From the brilliantly witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author Ken Jennings, a history of humor—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets all the way up to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes—that tells the story of how comedy came to rule the modern world.For millennia of human history, the future belonged to the strong. To the parent who could kill the most animals with sticks and to the child who could survive the winter or the epidemic. When the Industrial Revolution came, masters of business efficiency prospered instead, and after that we placed our hope in scientific visionaries. Today, in a clear sign of evolution totally sliding off the rails, our most coveted trait is not strength or productivity or even innovation, but being funny. Yes, funniness. Consider: presidential candidates now have to prepare funny "zingers" for debates. Newspaper headlines and church marquees, once fairly staid affairs, must now be “clever,” stuffed with puns and winks. 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terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. In 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. Entertaining, astounding, and completely head-scratching, Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.
*A New York Times Bestseller*The first definitive, unauthorized, behind-the-scenes cultural history of the Bachelor franchise, America’s favorite guilty pleasure.For sixteen years and thirty-six seasons, the Bachelor franchise has be...
Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are risin...
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Book of the Year Selection for Inc. and Library Journal“This book picks up where The Tipping Point left off." -- Adam Grant, Wharton professor and New York Times bestselling author of ORIGINALS and GIV...
From the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open comes a groundbreaking assessment of popular culture as it's never been considered before: through the lens of intelligence.Forget everything you’ve ever read about t...
In The 50th Law, hip hop and pop culture icon 50 Cent (aka Curtis Jackson) joins forces with Robert Greene, bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, to write a “bible” for success in life and work based on a single principle: fear no...
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson rocked the literary WD with his mind-bending style of Gonzo journalism. First published in 1966, Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s up-close and personal look at the infamous motorcycle ...
New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman asks questions that are profound in their simplicity: How certain are we about our understanding of gravity? How certain are we about our understanding of time? What will be the defining memory of r...
**One of NPR’s Best Books of 2017** “Petersen's gloriously bumptious, brash ode to nonconforming women suits the needs of this dark moment. Her careful examination of how we eviscerate the women who confound or threaten is cruc...
Narrator: Anne Helen Petersen Published: 06/20/2017
In Inside Studio 54, the former owner takes you behind the scenes of the most famous nightclub in the world, through the crowd, to a place where celebrities, friends, and the beautiful people sip champagne and share lines of cocaine using rolled-up ...
{"id":"2196961","ean":"9781508258582","abr":"Unabridged","title":"Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture","subtitle":"How Comedy Took Over Our Culture","author":"Ken Jennings","rating_average":"4.5","narrator":"Ken Jennings","ubr_id":"2196961","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"23.99","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"14.39","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"Ken Jennings","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 12 hr","abr_length":"Abridged: "}
