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

"It does feel like stand-up comedy," Smallidge said, but he disagreed with my assumption that "For Boys Only" is a tough room. No one is expecting the instructor in a hospital auditorium to be funny, he explained, so it's easy to beat low expectations. And he thinks the laughs are what makes it possible to spark real family conversations about sex. When parents come up against issues of sexuality with their kids, he said, the first response is usually discomfort and defensiveness. "But with humor, you don't have to be defensive for a few minutes, because you're laughing."

I told him that my childhood sex ed classes were never funny on purpose. "You could get in trouble for laughing."

"There's this one very conservative teacher, he always starts my introduction with, 'There will be no laughing! You know the rules!' Because they've gone over all the ground rules. 'I'm going to be watching you!' Very severe. It's sort of like having a bad opening act. I've got to undo that intro without offending him."

"Does that guy have a point? Are we giving kids a more casual view of sex because they got dick jokes with their puberty class?"

Smallidge smiled. "Something can be important without being serious," he said. "That's what it is for me."

In the Land of the Comedy Natives One joke-heavy sex ed class isn't exactly headline news. My favorite schoolteachers were always the funny ones, and I'm sure that was true in my parents' and my grandparents' day as well. But it's part of a pattern, one that we sometimes fail to notice, the way a frog in simmering water doesn't notice each degree of temperature change.

Everything is getting funnier.

For millennia of human history, the future belonged to the strong. To the parent who could kill the most calories, in the form of regrettably cute, graceful animals, with rocks and sticks and things made out of rocks and sticks. To the child who could survive the winter or the scarlet fever epidemic. These were success stories.

The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Ideas replaced muscles. A century ago, we believed the future belonged to the efficient, those who had discovered the best ways to streamline a manufacturing process. Fifty years ago, our anointed were the best scientific minds. Slide rules and engineering know-how weren't just going to defeat Communism, they were eventually going to get us into flying cars and domed underwater cities.

Today, in a clear sign of evolution totally sliding off the rails, our god is not strength or efficiency or even innovation, but funny. Funniness.

If you assume that all modern institutions have always been as joke filled as they are now, you're part of the problem—and probably part of the rising generation. A 2012 Nielsen survey found that 88 percent of millennials say that their sense of humor is how they define themselves. Sixty-three percent of them would rather be stuck in an elevator with a favorite comedian than with their sports or music heroes. "We called them Comedy Natives," MTV research executive Tanya Giles told the New York Times. She's now the general manager at Comedy Central. "Comedy is so central to who they are, the way they connect with other people, the way they get ahead in the world. One big takeaway is that unlike previous generations, humor, and not music, is their number one form of self-expression."

Comedy, in other words, is no longer just a vehicle for selling nightclub drinks or ad time, something people passively consume because it's an "easier sit" than drama. More and more, we actively seek it out. We're connoisseurs. Instead of dozing off to a single late-night monologue, we stream highlights the next day from six or seven different late-night shows, assembling our own comedy SportsCenter. Instead of relistening to the same album or two by a favorite comedian, we use newer media like Twitter and podcasts to check in on them weekly or daily or even hourly. Instead of quoting the occasional comedy catchphrase with pals at work, we can consult Frinkiac, an online Simpsons search engine stocked with three million screengrabs, which will produce a Simpsons meme for almost any occasion. (Just found out your boss is out of the office this Friday? Time for a quick "Everything's coming up Milhouse!") Being this kind of obsessive comedy geek is now an avocation, and an increasingly mainstream 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.