Planet Funny, Ken Jennings
Planet Funny, Ken Jennings
6 Rating(s)
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

Planet Funny
How Comedy Took Over Our Culture

Author: Ken Jennings

Narrator: Ken Jennings

Unabridged: 9 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/29/2018

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

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terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines.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.

About Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings is the New York Times bestselling author of BrainiacMapheadBecause I Said So!, Planet Funny, and 100 Places to See After You Die. In 2020, he won the “Greatest of All Time” title on the quiz show Jeopardy! and later succeeded Alex Trebek as the show’s host. He lives in Seattle with his family.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bandit

I remember reading Ken Jennings’ charming Brainiac and thinking this guy should write more books. And right after that Planet Funny showed up on Netgalley. What perfect timing. That’s actually one of the things discussed in this book. So anyway, this rainy day was spent in company of Ken Jennings, t......more

Ken Jennings, of Jeopardy fame, explores the history of humor and how comedy has evolved, permeating into all aspects of modern life. Super interesting! Jennings delivers a perfectly inflected, and humorous, narration. Don’t let the silly cover and title deter you. It’s a fun, witty, and educational......more