A Kirkus Evaluations Best Reserve of the Year

The witty and exuberant NY Times bestselling author Ken Jennings relays the annals of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, writer of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes.

Where once society’s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, inside a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it really is approximately Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture being funny. Yes, funniness.

Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t sell you anymore; they try to make you have a good laugh. Airline safety lessons—those terrifying laminated credit cards about the possibilities of open fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled video clips with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Because of social media, we now have a complete Twitterverse of beginner comedians riffing around the world at all hours from the day—and many of them also get popular enough online to look pro and dominate TV.

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred critique) Globe Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the advancement of humor from your caveman days towards the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor from the Simpsons, Jennings clarifies how we constructed our humor-saturated modern day, where lots of us obtain our information from comedy displays and a comic body can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Amazing, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious right here—essential” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Globe Funny is a complete taxonomy of what spawned and defines the present day sense of humor.