, “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS,” PRX, January 23, 2015.
online responses to West: Lindy West, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman (New York: Hachette, 2016), p. 196.
fear of “faggots”: Murphy’s consistency is remarkable: he opens both Eddie Murphy (Columbia, 1982) and Comedian (Columbia, 1983), as well as his concert film Eddie Murphy Raw (Paramount, 1987), with a “faggot” routine. He apologized to the gay community in 1996 for the years of slurs and AIDS jokes.
“with her wrists closed�
�: Woody Allen, Colpix, 1964.
a “Nazi rally”: John J. O’Connor, “Taking a Pratfall on the Nastiness Threshold,” New York Times, July 22, 1990.
have it both ways: All these jokes are from Louis C.K., Hilarious, Comedy Central, 2011.
“Everyone has his reasons”: The Rules of the Game, Gaumont, 1939.
after that tour: 60 Minutes, season 37, episode 21, CBS, February 20, 2005.
laughed a little too hard: The Oprah Winfrey Show, “Chappelle’s Story: Dave’s Moral Dilemma,” February 3, 2006.
“I want to make sure”: Christopher John Farley, “On the Beach with Dave Chappelle,” Time, May 15, 2005.
“mouth-full-of-blood laughs”: Dave Itzkoff, “Sarah Silverman on Bernie or Bust, and the Joke She Didn’t Tell,” New York Times, July 26, 2016.
structured like this: See the work of Thomas E. Ford—for example, Ford et al., “More Than ‘Just a Joke’: The Prejudice-Releasing Function of Sexist Humor,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34, no. 2 (February 2008), pp. 159–70.
due to cowardice: Davies, Ethnic Humor Around the World, pp. 227–31.
“Jeer pressure”: Leslie M. Janes and James M. Olson, “Jeer Pressure: The Behavioral Effects of Observing Ridicule of Others,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26, no. 4 (April 2000), pp. 474–85.
John Henderson: Maria Elena C. Lopez, “Student’s Ordeal Will Fund College,” Tucson Citizen, December 2, 1993.
“I offer no ‘cheers’ ”: Carl Rowan, “No Cheers for Blackface,” Baltimore Sun, October 14, 1993.
“gay plague”: Scott Calonic used the audio clip to score his 2015 documentary When AIDS Was Funny for Vanity Fair, http://video.vanityfair.com/watch/the-reagan-administration-s-chilling-response-to-the-aids-crisis.
analysis of survey data: Natalia Khosla and Sean McElwee, “New Research Findings: People Who Say Society Is Too Politically Correct Tend Not to Have Experienced Discrimination,” Demos, June 1, 2016, http://www.demos.org/blog/6/1/16/new-research-findings-people-who-say-society-too-politically-correct-tend-not-have-exper.
“like finding out that Ke$ha”: Last Week Tonight, season 2, episode 15, HBO, May 31, 2015.
they get results: Sara Boboltz, “10 Real-Life Wins for John Oliver’s Longest Segments on Last Week Tonight,” Huffington Post, August 12, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-oliver-real-life-wins_us_55c8e128e4b0f73b20bal71e.
“Stop them damn pictures!” Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, 6th ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2015), p. 85.
what he calls “laughtivism”: Popovic and Miller, Blueprint for Revolution, pp. 100–3, 113–14, 120–21.
“a laugh will bury you!”: Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 11.
“President Bannon”: Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Glenn Thrush, “Trump Removes Stephen Bannon from National Security Council Post,” New York Times, April 5, 2017.
joking about the Reich: This brief history, including the footnote, taken from Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor During the Holocaust (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1991), pp. 25–26, 40–42.
“There are those who thought”: The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 52.
“Wine barrels burst”: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 75.
revolutionaries avoided humor: As Ernst Dronke said, “If the Berliner has laughed at something, then ‘it no longer exists’ for him. He ignores it with equanimity.” Mary Lee Townsend, Forbidden Laughter: Popular Humor and the Limits of Repression in Nineteenth-Century Prussia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 19.
George Mikes claimed: George Mikes, Humour in Memoriam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 98.
Leslie Martin speculated: Katherine Bouton, review of The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, New York Times, April 18, 2011.
Because of the jokes: Christie Davies, Jokes and Targets (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011), p. 251.
“A woman is walking”: Mark Perakh, Laughing Under the Covers: Russian Oral Jokes and Anecdotal Tales, Talk Reason, 1998, Joke 1.20, http://talkreason.org/marperak/jokes/jokes.htm.
“A man calls KGB headquarters”: From a file of eleven “Soviet Jokes for the DCCI” declassified by the CIA in 2013, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP89G00720R000800040003-6.pdf.
