#431： How Everything Is Funny Now, and Why That's Terrible
Episode Stats
Summary
No matter where you look these days, someone is trying to make you laugh. Advertisers, politicians, and church ministers have all become comedians, but it wasn t always like this. When and why did the world become so funny? And what are the consequences of living in a culture where everything has a touch of humor and irony? My guest explores these questions in his new book, Planet Funny.
Transcript
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a website or domain. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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No matter where you look these days, someone is trying to make you laugh. Advertisers, politicians,
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even church ministers have all become comedians, but it wasn't always like this. When and why did
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the world become so funny? And what are the consequences of living in a culture where
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everything has a touch of humor and irony? My guest explores these questions in his latest book,
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Planet Funny. His name is Ken Jennings. Yes, Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy guy. Today on the show,
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Ken shares the moment in his life that got him thinking about how humor has taken over the world.
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From there, we discuss the history of humor and how it's changed throughout the ages. Ken and I then
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discuss the recent advent of politicians, advertisers, and amateur Twitter comedians trying to be funny and how
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the internet has changed humor. We then dig into the consequences of living in a hyper-humorous world,
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including the decline of sincerity, earnestness, and even genuine gut-busting laughter. Ken ends our
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conversation with a call to be more mindful of how an excessive focus on funniness can impoverish
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society, our decisions, and ourselves. After the show's over, check out the show notes at
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aom.is slash planet funny. All right, Ken Jennings, welcome to the show.
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So you've got a new book out. It's not about trivia, which we would expect you to write about,
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but you wrote about humor. And it's called Planet Funny. And it's about how humor has taken over
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our culture. I'm curious, was there a moment in your life when you realized everything,
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and by everything, I mean everything is funny now in particularly American culture?
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I think the thing that woke me up was when airline safety videos started to get funny.
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You know, because when I flew as a kid, I always was terrified of that little laminated pamphlet that
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told you about the oxygen masks and where's your life jacket and where's your nearest exit. You know,
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I studied that thing for an hour. And a few years ago, those safety demonstrations started to get
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replaced by little videos with musical numbers, and they were full of kind of wacky non-sequitur jokes.
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Delta had an 80s-themed one with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the pilot, just like an airplane.
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And I remember thinking, wait, why does this have to be funny? Like,
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there's nothing less funny than the odds of a plane crash, right? Like,
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what is happening to us that we need jokes here?
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Yeah. And besides, I mean, the other example you gave that I thought I didn't think about,
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but it's true, like insurance, like car insurance, like the thing that's supposed to you use when
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you get in an accident, like that's funny now, thanks to Geico.
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Yeah. You know, as late as the 1960s, and this is shocking to us today,
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the conventional wisdom on Madison Avenue was that funny ads didn't work. You had to stay away
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from all humor because viewers would remember the punchline, but maybe forget the product.
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And of course, that's all changed now. And the main thing that changed the calculus I found out was
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the possibility of an ad going viral on the internet. You know, tens of millions of people
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trying to watch your old spice ad just because it's got a funny guy on a horse. You don't have to
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pay a cent for that product placement. People are seeking your product out and product Procter
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Gamble now says that, um, old spice, isn't even a deodorant anymore. It's an entertainment brand.
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The deodorant is incidental to providing a fun branding experience, which is an awful thing.
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Right. Yeah. Super. So, so before we get to like explain like how we got to this point,
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let's talk about like the concept of funny too, because you explore this idea of what,
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what exactly is funny and how has that changed? And then how is that because of the change in humor,
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why that's, uh, you know, sort of infected everything in our culture. You know, we've,
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you mentioned in the book, Peter McGraw, author of the humor code, and he's like, he researches,
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he's a scholar that researches humor. You talk about him in his book. He has his theory about what you,
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what he thinks makes something funny, but you talk to other researchers and academics about why humans laugh
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and why things are funny. So what are the theories out there about what makes something funny?
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Philosophers have been arguing about this for thousands of years. What's the root of humor?
