A Planet Walks Into a Bar...

Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture by Ken Jennings (Scribner, 2018)

"Venus and Mars" may be "alright tonight,"* but Earth is downright funny, sometimes to its own detriment.  

Walking "bar bet" answer book and jokester  Ken Jennings has written an approachable, yet sometimes a bit academic look at the culture influence of comedy through the ages.  Jennings goes all the way back to early homosapiens and works his way up to the current political age.  He observes the evolution of what we value as a society and what we think is funny.  As a matter of fact, he takes an entire chapter - more like one long run-on sentence - to list the things he finds funny. (Some of his past tweets about people with handicaps, for example, have brought his sense of humor under scrutiny.  He has apologized for his "dumb jokes.")

When the book came out in paperback, the subheading was changed to How Comedy Ruined Everything. (Shades of Tru TV's Adam Ruins Everything.)  The new subhead sums up Jennings thesis that we've evolved as a society from one that valued physical strength (survival) to one that appreciated intellect (creative) to one that sees the ability to joke around as probably the most important attribute, as evidenced by practically everything and everyone having to be funny in some way to get our attention - so much so that we elected a reality buffoon as President.

*Thanks, Paul McCartney and Wings.

 Still Standing: Documentary by Elizabeth Zephyrine McDonough Shows Great Comedy Is Ageless

Some say that starting in comedy is a young person's game, what with the running from open mic to open mic at all hours of the night just to get some stage time.  Natalie K. Levant and George Saltz, the subjects of the short documentary Still Standing, show that just because you've made four score-plus trips around the sun doesn't mean you can't make people laugh, including those young enough to be your grandkids. 

Director Elizabeth Zephrine McDonough, who is also an actor and writer for The New Yorker and Full Frontal, was working on a documentary about the comedy scene in New York.  At one open mic, she was blown away by Natalie Levant, a tattooed, shaggy-haired octagenarian in sequined boots who dropped f-bombs and shot out jokes about sex, love, her kids, and more, leaving the audience in paroxisyms of laughter.  McDonough found a muse.

Enter George Saltz, another 80+ year old.  Both he and Natalie got into comedy in earnest when they became widowed.  While Natalie pursued her love of performing through community theater over the years, George first tried his hand at performing comedy in the Catskills when he was 18. (He bombed badly and became a clinical psychologist instead.)  Their approach to humor is different, but their result is the same - hysterical laughter.

Still Standing, which premiered at the Lower East Side Film Festival in New York City, will be making the film festival circuit, and will hopefully be available in the future either in theaters or via a streaming platform.  In the meantime, you can satisfy your itch for documentaries about mature merry makers with Lunch by Donna Kanter and If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast by Danny Gold.

(😁😁😁 out of five Smilies)