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

I was a comedy geek. Not a first-generation one—those would be the kids about ten years older than me with George Carlin records and subscriptions to the National Lampoon. But our parents didn't understand what we were laughing at, so it felt like we were breaking new ground. That was all that mattered.

This is largely hindsight, by the way. I don't remember ever identifying as a comedy geek at the time. Things were on; you watched them. If they were good, you taped them so you could watch them over and over. But being a funny kid was a big part of my identity, almost as far back as I can remember. Bothering grown-ups with riddles, asking them to explain the jokes you still didn't understand.XI Do you remember? Making an adult genuinely laugh is a huge thrill when you're five or six and nobody really pays much attention to you.

I was the Smart Kid too, but it doesn't take long before reasonably self-aware Smart Kids start to see the ambivalence with which the world regards them, not just peers but adults as well. Funny Kid is a lot less lonely, as identities go. Not everyone can make people laugh, and children figure out pretty quickly who has the knack and egg them on. Not a week goes by when I don't think about Eric R., the kid in my kindergarten class who leaned over to me during the Pledge of Allegiance on the morning of May 19, 1980, and stage-whispered, "Mount St. Helens blew its penis yesterday!" This is still one of the top four or five funniest jokes I've ever heard. As George Carlin pointed out on his Class Clown record, elementary school classrooms are an amazing comedy venue, because "suppressed laughter is the easiest to get." The research bears out my childhood intuition on the benefits of being the Funny Kid. When psychologists ask fourth-graders to rate their class members on humor and popularity ("classroom social distance" is the nicer way to say this in the literature), the two variables are always closely linked—and the pattern of variances strongly suggests that popularity is predicted by funniness, not the other way around.

If you've met a few grade-school Smart Kids–turned–class clowns, or are one yourself, you won't be surprised to learn that this was also a preemptive measure for me. I wasn't the biggest kid in class or the best soccer player; I was quiet and full of crippling self-doubt. That's not a great trade-off. In that situation, where all might be lost for others, at least the Funny Kid can tell jokes. You joke about your own bad haircut. Your bad skin. Your airball. The clothes your mom thought looked "sharp" at Mervyn's. Tell the joke you fear others might tell about you. It's a vaccination; you might get cowpox but you probably won't die of smallpox. You can also deflect by joking about literally anything else: the girls, the teacher, the bully trying to destroy you. As Harry Shearer once said to Marc Maron, "Comedy is controlling the reason people are laughing at you."

I never went anywhere close to comedy as a profession (see "crippling self-doubt," above) but I was always in its orbit. Nobody was quicker than me to jump into an argument over the worst "Weekend Update" anchor or the most underrated Judd Apatow movie (Kevin Nealon, Walk Hard, duh). And after I became a professional ex–game show contestant and started to write for a living, I suddenly had a little online venue (blogs, then social media) to post things that cracked me up instead of just annoying my family and friends with them. The Internet is a seductive mistress for would-be comedians: personal enough for lots of strangers to tell you how funny they think you are, but impersonal enough that there's no humiliating silence (or silence-with-a-single-cough) when a joke misses. It's also a great place to buddy up to comedy writers and performers you have long admired, pretending to be one of the cool kids.

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.