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Where does the impulse to laugh even come from? Aristotle and Plato believed that it was laughter
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came out of superiority. If you feel better or superior or smug towards someone else, you'll laugh
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at them. You know, all laughter is ridicule. You know, to Freud, it was, it was more a laughter of
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relief. You know, it was a way to express discomfort or about taboo subjects or vent uncomfortable
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feelings. Today, a lot of cognitive scientists center around the idea of incongruity, two things
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that don't normally go together. You know, you've seen a monkey, you've seen roller skates, but a monkey
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on roller skates, uh, that's funny. So to this day, there's no consensus on, you know, where the urge
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to laugh comes from or why amusement works in our brains. And it makes it hard to track down what
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is funny. I think it's a moving target for one thing, you know, think about reading a, you know,
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in quotes, humor book from a hundred years ago, or watching a Elizabethan comedy. You know, these
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things just don't strike us as funny, even just a few years after they were made because jokes move
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on. But I mean, are there jokes that, or things that are funny that have like stood the test of time?
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I mean, are there things that were funny, like in ancient Rome that are still funny today?
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I think so. I mean, think about somebody falling down. You know, that's, that's funny. I don't
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care who you are. And I'm sure that's universal. There are written records of ancient Greek jokes
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that we still tell today. The very earliest joke collection has a joke in it that was still being
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told about sour politicians in the 1980s. Man goes into the barber shop and the barber says,
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how would you like me to cut your hair? And the man snaps in silence. You know, that joke's thousands
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of years old and it still kind of works. But I think the way you tell jokes have to change because
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again, the comic sensibility keeps changing and we demand novelty. Right. Yeah. The fart jokes,
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I think too, have been around for a while. My kids still think my, you know, my seven and four
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year old think it's hilarious. Fart jokes, but now that was funny in ancient Greece too.
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That would be Freud's theory, you know, something that they can sense is taboo, you know, even if,
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I don't know if you like raised a kid by roles, would the kid think farting was funny?
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I doubt it. You know, I can sense that we're uncomfortable with it and they, they, they,
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they realize, Oh, I can do something with this. So, you know, for most of human history,
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you know, recorded history, like there were jokes, like there were jokes you told,
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and I guess comedians call them joke jokes or jokey jokes, right? Like man walks into the bar,
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but like, we don't do that anymore. I can't remember the last time when I was with a group of friends
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and they said, Hey, let me tell you this joke. Like that is like the, instead it's like they
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pull out their phone. They like, let me show you this meme. So, I mean, like, why, why did that,
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what happened? Like where, you know, we no longer tell joke jokes and this, and how did that change
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in metamorphosis happen? I wonder if part of that is kind of the American ethos of cool, you know,
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that came out of hipster and jazz culture, thirties, forties, and fifties. It just seems like such
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an effort to create a story where a priest, a minister, and a rabbi get on a plane. I mean,
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what am I, Edgar Allen Poe? Why am I writing a short story for you at dinner? Like to actually
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get the organic laugh, it needs to seem cool and low impact and something that just, I thought of
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off the tip of my tongue. And that's really the comic mood of today. You know, comedians goofing
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around with their friends on podcasts and, you know, saying whatever crosses their mind on Twitter.
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The idea that, you know, we like a more conversational vibe. We like Jimmy Fallon playing
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charades with people. God help us. Right. Well, yeah. You see how the internet has changed.
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One thing I've noticed in the past 10 years, like humor has gotten weird, right? It's like,
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as you said, like non sequiturs, like that's like, it's pretty much what it happens on the internet.
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It's like stuff that if you didn't understand the story about how that thing became in existence or
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how, why it got funny, like you wouldn't get all the derivative jokes that came from it.
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Here's why that happens. A joke requires novelty. You can't laugh at something the fifth time
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as much as you laughed at it the first time. So comic tastes have to keep evolving so that
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the kids are laughing at something their parents don't get. Like when I was a kid, we stayed up
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late to watch Letterman and Saturday Night Live. And we just knew that our parents would not enjoy
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this kind of crazy irony. But as that keeps progressing, the jokes have to get weirder and
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weirder. So you get these adult swim shows where it's not even clear where or what the jokes are.
