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    Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
    Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
    Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
    Audiobook9 hours

    Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture

    Written by Ken Jennings

    Narrated by Ken Jennings

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    About this audiobook

    A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

    The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.

    Where once society’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 don’t 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terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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 “smartly 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’t—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’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. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMay 29, 2018
    ISBN9781508258582
    Author

    Ken Jennings

    Ken Jennings is the New York Times bestselling author of Brainiac, Maphead, Because I Said So!, and Planet Funny. In 2020, he won the “Greatest of All Time” title on the quiz show Jeopardy! and in 2022, he succeeded Alex Trebek as a host of the show. He is living in Seattle during his mortal sojourn, but his posthumous whereabouts are still to be determined.

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    Reviews for Planet Funny

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    • 4/5
      In this book, Ken Jennings explores the way humour has pervaded all aspects of modern life, from politics, to social commentary, to airline safety videos. He also discusses how ideas of what is or isn't funny have evolved over time. The book is well researched and engagingly written. It made me think about why we value a sense of humour so much, and how much emphasis we place on being entertained. Two small points: there were a lot of pop culture references I didn't get...the author is obviously younger and hipper than I am! And (a complaint I often have) the subtitle "How Comedy Ruined Everything" doesn't reflect what the book is about. Comedy is pervasive, and Mr. Jennings shows us the good and the bad sides of that.
    • 5/5
      Enjoyed the book and learned a lot about comedy. ?
    • 5/5
      I wasn't immediately sold on Jennings' premise but his case for humour proliferation had me be the end. The Chinese Room argument applied to Twitter was particularly stunning. Come for the jokes, get Searle's logic applied to emergent phenomena in social media for free.
    • 4/5
      Jennings has written a witty book about the creep of humor into every aspect of our lives, from advertising to news to ordinary interactions (especially on social media). I think the point is to end up disturbed about the very serious problems of the world around us—a version of the “against irony” stuff we’ve seen before. But Jennings doesn’t push too hard on this, and I did think he had a point about appreciating and attending to that which is not funny.
    • 3/5
      “Planet Funny” treats readers to a history of sorts of comedy through the years, interspersing the facts with insider stories of comedians and their brands of humor. This homage to the development of comedy also serves as a social critique, looking at how comedy has become an integral part of the media, of advertising, and of politics. For fans of the medium, it’s a treasure-trove of information and delightful tales.