Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything

Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in â€œlively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,â€ (Maria Semple, author of Whereâ€™d You Go Bernadette)â€”from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.

Where once societyâ€™s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness.

Consider: Super Bowl commercials donâ€™t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorialsâ€”those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowningâ€”have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the dayâ€”and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV.

In his â€œsmartly structured, soundly argued, and yesâ€”pretty darn funnyâ€ (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it meansâ€”or doesnâ€™tâ€”to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Pythonâ€™s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. â€œFascinating, entertaining andâ€”Iâ€™m being dead serious hereâ€”importantâ€ (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.
Country USA
Brand SCRIBNER
Manufacturer Scribner
Binding Paperback
IsAdultProduct
Height 8.375
Length 5.5
Weight 0.54895103238
Width 0.8
ReleaseDate 2019-07-09
NumberOfItems 1

Country	USA
Brand	SCRIBNER
Manufacturer	Scribner
Binding	Paperback
IsAdultProduct
Height	8.375
Length	5.5
Weight	0.54895103238
Width	0.8
ReleaseDate	2019-07-09
NumberOfItems	1

Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything

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