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You know, it's, it's just kind of uncomfortable. There's online humor. Like I love this thing
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called lasagna cat, which is just weirdly edited live action reenactments of Garfield comic strips,
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but with very sad music and even horror movie tropes added in. And it's impossible to explain
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how this is a joke. But again, that's kind of the appeal of it. We've already laughed at everything
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else. The well is running dry. Right. And I mean, another point you make with the way things have
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changed where things are constantly evolving at a quicker and quicker pace is that humor today
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is much more fragile than it was say 20 years ago. You could tell a joke and kind of flub it,
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but it would still, you could still land the punchline and people would laugh. But today
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it doesn't like, if you miss like one little thing, then it doesn't, it's not funny. It just,
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it falls dead and you might, it might even be offensive, right? And then you're suddenly the
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pitchforks come out on the internet and you're, you're pillared. That's what you see a lot. This
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made sense in my head, but yeah, humor is so ephemeral that any little thing will break it.
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There's a reason why jokes don't translate well into other languages, why computers can't produce
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them. You try to think of an, you try to tell a friend an onion headline that you enjoyed and you'll
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realize you can't crack her up because you're not remembering it word for word. So much can go wrong
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telling a joke, but we're all getting better at it. Even so, the fact that we're surrounded by this
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endless avalanche of jokes on social media and streaming video means that we're all kind of
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internalizing what the rhythms and the mechanisms are. And we're starting to get into a culture where
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everyone can kind of do the voice of comedy, whether they really have a knack for it or not.
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So, I mean, this idea also you get into is how, how one way that humor has changed is we become much
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more ironic and you get into like what irony means. You talk about Alanis Morissette. I remember when
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that, I was like, I think in ninth grade when that song came out and our, my English teacher was like,
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that's not irony what she's talking about, but like, what is irony and why has irony infused our,
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our humor today? Well, you know, irony just started out as a literary device, you know, an audience,
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you know, something, you know, an oddly appropriate fate for a character in a short story or a play where
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the audience knows that the guy is doomed and the character doesn't yet know he's doomed. And that was
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just fine. But sometime around, you know, Vietnam Watergate, kind of the new American citizen cynicism
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era, ironic comedians like Steve Martin and David Letterman started to expand irony. And so it was a whole
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voice. And today it's even, you know, I don't take anything seriously, even my own comedy. And today it's
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essentially a lifestyle, you know, you have people growing facial hair or buying vintage clothing
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because they're not sure if it works even, but if it's kind of crazy over the top, Hey, this works
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ironically, people voting ironically or telling, you know, offensive jokes, ironically, it's almost like
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we want to be insulated from any of the possible impact of our, of our convictions, you know? So
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lifestyle irony is a way to kind of skate through life unscathed without having to commit to really
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believing or thinking anything seriously, which is pretty awful when you think about it.
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Yeah. I mean, cause it, it takes out some of like, I don't know, the sincerity of life,
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right? Like when, like, when was the last time you actually felt genuinely like excited about
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something? Because if you look too excited, well, then you're a square or something's wrong with you.
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Right. Or just, or actually telling a friend how much you appreciate them or love them,
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you know, like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, no way. You know, we're very comfortable kind of riffing and with
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light banter. I noticed this recently, my, my daughter fell and broke her wrist and, you know,
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a lifetime of, you know, ironic social media had really prepared me for kind of funny quips to try
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to distract her from her, from her owie as the doctor put the cast on it. But when something
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seriously goes wrong, you know, I had a friend whose kid was in a car accident and I realized I had
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nothing to say, you know, all these, these years of, uh, these years of banter and social media
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quips and riffing with my friends have left me really ill-equipped to, to actually get under the
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skin and like, you know, share my real feelings and find out what this guy needs. And I, I do miss
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Yeah. Yeah. And you all, I mean, one of the, one of the more poignant moments in the book,
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you talk about that sort of how things being infused with humor sort of, I don't know if the,
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what's the word where desensitizes you to those other things you talk about, you watched a clip
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of like a, an accident and like your initial like reaction is like kind of chuckle, but then you
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realize that no, what happened was actually really terrible and I should be feeling something else.
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Yeah. It was one of these dash cam videos and it was actually, it was awful. It had been near my
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house and I knew that a bystander had been killed. And, but yet when the link appeared on the
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newspaper site and started running and I saw the weird slapstick, you know, I kind of involuntarily
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laughed and I realized I did think it was funny, but that didn't excuse it. You know,
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things can be funny and still not be helpful or good. And I think that's an important realization
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in comedy as well, but, um, a joke might work and still do something awful.
