Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture Audiobook (Free)

A Kirkus Testimonials Best Publication of the Year

The witty and exuberant NY Times bestselling author Ken Jennings relays the annals of laughter in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, writer of Where’d YOU DECIDE TO GO Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.

Where once society’s most coveted trait may have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, inside a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it really is approximately Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture being funny. Yes, funniness.

Consider: Super Dish commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they make an effort to make you have a good laugh. Airline safety tutorials—those terrifying laminated credit cards about the options of fireplace, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled video clips with multimillion-dollar finances and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a complete Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing all over the world in any way hours of the day—and many of them actually get popular more than enough online to go pro and take over TV.

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred critique) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it right now. Tracing the advancement of humor in the caveman days towards the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness towards the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings points out how we built our humor-saturated modern day, where plenty of us obtain our information from comedy shows and a comic physique can even be elected Chief executive of america purely on showmanship. “Interesting, entertaining and—I’m getting dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, writer of THE ENTIRE YEAR of Living Biblically), World Funny is a complete taxonomy of what spawned and defines the present day love of life.