Planet Funny: How Comedy Ruined Everything

ISBN: 1501100602

Author: Jennings, Ken

Condition: New

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the YearThe witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! championKen Jennings relays the history of humor in ?ively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,?(Maria Semple, author of Where? You Go Bernadette)-from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.Where once society? 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 don? try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials-those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning-have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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 day-and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV.In his ?martly structured, soundly argued, and yes-pretty darn funny?(Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means-or doesn?-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 Python? 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. ?ascinating, entertaining and-I? being dead serious here-important?(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.