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Yeah. So, I mean, this idea you mentioned earlier about we're, we're getting, we're like, we're,
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we're, we're, we're all practicing at being sort of comedians all the time. And now you can,
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we have these devices in our hands where we can create memes on the fly and we can use emojis in
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certain ways that elicit humor. But I mean, what's, what's weird about it is that, as you said,
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this, it kind of degrades our ability to be earnest. Um, it's also infused, not just our
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relationships and how we interact with others, but it's infused other institutions where you think,
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well, that, that shouldn't be funny. For example, religion, like religion has always been like the
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doubt, like they've been the buzzkill, but now you even argue that religion is trying to get on the
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humor game. So what's going on there? Any examples of that in particular?
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Yeah. I mean, in the middle ages, you're exactly right. Early Christian scholars read the Bible
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closely and realized there's no record of Jesus ever laughing. And that that therefore that's
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important. You know, uh, we should be serious in this life so that we can have joy awaiting us
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hereafter. Um, and that idea has really gone away, I think, because it can't compete.
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You're not going to get butts in the church pews unless you've got a funny pastor giving a funny
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sermon. And I, I noticed that the most on the marquees in front of churches, do you know what
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I'm talking about? When I was a kid, those were Bible verses, you know, always. And now it's always
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some kind of one liner or a pun, you know, come to my house after the game, God. Uh, and you realize
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pastors are trading these, you know, Xeroxed and emailed lists of funny marquee ideas because they,
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we have to keep up, you know, once part of society seems funny, any competitor that's not
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funny seems stodgy and old fashioned by comparison. And so humor kind of spreads like a virus or an
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epidemic. Is that working for, for churches? I don't know. I mean, like as a, as a parishioner,
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I enjoy it when I, uh, you know, get a little chuckle from something at church, but I can't imagine
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anybody ever walking by a church seeing a sign that says, um, you know, uh, our lifeguard walks
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on water or something and being like, Oh boy, walking on water. That's hilarious. I got to find
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out more. I'm going in there. Right. But I mean, yeah, it's, yeah. Church has become, I mean, it used
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to be, you go there to be lectured basically on how to be a better person or why you're a terrible
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person and why you needed to be better. But now it's like, we're here to entertain you. And that can be,
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as you said, like some, some churches, some pastors or members, uh, are better at it than
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others. There's some depth. There's depth. I'm sure there's a lot of eye rolling humor going on
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in churches. Well, that's something you see a lot of people, when people who shouldn't be funny,
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try to infuse humor into what they do. It's cringy. There was a fad for like office humor where
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big corporations would have, you know, um, funny, uh, dress like Elvis days or, um, you know,
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a special people, uh, patrolling, uh, patrolling the halls with, you know, groucho glasses on trying
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to crack you up. And, you know, there's nothing less funny than work or God co-opting humor.
00:17:52.900
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00:20:26.700
Right. But yeah, you talked about the, like sort of the eighties, nineties, like there was like
00:20:29.680
corporate humor consultants. I mean, that's sort of going on today still, but it's like
00:20:34.380
