Overview
The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in ālively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,ā (Maria Semple, author of Whereād You Go Bernadette)āfrom fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.
Where once societyās 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 donāt try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorialsāthose terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowningāhave been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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 dayāand many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV.
In his āsmartly structured, soundly argued, and yesāpretty darn funnyā (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it meansāor doesnātāto be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Pythonās 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. āFascinating, entertaining andāIām being dead serious hereāimportantā (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.
This book title, Planet Funny (How Comedy Ruined Everything), ISBN: 9781501100604, by Ken Jennings, published by Scribner (July 9, 2019) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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