June 18, 2018

A HORSE WALKS INTO THE eND OF hISTORY...:

Have We Reached Peak Funny? (GLEN WELDON, 6/18/18, NPR)

Ken Jennings -- yep, you got it: affable Jeopardy! champ/trivia doyen/comedy-adjacent media personality, that Ken Jennings -- is worried.

Worried, not panicked. Not even distressed, really. No, what his book Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over our Culture amounts to, really, is an extended, engaging, deeply knowledgeable, 275-page-long (312, if you count the endnotes) (come on, you knew there'd be endnotes) fret.

He's concerned, Jennings is, about how something he loves -- comedy -- has transformed the way we live now.

These days, he says, we collectively react to every stimulus through a lens of humor. In his view, the comedic "take" has become reflexive, unthinking and often, especially when abetted by social media, glib.

He's worried about what is healthy.

Posted by at June 18, 2018 4:25 AM

  

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