workers themselves are infusing the workplace with humor because they've grown up in a culture where
00:20:40.200
anyone can be funny thanks to memes and things like that. So they, you know, they probably use
00:20:44.160
Slack to like tell jokes or share memes. So they don't have to hire some outside guy to tell really bad,
00:20:51.640
His group was spending an incredible amount of time and expense to make this engine where instead of
00:20:56.500
reporting bugs with an email or some kind of a Slack note on Slack or whatever, you would send
00:21:01.980
a meme and the, you know, the seriousness of the meme would determine how, how bad the bug was and
00:21:07.760
how, you know, how problematic the, uh, the tech issue was. And, you know, clearly this did not have
00:21:13.460
to work this way, but this is humor has so suffused our culture now, but it's, it's not a scarce resource
00:21:18.520
anymore. You don't have to hire a speaker to come in and do a, do a routine with a rubber chicken
00:21:26.540
Right. Well, so besides religion, trying to get in on the humor game, another one that we've,
00:21:31.680
that's gone on the humor game where you think this really shouldn't be funny because it's kind
00:21:34.740
of serious what the stakes are is politics. So today we live in this world where, you know,
00:21:39.980
any political candidate, particularly presidential candidate has to make the rounds on the night
00:21:43.820
shows or make an appearance on SNL, but that wasn't always the case. When did politics in America
00:21:50.740
start getting funny? It's really shocking how recent that was. Um, the watershed moment is
00:21:58.260
probably 1988. Bill Clinton gives a just lousy meandering speech at the democratic national
00:22:04.280
convention. And everyone says his political career is over. He's toast. And his handlers managed to get
00:22:09.860
him on Carson, uh, that week, which never happened. Carson never had politicians on, but he played his
00:22:15.140
sax with the band and kind of joked with Johnny about how bad his speech had gone. I think Johnny pulled
00:22:20.580
out a big hourglass on his desk when Clinton was about to start talking and within less than a
00:22:25.440
week, he had totally turned it around and everyone realized, wow, this is the playbook now. Um, and
00:22:31.100
when, so when Clinton ran for president, he went on Donahue and Larry King. And at the time this was
00:22:35.780
considered very undignified and everybody was tisking at him, but once it worked, that became the new
00:22:42.480
climate. And today, uh, you know, today we've gotten to a point where the most entertaining
00:22:50.660
candidate might get the most votes, even if he's not the most qualified, even if he's awful. And all
00:22:56.120
the other candidates will try to be doing their cringey attempts to keep up with jokes of their
00:23:00.120
own as we saw in 2016. Right. There was a lot of, a lot of cringe moments going on. Yeah. Speaking of
00:23:04.820
politics, even like on like national, like international level, we're seeing that now. So
00:23:09.680
like, I think just a few days ago, Israel sent a meme out to any Palestine. It was like a mean
00:23:16.360
girls meme. And they're basically doing diplomacy with internet memes from a movie from the early
00:23:22.660
2000s. Um, yeah, once powerful people and organizations realize that they could put humor
00:23:30.000
to work for them at agencies and political campaigns, um, that was really ball game because
00:23:36.440
humor used to be our joke, our, our way to fight back against the man, you know, but if the CIA now
00:23:42.480
has an ironic Twitter account and if Israel sending memes to the Palestinians, they're shooting,
00:23:47.540
like what is left, you know, uh, um, we really have to be suspicious of the jokes we hear now
00:23:52.920
because they have agendas behind them. No. Yeah. I thought it was so bizarre. Just like,
00:23:57.620
this is, this is so bizarre that I'm living in this time where two countries are sending or a
00:24:02.360
country sending memes to another country. Um, so besides, I mean, what's interesting too,
00:24:07.820
about how the internet has changed humor you talk about, you, you, you play up Twitter cause
00:24:11.640
you're very active there. Um, I follow you on Twitter, um, and you're testing out stuff and putting
00:24:16.300
stuff out there, but I mean, what is it about Twitter that can, that that's conducive to humor
00:24:23.680
and, and, and particularly internet humor? Uh, it's mostly the short attention span. I mean,
00:24:29.140
they don't have the 140 character limit anymore, but when Twitter first came out, it was, it was too
00:24:33.940
limited to actually work for the things they hoped you would use it for just chilling with friends or,
00:24:40.260
um, you know, talking about serious issues. I mean, it really only worked for jokes. Humor is the
00:24:45.940
only art form that requires brevity or it fails. And so this huge kind of jokey Twitter community
00:24:52.640
formed with people just kind of essentially having a big sentence contest all day. Who can,
00:24:57.600
who can come up with the best one liner about the day's events? Uh, once we had Johnny Carson telling
00:25:03.840
four or five topical jokes a night, and now you can read a hundred or more every hour on your phone.
