Excerpt from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This book is an attempt to capture something ineffable: the comic mood of a moment. Today's jokes aren't just ubiquitous; they're also a new breed: faster, weirder, more complex, more self-aware than ever before. How did we get here? How is the new sensibility changing our laughterhood? How is it changing us? It seems to me that these are questions worth asking because we're not living through just any comic moment, subject to the usual shifting winds of fashion and circumstance. After a century of rising comedy saturation, our present society feels more like a culmination. In the same way that ecological doomsayers predict "peak oil," a point beyond which decline is inevitable, it may be that we are fast approaching "peak funny," the singularity of our current dizzying spiral toward never-ending hilarity. There's something foreboding about all the funny buildings and desserts, the fifty new Twitter jokes per minute on my phone. Don't get me wrong, I'm still laughing, but it feels unsustainable, the same way tourists often feel amid the splendid excess of someplace like Vegas or Dubai. This can't go on, right?

When someone's telling a joke, you can usually sense when the punch line is coming.

Excerpted from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings. Copyright © 2018 by Ken Jennings. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.