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

This change is often framed as a decline of traditional media, but to my mind, the real story was the new legitimacy and relevance of comedy. In the late sixties, when the Smothers Brothers were doing the edgiest, counterculture-friendliest comedy on TV, the network still carped about every joke that mentioned Vietnam, the most important news story of the day. (Pete Seeger was censored for singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," a folk song that didn't even mention Vietnam.) It's not always remembered today that Tom and Dick Smothers lost their battle with CBS's Program Practices division: the show was repeatedly neutered and then, in 1969, abruptly canceled. That cemented the TV status quo for decades: jokes should not have a viewpoint on serious things. The rule worked mostly because the viewership was fine with keeping its news and its comedy in separate time slots. Satire just wasn't a mass-culture phenomenon; as George Kaufman famously said, it "closes on Saturday night."

That was all upended in the Daily Show era, when a comedy host could do an eight-minute tirade against the Iraq War, full of moral outrage—at a time when even the New York Times was banging the drum about Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction—and keep the full support of his network and his audience. In fact, they loved him for it. He was free to layer the editorial commentary in silly pop culture asides (when George Bush called Saddam Hussein "a deceiver, a liar, a torturer, and a murderer," Stewart asked if he was also "a picker, a grinner, a lover, and a sinner") and puns ("Mess O'Potamia!" read the chyron) without anyone asking if war was too serious a subject for that sort of thing. He could even snipe at his own network. When President Bush said that the arguments over Iraq were like "a rerun of a bad movie, and I'm not interested in watching it," Stewart noted that, by an amazing coincidence, that was also the official slogan of Comedy Central. Instead of getting fired like the Smothers Brothers, he became the highest-paid performer on television. Bush's successor secretly summoned Stewart to the White House twice to consult on policy, and petitioners tried to draft him to run for president himself in 2016.

Jon Stewart's vehement protesting-too-much that he was "just a comic" was always a reminder that he knew how influential his voice was. The Daily Show take on a policy matter or media skirmish could determine the opinion of millions of people, the same way Fox News's official line could. Was it any wonder that jokes began to receive more scrutiny and Monday-morning quarterbacking than ever before? It wasn't enough to be funny; every joke was held to strict ethical standards of fairness, civility, compassion. And why not? This was now serious business; comedy could quite literally change the world.

The Magic Spell of Khlebnikov
How did we get to this point? Our gradual descent into nonstop comedy started in the early decades of the twentieth century, and I'm going to blame it all on one man: an eccentric Russian futurist poet named Velimir Khlebnikov. The futurists, as the name of their movement implied, were young artists besotted with the speed and dynamism and violence of mechanized modernity, and eager to replace the tired old art of the past with experimental new forms in their new century. The most famous poem of the futurist movement is probably "Incantation by Laughter," which Khlebnikov wrote in 1909 while he was (nominally) studying mathematics at a Saint Petersburg university. It's a series of escalating nonsense riffs on the Russian word smekh, meaning "laughter." An English translation might look something like this:

O, laugh, laughers!
O, laugh out, laughers!
You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly
O, laugh out laugheringly
O, belaughable laughterhood—the laughter of laughering laughers!

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.