Planet Funny

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year: An “impressive and highly entertaining” history of humor by the New York Times–bestselling Jeopardy! host (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings knows a lot of things about a lot of things, and in this “lively insightful” book (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette) he takes on a fascinating subject—the evolution of humor from fart jokes on Sumerian clay tablets to today’s 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 rails, it is being funny. Humor—and attempts at it—seem to have taken over the planet. 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terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. And thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day.

In Planet Funny, Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing comedy from the caveman days to the bawdy medieval antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, he 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. Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

“Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important.” —A.J. Jacobs, New York Times–bestselling author of The Year of Living Constitutionally

“Smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Full of good sense and meaningful interviews . . . it would be difficult to find a smarter or more satisfying treatment of a subject so evanescent and idiosyncratic as comedy.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)