00:25:09.680
Um, and so the, it was very easy for me to get just swept up in that and be like, Ooh,
00:25:14.820
I want to hang out with these people. They seem fun. And of course it was awful and no one should
00:25:18.920
do that. I want to, I want to warn all your listeners, please stay away from Twitter. It
00:25:22.640
will break your brain, but it's seductive. Yeah. You highlighted several, not only yourself,
00:25:26.980
but several other, you know, internet comedians or just comedians in general. They're like, yeah,
00:25:30.580
Twitter, like it destroyed humor for me. Like, it just like, it turned, like turned making jokes
00:25:36.200
like into a job and not, not fun anymore. For some of those people that literally became a job,
00:25:40.800
you know, they got hired away to, to work on a late night staff because they were writing such,
00:25:44.500
you know, great high quality topical jokes on Twitter. But I think that's something comedians
00:25:48.800
say a lot in general, which is that once they do it for a living, once they can see all the strings
00:25:53.760
and know where all the bodies are buried, comedy has no joy in it for them anymore. And I feel like
00:25:58.800
we're starting to see that culture wide now that we are all getting as savvy, as savvy as comedy
00:26:02.960
writers about jokes. We're starting to enjoy it less and less. We just know the mechanics too well
00:26:08.600
now. We're hard to surprise. Yeah. I can't remember the last time, like I had like a giant belly laugh
00:26:13.680
where I cried because I laughed so hard. It's more like, okay, I see something that's funny and I,
00:26:18.620
my brain recognizes, oh, that's funny. And that's it. There's no LOLing going on at all.
00:26:25.000
There's a thing called the hedonic treadmill where the brain gets used to more and more
00:26:28.620
pleasurable stimuli and it needs those just to maintain a baseline. So if you don't have a hundred
00:26:33.460
jokes a minute on Twitter, you're kind of bummed, but as you get them, you take no joy in them.
00:26:38.880
You know, we, we, people used to literally slap their knee and hold their sides, you know, and now,
00:26:43.760
now it's just more like, Hmm, yes, that's funny. That's, that's about the best we can do.
00:26:48.180
Right. I'm amused. I know that's supposed to be amusing. And I would be laughing if I was a,
00:26:53.620
not living in 2018. If I was not a hollowed out shell of a man, I would be delighted now.
00:26:58.960
Right. Well, you talk about Twitter a lot. What about Instagram and YouTube? What,
00:27:03.180
how are those doing and contributing to humor or maybe taking away from humor?
00:27:08.540
They're both, you know, paths to success. Bo Burnham is now selling out Madison square garden
00:27:12.940
as a comedian when he used to just be sitting in his room at 16 years old, making YouTube videos
00:27:17.600
with an acoustic guitar. So it's a way to get an audience, which is great if you're in the business of
00:27:22.320
being funny. But again, it's just kind of an addictive, oppressive dopamine cycle for everyone
00:27:28.460
else who, uh, you know, just, we, we can't look away from these feeds, but you know, one thing they
00:27:33.540
do is they kind of give us training wheels. You know, they give us a set of templates for how to be
00:27:38.000
funny, whatever the meme of the day is, or the joke format of the day on Twitter. And it's pretty
00:27:43.260
good comedy for dummies. You know, it's, it's a good remedial class and how to at least simulate
00:27:48.040
comedy, which is one reason why we can all do it.
00:27:50.720
Right. Yeah. Well, it's sort of, it's sort of like the, you know, those old jokes from
00:27:54.400
40 years ago, you know, the priest, the rabbi, whatever walked like that. It's, we have that
00:28:00.820
Yeah. And I, and for a while it was catchphrases, you know, if you could, if you could say, yeah,
00:28:04.680
baby, like Austin powers, you could be the office kind of Twitter joke formats to do that with.
00:28:11.300
So what is the downside of having so much culture infused with humor? And we kind of highlighted a
00:28:18.140
little bit of it, you know, on a personal level, you, you're less empathetic and you,
00:28:22.200
you laugh at things you shouldn't laugh. You don't know how to console people or be genuine
00:28:25.500
or sincere with them, but what on a societal level, like what is happening to us now that
00:28:30.860
everything, including international diplomacy is supposed to be funny?
00:28:35.320
Well, yeah, there's the personal cost for all of us that we enjoy jokes left and less. And maybe,
00:28:40.020
you know, in my case, maybe even feel like it's not making me a better person,
00:28:43.260
but I think there are, could be real world effects too, with the result of people making
00:28:47.520
worse and worse decisions because we've kind of been narcotized by our, our love of jokes,
00:28:53.000
people buying an inferior product just because the ad was funnier. That could have real impact.
