Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture
2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.5.2.0391
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoKen Jennings's Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture follows in the footsteps of Neil Postman's 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business in which Postman lamented the infiltration of the values of entertainment into nearly every sphere of American life. Written in an era in which America had its first (but not last) president whose previous employment had included working in the entertainment industry, Postman's book is a jeremiad against the decline of civic discourse and rationality in American life. The tone of Planet Funny is quite different, as the titles of the two books indicate: no reader has ever been amused to death by reading Postman, but Jennings has written a very funny book about why we should not try to be so funny all the time.The humor in Planet Funny is not so much a contradiction of Jennings's thesis as an expression of his ambivalence about the role of humor in American life; unlike Postman, Jennings prefers to gently nudge us into accepting his claims, and he is quite willing to admit that he is as guilty as anyone else of wanting laughter where it might be out of place. He suggests that while Amusing Ourselves to Death pretty much got it right about where American culture was headed, Postman “underestimated the degree to which the thing that would ‘amuse us to death’ would be amusement itself—laughter, comedy” (25). Now we expect everything to be funny, and Jennings's book is an exploration of what happens to a culture that apparently has little interest in any experience that does not make us laugh. We seem, he concludes, to have reached “peak funny, … a dizzying spiral toward never- ending hilarity” (26). His reference to hilarity might suggest that Jennings is concerned that we are headed toward the kind of mindless guffawing predicted in Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy, but he sees the hegemony of ironic, postmodernist hipster humor as a greater danger to American democracy. Planet Funny explores how we got here, the implications of the infiltration of (nearly?) every sphere of American life by the value of constant laughter, and what we might do about a cultural phenomenon that has had such dire effects with the election of Donald Trump, whom Jennings views as the predictable result of a culture that is no longer capable of taking anything seriously.Jennings's argument relies heavily on the revealing anecdote or example, and while this approach has its drawbacks, his opening description of a “comedy” sex education class he attended with his son perfectly illustrates his own conflicted feelings about his subject: on the one hand, pleased that sex ed is not as dull as it had been for him when he was his son's age, and the other, a nagging sense that perhaps a sex ed class is not really the place for yucking it up (3). From here, Jennings moves on to a survey of the major theories of humor, from Plato to the present. Not surprisingly, in a book aimed at a broad audience, Jennings finds the humorless, pedantic scholars with their clipboards lacking in their attempts to explain humor. This jab at academics, however, seems more rhetorical than substantive (what might characterize Americans more than their desire to be entertained all the time, it seems, is a deep distrust of expertise), as Jennings's analysis of humor theories is quite competent and he clearly takes academic research on humor seriously. The book is surely the first study of humor that contains interviews with both Weird Al Yankovic and philosopher of humor John Morreall, and both offer interesting contributions to the discussion.Jennings has little trouble supporting his claim that humor has infiltrated previously drily serious areas of American life, from the news (The Daily Show) to business (humor consultants) and even to airline safety videos (Delta Airlines). He is particularly troubled by the role of humor in the 2016 presidential election, and while his analysis is not as searing and personal as Emily Nussbaum's 2017 New Yorker essay “How Jokes Won the Election,” he is just as troubled by Donald Trump's use of comic tactics and what it says about our culture. Trump, Jennings notes, “was a cartoon character” during the campaign (220) and his überserious competitors were unable to figure out a way to deal with this: when they tried, as a last resort, to compete on his own comic turf (see Marco Rubio), they failed miserably. While one could quibble with Jennings's view that this is a new phenomenon—Ronald Reagan ended what turned out to be completely legitimate worries about his mental capacities after his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984 with a witty quip in the second one—Jennings is very persuasive on how the Trump campaign uniquely weaponized humor as a political tactic. He grimly concludes that “we created a culture where everyone is expected to be entertained by politics all the time, and after we finally did it, when we finally voted in a showman whose candidacy had seemed the funniest, no one felt much like laughing at all” (229).Jennings not only focuses on the increase in comic laughter's reach; he also examines how humor itself has changed in the cable and internet era. Here, Jennings might best be seen as giving a pessimistic spin to studies such as Steven Johnson's 2005 Everything Bad for You Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson argues that television and video games, in particular, have become far more complex in recent years: the audience is more sophisticated than in previous eras and so demands greater complexity, and this complexity in turn increases our intelligence when we consume it. Jennings would seem to agree with this claim, and he compellingly documents the rise of what we might call “complex comedy” with diagrams of an especially recursive standup routine by comedian Mike Birbiglia (the final payoff of jokes begun in the first few minutes of the routine does not come until toward the end) and the rapid increase in “jokes per minute” on television sitcoms. Father Knows Best, a typical sitcom from the 1950s (he does not use I Love Lucy precisely because it is not typical), has around two jokes per minute, while the current show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has around seven (77). According to Jennings, we are gorging; we expect humor everywhere, and we also want a lot of it when we encounter it.Jennings's worries here, however, are less convincing than his account of comedy as a “virus” (89) infecting all areas of American life. His concerns that we have all become ironic hipsters about what makes us laugh and that we have become increasingly hard to please (“In an age of peak funny, every laugh is a knowing laugh” [127]) seem all too familiar: hand-wringing about the “irony epidemic” has been going on now for several decades. In fact, this lament itself seems to be a kind of virus: how dreadful that we are all now food snobs, beer snobs, and even, egged on by Yelp, snobs about the free continental breakfast at the Motel 6! Jennings is on firmer ground when he explores the role of humor in his own life, confessing that he has realized that his love of humor has not made him a better person (270). Here, he cites a conversation in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in which Darcy criticizes Elizabeth Bennett for making a joke about everything, and Elizabeth responds that she has never laughed at “what is wise or good” (271). We should, Jennings suggests, aim more for the virtues of Elizabeth Bennett rather than spending our lives as if we are constantly auditioning for Mystery Science Theater 3000.Before turning to authorship, Jennings was best known as the longest- running champion on Jeopardy!, and his knowledge is encyclopedic: he is as much at home quoting Cicero as he is Sarah Silverman. This capacity makes his book highly entertaining because his sources of evidence are never predictable, but it also sometimes leads him to some dubious sweeping generalizations. For example, scholars and students of Victorian literature will undoubtedly find fault with Jennings's claim that censorship was only in place for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century (192); here, Jennings takes atypical exceptions (Chaucer, Boccaccio) as the norm. Furthermore, Jennings's discussion of offensive humor is thoughtful but not quite thoughtful enough: he argues that the vogue of Polish jokes in 1970s America was not driven by animus because Polish Americans had become an accepted part of our society by that era (238), but it is just as likely that this success was precisely what made Polish Americans objects of animus, as other successful minority groups can attest. This point aside, however, Jennings carefully discusses research on offensive humor and engages in some close reading of examples of the genre; he performs a valuable service in exploring this material in a book aimed at an audience beyond specialists.Such specialists will no doubt find much to quibble with in Jennings's book, and Planet Funny may not stand the test of time as Amusing Ourselves to Death has done, but Jennings has provided a compelling and at times powerfully confessional account of the role of comedy and humor in early twentieth-first-century American life. At the end of his introduction, Jennings explains, “This book is an attempt to capture something ineffable: the comic mode of a moment” (26). He has achieved this goal quite well, and Planet Funny should inspire deeper analysis of the urgent issues his book raises.
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