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

On paper, it seems like the modern funnying-up of America would be a golden age for a guy like me. Who doesn't like to laugh? Who would rather sit through an earnest, awkward sex ed class than a funny one? Who wants to go back to a time when if there was nothing funny on any of the three TV channels, our only options were a Dave Barry book or Caddyshack on video for the fiftieth time?

And yet, even in the midst of this embarrassment of riches, I have my doubts. In recent years, I have often found myself more bemused than delighted to find an endless stream of jokes everywhere I look, from politics to upscale dining to my kids' sex education. And it's made me think seriously about what this change might be doing to our institutions, our social relationships, our very brain chemistry.

Everything is funny now. Shouldn't we be happier?

Giggling Toward Gomorrah
In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman worried that the trivialities of mass media were going to be the death knell for American culture. In his view, the West had successfully avoided the authoritarian dystopia of 1984 only to embrace the narcotized "soma" culture of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. "An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan," he wrote. "Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us... [but] who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements?" Postman, presciently describing information overload even before the dawn of the Internet, blamed our plight on a glut of celebrity culture, television commercials, and dumbed-down news. He longed for television that would stay in its lane, sticking harmlessly to "junk entertainment." Couldn't it leave commerce, news, culture, and education alone?

Decades later, we live in the exact culture Postman predicted. (He died in 2003, having seen his worst fears unfold before his eyes.) But even he underestimated the degree to which the thing that would "amuse us to death" would be amusement itself—laughter, comedy. Life is full of possible trivial distractions, but we have increasingly decided to while away our hours with the funny ones. Reality television is often just the dumbest excesses of Postman's celebrity culture, now molded into the shape of the classic sitcom. Television commercials once praised products; now that's almost incidental to telling jokes. On the Internet, with all of human knowledge at last available democratically to all, the most popular aggregation sites are usually topped by short-attention-span laughs: viral memes, TV screengrabs, funny animal videos. The smiling mannequins reading news and making light chitchat about it have been replaced, for millions of people, by actual comedians. If you can't get one of those comedy-news jobs—if you quit Saturday Night Live in 1995, for example, because you got passed over for the "Weekend Update" desk—you can still become a United States senator for nine years. If you get dropped from your reality show, but the crowds hoot and holler loudly enough at your campaign antics, you can even be elected president.

We are in uncharted waters here. No one really knows how a comedy-first culture might change comedy or culture. I agreed instinctively with Greg Smallidge's maxim, "Something can be important without being serious," but that doesn't mean that nothing should be taken seriously. I object to the nihilism of that, but I also object to the comedy construction. What would be our benchmark for comparison in a world where everything was funny?

My favorite part of Khlebnikov's "Incantation by Laughter" is the neologism that the translator renders as "laughterhood." It seems to encompass everything about a culture's funniness: not just the voice of its comedy, but its social clusters and media and genres and fan bases, its techniques and tropes, its lineage and influence. We don't really have a word like that in English. But even when they don't know what to call it, groups always have a laughterhood. Families have one, offices have one, online communities have one, ethnic groups have one. Zoom out and civilizations have one.

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.