“jokes are thermometers”: Christie Davies, “Jokes as the Truth About Soviet Socialism,” Folklore 46 (2010), pp. 9–34.
“Controlling a culture”: Hilary Lewis, “Jon Stewart Talks Media’s Role in Election Outcome, How to Combat Spread of Fake News,” Hollywood Reporter, December 2, 2016.
“As for jest”: “Of Discourse,” The Works of Francis Bacon (New York: R. Worthington, 1884), 1:40.
Cicero and Castiglione: Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, A Cultural History of Humour (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997), p. 4.
“You have a mangrel”: Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1992), p. 117.
ELEVEN: NEW TIRYNTHA
“Humour is the great thing”: Mark Twain, “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” in The Writings of Mark Twain, vol. 22, Literary Essays (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899), p. 163.
Bill Haverchuck: This wasn’t intended to be the next-to-last episode, but NBC dropped three episodes from the show’s network run. They finally aired that fall on Fox Family, long after the show’s cancellation. Freaks and Geeks, episode 14, “Dead Dogs and Gym Teachers,” NBC, October 10, 2000.
digital editing: Adam McKay interviewed in Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog, p. 129.
“Are we paying more bucks”: Malcolm Kushner, “More Bucks for Less Yucks: Cost of Laughing Index Up Again,” Huffington Post, March 31, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/more-bucks-for-less-yucks-cost-of-laughing-index-up_us_58de8e4de4b0d804fbbb7264. In fairness to Kushner, maybe an intern wrote the headline.
“Everything’s been done”: Stephen Merchant interviewed in Sacks, Poking a Dead Frog, p. 402.
“a grave, twenty-three inches long”: Don Marquis, The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. xxx–xxxi.
“went temporarily ‘joke-blind’ ”: Carr and Greaves, Only Joking, p. 80.
“If I laugh”: Byron, Don Juan, canto 4, st. 4.
“I have more faith”: Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), p. 81.
“the currency of hope”: Lipman, Laughter in Hell, p. 10.
popular running gag: Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 2006), p. 44.
the Ik people: Colin M. Trumbull, The Mountain People (New York: Touchstone, 1987).
strange story of Tiryntha: Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 155–57.
“They perceived”: Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists; or, Banquet of the Learned, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 1:410.
“I’m not ready”: Nesteroff, The Comedians, p. 348.
Queen Elizabeth’s eventual death: “BBC Staff Are Trained on Correct Way to Announce Death of Queen in Bid to Avoid Another Embarrassing Gaffe,” Daily Mail, October 30, 2011. This follows the precedent from George VI’s death in 1952. In 2017, the Guardian reported that the BBC might not even go that far this time, nixing political satire but not necessarily all comedy.
“The failure mode of clever”: John Scalzi, “The Failure Mode of Clever,” Whatever (personal blog), June 16, 2010, https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-clever.
“whose first object in life”: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 56.
“something like a momentary anesthesia”: Bergson, Laughter, p. 5.
“If,
after hearing my songs”: Songs & More Songs by Tom Lehrer liner notes, Rhino, 1997.
hijackers took over: As remembered by Funt’s daughter Juliet on “Smile My Ass,” Radiolab, WNYC, October 6, 2015.
“When a man once”: Josh Billings, Everybody’s Friend; or, Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia of Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (Hartford, Conn.: American, 1874), p. 552.
INDEX
A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.
Abbott and Costello, 66–67, 76
absurdity, 43–44, 46–48, 57–59
Academy Awards, 198
Acharnians, The (Aristophanes), 165–66
Achatz, Grant, 19–20
activism, 180, 230–59
Addams, Charles, 43
Adrià, Ferran, 18–19
Adult Swim, 47, 58, 79, 80, 173–75
advertising, 7, 25, 89–99, 110–11, 262
affect transfer, 110–11
age, and humor, 48–49, 107
Agosti, Alison, 155
AIDS, 252
airline safety videos, 107–8, 109–10
Airplane!, 22, 49, 108
Ali, Muhammad, 15–17
Allen, Gracie, 76
Allen, Steve, 104, 125, 191
Allen, Woody
comedian, 61–62, 72, 103, 119
creep, 61, 103, 245
director, beloved in France, 55
Almost Live!, 239
alternative comedy, 84, 117, 122
alt-right, 174–75
“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” 59
American Humor (Rourke), 236
America’s Funniest Home Videos, 137
Amram, Megan, 144–45, 153–55, 158
Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman), 25
Anchorman, 82, 88
Andersen, Kurt, 176, 185
Andre, Eric, 186
animals, and humor, 129
Ansari, Aziz, 7, 135