Ken Jennings - Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture

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ALSO BY KEN JENNINGS

Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

Ken Jenningss Trivia Almanac: 8,888 Questions in 365 Days

Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

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Copyright 2018 by Ken Jennings

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First Scribner hardcover edition May 2018

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by David A.Gee

Laughing Emoji by Cougarsan/Shutterstock

ISBN 978-1-5011-0058-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-0061-1 (ebook)

There will never be enough comedy. Comedy is at a premium always.

Phyllis Diller

America can be counted on to take any good idea, or any bad idea, and absolutely run it into the ground.

George Carlin

S top me if youve heard this one before. A man walks into a sex ed class.

In my defense, I was supposed to be there. It was the first night of For Boys Only, a popular four-hour seminar on puberty and sexuality given every month or so at Seattle Childrens Hospital. The class, along with its For Girls Only counterpart, is the brainchild of a local nurse who thought parents shouldnt be outsourcing sex talk with their kids to elementary schools. This is a relationship-building class, my registration e-mail told me, so it will be important to your child to have you attend both sessions. Because class includes interactive exercises for the adult and child, our teachers request that you sit together. The classes have become so popular locally that theyre virtually a rite of passage for Seattle-area fifth-graders and their helicopter parents, and the program has since spread to Oregon and California.

Retaking sex ed with a roomful of twelve-year-old boys wasnt my idea of a relaxing Monday evening. To make matters worse, my son, Dylan, discovered a week beforehand that two of his best friends from school had been signed up for the same session. So of course we all had to meet up beforehand for burgers, and then I had to sit through two hours of sex ed with my sons goofy friends and their dads. Also, right before the class was set to begin, a familiar-looking bearded man walked into the auditorium with his young son and sat down a few rows in front of us. It took me a few minutes to recognize him as longtime NBA coach P. J. Carlesimo. This is in no way relevant to the rest of the story, but you cant just go to sex class with P. J. Carlesimo and not mention it.

The instructor, Greg Smallidge, was exactly who I expected: a friendly-faced middle-aged white guy with receding brown hair, a vaguely professorial air, and an easel stacked with, I could only assume, the same grisly cross-sections of the human reproductive system that I remembered from fifth grade. But when Smallidge began the class, I couldnt believe what I was hearing. He was funny! In my day, sex ed wasnt funny. Maybe the girls class was funny? I dont know, I still have no idea what went on in there. But the boys class was only funny unintentionally, like when my friend Glenn asked the teacher, What if pee comes out instead and you pee inside the lady? and Mr. Jenkins explained that his wife liked morning sex and even when he really had to go, pee never came out when he ejaculated, and then everyone got incredibly uncomfortable and quiet.

Smallidge was a slow, careful talker, but what I had initially taken for unflappable dullness turned out to be a calculated deadpan, in the vein of Bob Newhart. He introduced the topic of masturbation by saying, Its a very personal subject. Its not like a kid comes home one day and says, You know, I had a rough day at school. Im going to go up to my room and masturbate for about ten minutes. He paused and let the laughter build, then added the topper. Dad, could you make me a sandwich?

Later, he asked the room to suggest slang terms for penis and jotted down a list on his big drawing pad. Many of the kids had obviously never been given license to yell anatomical slang in a crowded roomful of adults, and they jumped in with gusto, some of them possibly inventing terminology on the spot. Old one-eyed Mr. Johnson! shouted a boy two rows back, which I thought was a bit much. The room teetered on the brink of anarchy. But Smallidge got them back! It was essentially a two-hour stand-up set for the most tentative of audiences, and it was masterful. I felt like applauding at the end.

Its like Houdini, he told me later when I asked him about his crowd work. How do you get out of this and survive? Smallidge was a corporate trainer back in the 1990s when a friend at Seattle Public Schools called him out of the blue to see if hed be interested in teaching puberty classes. Hed been a philosophy major in college and had no background in medicine, psychology, or education. He didnt even have any kids. Sure, Ill do that, he said. Hes now been a full-time sexuality curriculum guy for more than twenty years.

It does feel like stand-up comedy, Smallidge said, but he disagreed with my assumption that For Boys Only is a tough room. No one is expecting the instructor in a hospital auditorium to be funny, he explained, so its easy to beat low expectations. And he thinks the laughs are what makes it possible to spark real family conversations about sex. When parents come up against issues of sexuality with their kids, he said, the first response is usually discomfort and defensiveness. But with humor, you dont have to be defensive for a few minutes, because youre laughing.

I told him that my childhood sex ed classes were never funny on purpose. You could get in trouble for laughing.

Theres this one very conservative teacher, he always starts my introduction with, There will be no laughing! You know the rules! Because theyve gone over all the ground rules. Im going to be watching you! Very severe. Its sort of like having a bad opening act. Ive got to undo that intro without offending him.