NPR

Have We Reached Peak Funny?

In his new book Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture, Ken Jennings takes humor seriously, tracing how comedy infiltrated every aspect of our lives — and what it's doing to us.
Buk buk. Rubber chicken keeled over on its side.

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 , Jennings is, about how something he loves — comedy — has transformed the

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