00:28:58.560
You know, North Korea could have launched missiles because they didn't like the interview with Seth
00:29:02.000
Rogan and James Franco. So at some point there may actually be a body count for this phenomenon,
00:29:09.040
Well, you gave an example that was really poignant was a, there's some Greek myth
00:29:12.300
about a city that all they did was laugh and they ended up destroying themselves because of it.
00:29:17.900
Yeah. There's this ancient Greek story from Theophrastus who talks about a city called
00:29:22.360
Tyrants where everybody was addicted to laughter. They just couldn't stop and it was ruining their
00:29:28.260
city. Like they couldn't trade, they couldn't do anything. So they, they go to the Oracle and the
00:29:33.000
gods say, you know, you have to, you have to sacrifice this ball. And if you can do the whole
00:29:36.960
ceremony without laughing, your town will be cured. But a little boy sneaks into the ceremony and
00:29:42.100
sees the bull getting sacrificed and makes a, makes a pun and just cracks up the whole crowd.
00:29:47.500
And the lesson said Theophrastus is that, you know, once you, your society has an inveterate
00:29:52.300
custom, there is no remedy for it. You know, you're, you're locked in. And sure enough, that city was
00:29:58.340
invaded by the, by Argos, you know, just a few centuries later and has been ruins for thousands
00:30:04.500
of years. And that's kind of a gloomy takeaway, but I think it's, it's not possible that this is
00:30:10.280
a new kind of dystopia we could be entering. Not one where instead of a government oppressing us,
00:30:14.900
we've decided to kind of oppress ourselves just by ignoring serious things in favor of
00:30:20.900
comedy and amusement and, you know, not grappling with the real challenges we have because
00:30:26.700
there's just too many hilarious distractions on our phone.
00:30:29.960
Right. Or we, we see the problems and instead of doing something about them,
00:30:35.020
And we say, Hey, you know, it's a, it's a coping mechanism for dark times. Sure. I got a joke
00:30:39.360
about Trump. I got a jump joke about rising sea levels, you know, but it's gotten to the point
00:30:43.420
where a joke is kind of our default first response to everything. Like I've noticed this thing on
00:30:48.040
Twitter where even when like a celebrity dies, immediately a hundred people will jump in and
00:30:52.560
start trying to make jokes about the death. Like the, uh, the guy who founded Ikea died a couple months
00:30:58.560
ago and immediately dozens of people on Twitter were like, I hope his casket came with an Allen
00:31:03.680
wrench or whatever. And, uh, you know, it's, it's not unfunny, but is that really the best
00:31:10.720
impulse when somebody dies? It seems very callous, but it's, it's like the only thing in our playbook
00:31:15.700
now. It's like the only pitch we have is to tell a joke.
00:31:18.560
Right. So the, when you talk about the dystopia, the thing that came to mind that it's our future
00:31:22.680
where everything becomes a joke is idiocracy. I don't know, for some reason, I think that's where,
00:31:26.340
that's where things are heading by, by making everything funny and entertaining.
00:31:30.920
Yeah. My, my wife says she can't even watch that movie anymore because like,
00:31:34.260
since she first saw it and enjoyed it, it's kind of started coming true. And she's very worried that
00:31:38.840
we're going to start watering our crops with Gatorade and I don't know what's next.
00:31:42.120
Right. Here's the, it could happen. Cause like you, we might start doing it ironically
00:31:45.340
and then we end up doing it and we just destroy all the crops because we were trying to be funny.
00:31:51.000
Sure. Like all the people making jokes about the Ikea guy on Twitter, if you asked them,
00:31:54.760
they'd be like, Oh no, no, no, you know, condolences to his family. But, um, but I just,
00:31:59.320
you know, thought I had this ironic persona where I joke about everything. Well, I mean,
00:32:03.300
if that's what everybody sees, that's effectively what we get.
00:32:06.000
Yeah. So I mean, well, how do you, what's the solution, right? I mean, it's, it's so embedded
00:32:10.160
and infused in our culture. Is it just like you stop using the internet, you stop watching the Delta,
00:32:16.760
you know, fly movies. Like how do you, what's, what do we do here?
