9781508258582
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Planet Funny audiobook

  • By: Ken Jennings
  • Narrator: Ken Jennings
  • Category: Popular Culture, Social Science
  • Length: 9 hours 10 minutes
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
  • Publish date: January 01, 2018
  • Language: English
  • (943 ratings)
(943 ratings)
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Planet Funny Audiobook Summary

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author 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, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness.

Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials–those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning–have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day–and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV.

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes–pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means–or doesn’t–to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and–I’m being dead serious here–important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

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Planet Funny Audiobook Narrator

Ken Jennings is the narrator of Planet Funny audiobook that was written by Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings was an anonymous Salt Lake City software engineer in 2004 when he unexpectedly became a TV celebrity after his record-breaking seventy-four-game, $2.5 million winning streak on the syndicated quiz show Jeopardy! Today, he is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Brainiac, Maphead, and Because I Said So!, as well as the Junior Genius Guides for children. In 2020, he was named Jeopardy!’s “Greatest of All Time” after winning a primetime tournament on ABC, and in 2022, succeeded Alex Trebek as a permanent host of the show. He grew up in Seoul, South Korea, but for the last fifteen years has lived in his native Seattle with his family and dogs.

About the Author(s) of Planet Funny

Ken Jennings is the author of Planet Funny

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Planet Funny Full Details

Narrator Ken Jennings
Length 9 hours 10 minutes
Author Ken Jennings
Category
Publisher Simon & Schuster Audio
Release date March 29, 2024
ISBN 9781508258582

Subjects

The publisher of the Planet Funny is Simon & Schuster Audio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Popular Culture, Social Science

Additional info

The publisher of the Planet Funny is Simon & Schuster Audio. The imprint is Simon & Schuster Audio. It is supplied by Simon & Schuster Audio. The ISBN-13 is 9781508258582.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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