Excerpt from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A Stranger Here Myself
The world that has been delivered to us now seems to have the goal of packing in as many laughs into every second of the day as possible. "There were more jokes written in one minute on the web today than were written in all of the twentieth century," the Onion's Joe Randazzo has observed, only halfway joking. Once you start noticing it, funny is everywhere—even the tiniest, dumbest places. The last time I waited on the phone for a corporate conference call to begin, the recorded hold music wasn't Vivaldi or smooth jazz; it was a faux-earnest novelty ditty about... the travails of being placed on hold. "Yes, I'm waiting on this conference call all alone / And I'm on hold, yes I'm on hold... I hope it's not all day!" The yoga studio up the street from my house added a laughter yoga class. The corner drugstore has replaced its "Video Surveillance in Use" security notice with a sign that says "Smile! You're on Candid Camera!" The bag of organic dried mangoes sitting on my desk right now has "Tropical Humor!" as a label slogan. Not only has this company decided that the biggest selling point of dried mango snacks is how funny they are, they've decided to advertise the fact with a confusing pun!

So life is now a never-ending barrage of little micro-jokes, most so fleeting that they don't even register. One thing you don't see much is people wondering if they should make every joke that they can, if there are cases where humor might be pointless or even counterproductive. That kind of introspection usually only happens after a brand makes a joke that it shouldn't have and gets dragged for it online.IX Online culture in particular seems to demand an even higher comedy quotient than real life. In 2014 I saw a New York Times story about an experimental new technique to save the life of trauma patients by injecting them with freezing salt water and inducing hypothermia—not a particularly hilarious topic, obviously. The headline in the print edition read, "Killing a Patient to Save His Life." On social media, the headline was, "A Chilling Medical Trial." Funnier! You have to admit, it's funnier.

I am not, generationally speaking, a Comedy Native. I'm an immigrant here. I come from a strange, topsy-turvy time when comedy had already acquired its cool cultural cachet, but—if you can imagine such a thing—there wasn't actually enough of it. We had to hoard what little of it we had on albums and cassettes and videotapes. The very first movie I ever saw on video (Betamax, specifically) was a comedy: Airplane!, at Michael Brewer's birthday party in third grade. I grew up rewatching the same worn VHS comedy tapes over and over: Raising Arizona, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, UHF, David Letterman anniversary specials, Tracey Ullman episodes so we could fast-forward to the Simpsons sketches. I snuck Mad magazine home from friends' houses where it wasn't contraband. I reread Peanuts treasuries until the pages fell out. We weren't allowed to stay up late enough for Saturday Night Live for much of my youth, so my brother and I taped it and watched it the following day after church. (Once, my dad got wind at church that Robin Williams's monologue from the previous night's show had been particularly saucy, and the tape went missing when we got home. It's still the only episode from that season that I've never seen.) The scarcity of comedy meant that we watched or listened to things until we knew them letter-perfect. To this day, if you need an emergency transcript of anything from This Is Spinal Tap, Monty Python Sings, or the first season of In Living Color, I am your man. To this day, I can't even hear the word "lemonade" without mentally adding Eddie Murphy's brief Elvis impression from his Comedian record: "Lemonade! That cool, refreshing drink!" Sometimes people forget Eddie was a great impressionist.

Excerpted from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings. Copyright © 2018 by Ken Jennings. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.