00:32:20.120
I don't want everybody to die in a plane crash because they stopped watching the security of
00:32:23.960
the safety video. That would be awful, but you're right. Like that's, and that's kind of the most
00:32:27.960
difficult thing I had with the book is what am I, I've noticed this thing and I think it's a thing
00:32:32.420
and I think it needs to be talked about, but like, do I really have a recommendation? I don't want to
00:32:38.440
say I'm against comedy. I love comedy. The book is like a love letter to the comedy I like,
00:32:43.600
but I kind of think of it like one of these charities that, you know, it's not going to cure cancer,
00:32:47.840
but it's, it's raising awareness, you know? Oh yeah. Please donate to our campaign. We're
00:32:51.560
raising awareness about prostate cancer or whatever. I feel like this book cannot solve
00:32:56.260
the problem of people laughing when they shouldn't, but I would like people to be aware. I'd like to
00:33:00.740
start a conversation so that the next time somebody thinks, Hey, that ad is funny. I'm going to buy
00:33:05.160
that. Maybe they'll, a voice in their head will be like, wait, wait a second. I shouldn't buy the
00:33:09.720
product just because the ad was funny. Or maybe some other insurance company has lower rates
00:33:13.240
or I'm going to go for that guy. You know, he was hilarious with Ellen or Jon Stewart or whatever.
00:33:18.860
You know, maybe the person will think maybe just being on good Colbert is not the same as,
00:33:24.740
as being a good civil servant. Maybe having a good zinger in the debate is not the same
00:33:29.940
as mastering policy so that we kind of think, well, maybe there are parts of our lives we can keep
00:33:35.680
sincere. You know, maybe I should make time every day to get offline or go for a walk or give a
00:33:40.560
friend a sincere compliment. There are little things we can do, I think, to push back against
00:33:45.080
this rise of irony and snark everywhere to make sure it's still, it's still acceptable to be,
00:33:50.020
to be earnest and nice. I like that. So if you have that feeling, if you want to like,
00:33:54.080
if your, if your daughter gets hurt, instead of like going to that first impulse of saying something
00:33:59.180
funny, actually, actually give her a sincere, you know, counseling there.
00:34:04.260
When you see a friend, you know, don't instantly fall into the, Hey buddy, the kind of banter,
00:34:09.000
you know, why not be the kind of guy who's like, Hey, Hey, how are you doing? How are your parents?
00:34:13.900
I haven't heard from them lately. You know, why not be that guy? There's, there's plenty of the
00:34:17.080
other guy. There's, there's no shortage of quippy hot takes in our culture.
00:34:20.680
Right. Think like, what would your grandpa do? Like, how would my grandpa behave in this situation
00:34:24.780
and then do that? Maybe that's what I, that's, that's true. That's my grandpa. My grandpa was like
00:34:29.240
the most genuine, sincere guy could just be friends with anybody. And I'm like, I wish I could do that,
00:34:35.040
but I, I don't know how to do it. I had one earnest cowboy grandpa and one irony grandpa
00:34:39.820
who would always be pranking clerks. So I guess I should be, I should be like my dad's dad and not
00:34:44.640
like my mom's dad, who was always, who was always asking cashiers. Oh, I thought today was free day
00:34:49.440
just to, just to watch them be confused. Right. Be earnest cowboy grandpa. All right.
00:34:55.100
Well, Ken, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book?
00:34:58.920
I'm at Ken Jennings on Twitter. My website is, uh, Ken hyphen Jennings.com. You got to remember
00:35:04.480
the hyphen or you wind up at the website of the guy in Florida who would not sell me his URL
00:35:08.260
and the book is on sale, uh, bookstores everywhere. Online retailers like Amazon should be hard to miss.
00:35:15.180
Fantastic. Well, Ken Jennings, thank you for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:35:18.760
My guest today was Ken Jennings. He is the author of the book, Planet Funny. It's available on amazon.com
00:35:23.220
and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at Ken-Jennings.com.
00:35:27.580
Also, you can follow him on Twitter where he's trying to be funny. They've been talked about
00:35:31.000
at Ken Jennings. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash planet funny,
00:35:35.640
where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:35:50.020
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:35:54.300
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you
00:35:57.220
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00:36:00.220
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00:36:03.920
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think gets something out
00:36:07.260
of it. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay