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chukg's review against another edition
4.0
Good, pretty funny even though some of it is explaining jokes. (More of it is talking about comedy and jokes and their place in our culture.)
meflyntz's review against another edition
4.0
A funny and surprisingly thorough history of comedy’s ascendancy in American culture. Jennings makes a compelling argument that perhaps we’ve taken things too far with comedy. There are a ton of references to comedians in here, so it would help if you have a general understanding of the big (and even moderately big) names in comedy (a fair amount went over my head).
dray's review against another edition
4.0
I'm slowly making my way through the books that Ken J. has written (many) and found this one his most in depth and most studied efforts. The shear volume of material he had to read, listen to and watch to be be able to comment on the subject is actually staggering (to me). i am thankful he doesn't go for a definitive "all explained" type of exposition, hence not killing the frog. I did learn a lot about comedy, types of comedy and leads to deepen my knowledge and exposure to comedy for which I am thankful. There are what I believe to be weak spots, why not more on mad magazine? but these may reflect my own more limited exposure. I knew next to nothing about Greek and Roman comedy before reading this book. Worth reading.
lindzee's review against another edition
3.0
This didn't really delve as deep as I hoped, it was much more of an overview than anything in depth.
lindzt18's review against another edition
4.0
Very interesting read and I like Jennings' writing style/footnotes. My only problem was that the book seemed to be weirdly organized-- I felt like he went in a lot of circles/on a lot of tangents and made points multiple times. I did read the book over a longer period in small chunks, but I feel like it could have been edited better.
celebrationofbooks's review against another edition
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
In the month of January, when I was reading Planet Funny, I was dealing with three family deaths, anxiety, and millennial ennui. The later of which seems completely insignificant when compared to the general state of the world right now. And oddly enough, I’m not really experiencing that much anxiety comparatively speaking either. Point being, though, that when I needed humor and comedy to get me through a difficult time, I was binge watching Saturday Night Live reruns and reading a book about how comedy is killing our culture.
Well, a little bit. Not completely, but a little bit. Two dichotomous notions competing for attention in my brain. The first saying, you’re depressed, you need something to cheer you up, and the second saying, we no longer experience real emotions and connections if we’re all hiding behind our comedic instincts all the time. It was difficult to figure out how I was really feeling and how I should cope, hence the need for a two month time lapse to digest Planet Funny and figure out just what I wanted to say about it.
My mother is an avid Jeopardy! fan and her husband even made it to the second round of qualifying to get on Jeopardy!, that’s how much they love and are obsessed with it. So of course, every weeknight evening when I was in high school, we would watch Jeopardy!, and there were rules. Strict rules I tell you about how one watched Jeopardy! in my mother’s house. But it also meant that when Ken Jennings went on a 74 game winning streak in the midst of my high school years, we watched a decent amount of it.
When I was student teaching world geography to sixth graders many years later, I referenced Ken’s book Maphead a lot. A lot a lot. It’s a very interesting book, and I’m all for supporting my favorite Jeopardy! champ’s post-game career as full time writer. When picking books for Nonfiction Book Club voting back in November, I knew that I had to have Planet Funny, his latest just out in paperback, on the list. I was so bummed when it wasn’t voted in. It was a close fourth and we read the top three. When the pub date for one of the top three was pushed back and we needed a book to fill the month, it was fate.
There’s nothing like a book about humor to keep you going when times seem tough. Or at least that’s what I thought. I thought the subtitle was more tongue in cheek than anything, especially after the first few chapters where Ken shared stories about the history of comedy and his own recent experiences handling awkward teenage situations with his kids with comedy. But as the book progressed, Ken delved more and more into how comedy has become a crutch of American society, and world society as a whole.
There’s a whole chapter dedicated just to Twitter comics, which as a person who doesn’t use Twitter, I found absolutely fascinating. And shortly after finishing it, when I went out with a friend from book club (where we all expressed similar feelings) and when I was telling her about my uncle’s passing, but trying to brush past it so I didn’t encourage sympathy, she stopped herself making a joke because of Ken. Admittedly, the joke would have been welcome, a laugh in hard times is, to me, different than relying on humor to get one through every single daily action and interaction.
But she didn’t want to make the joke because she didn’t want to discount how I was feeling or how we were connecting and relating to each other. She’s taken Ken’s observation about hiding behind humor seriously. And I think he, and she, were ultimately right. If everything is a joke, if we’re all so awkward around each other that we can’t interact without jokes, how can we truly take anything seriously?
Overall, Planet Funny was a great book club book – we had a very intriguing discussion with lots of insights into how we all personally rely on humor versus collectively as a society. There were only four of us in January, February we had many more, and March we’ve cancelled. So we’ll have to see how book club goes for the rest of the year!
tome15's review against another edition
5.0
Jennings, Ken. Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture. Scribner, 2018.
Jennings sets out to demonstrate that, for better or worse, humor is now the dominant mode of American cultural expression. He makes a good case. Humor, he notes, is everywhere in modern American life from cuisine to funerals. He also argues that nature of humor has changed over time. I found especially enlightening his discussion of the widening definition of irony and the narrowing distinction between irony and snark. He cautions that we have so much inside knowledge how jokes work that while we may appreciate humor, we may have lost the ability to respond to it without comparison and analysis. Knowing grins, yes. Belly laughs, not so much. It is a good read, and you will learn things about humor and about Jennings himself that you probably did not know.
Jennings sets out to demonstrate that, for better or worse, humor is now the dominant mode of American cultural expression. He makes a good case. Humor, he notes, is everywhere in modern American life from cuisine to funerals. He also argues that nature of humor has changed over time. I found especially enlightening his discussion of the widening definition of irony and the narrowing distinction between irony and snark. He cautions that we have so much inside knowledge how jokes work that while we may appreciate humor, we may have lost the ability to respond to it without comparison and analysis. Knowing grins, yes. Belly laughs, not so much. It is a good read, and you will learn things about humor and about Jennings himself that you probably did not know.
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