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Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Ultimate Insult Generator: Over 60 Million Hilarious Zingers and Stingers. Optical Illusions Dk Gereral Reference. The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions. The Encyelopedia of Immaturity Reference. About the Author Mike Barfield is a comic writer, cartoonist, poet and performer with 25 years' experience.

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Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. Bought it for a friend's 8yo boy for Christmas. If you open the flipbook as it arrives, the first insult is: And poses for selfies Perfect 8yo boy material! There will be a collection of kids from ages 7 to 12 at Christmas this year. I forsee much hilarity! This entertained my 10 year old son and his bunk-mates. Funny without being inappropriate. Family dinners became laughing attacks. In Britain, comedians are certified public intellectuals. Terry Jones, an avid medievalist, tried to solve the death of Chaucer in a book.

John Cleese has a species of lemur named after him, for his conservation work in Madagascar. In American post-comedy life, the closest thing we have to this is Steve Martin, who is now a passable banjo player. But this is changing!

Writing a book or two of funny essays is now a virtual requirement of comedy legitimacy and led to seven-figure publishing advances for hot commodities like Tina Fey, Aziz Ansari, and Lena Dunham. Around the same time, we started putting legendary comedians on postage stamps: Gloria Steinem and Amy Schumer started hanging out together at comedy clubs—and why not? The unlikeliest comedy hangers-on were the fabulously good-looking ones. Celebrities like Jon Hamm and Justin Timberlake were among the biggest sex symbols in the world, but they were tired of lounging on beaches with supermodels. What they really wanted to do, apparently, was hang out with comedians!

Only a Funny or Die director telling them how great that improv was on the last take would fill the comedy-shaped hole inside of them. It was the exact reverse of generations past, when an alpha dog like Frank Sinatra might let one comedy goofball—a Joey Bishop, say—join his gang. In , Esquire even began a monthly feature where a rotating series of comedians were pressed into service as advice columnists. After all, is there a demographic more stereotypically famed for having their lives together than stand-up comics? Ask a comedian; they always know what to do.

And once comedy is done fixing your love life and roommate troubles, why not put it to work on public policy? He was the closest thing millennials had to a Walter Cronkite, and his mere proximity had the power to create similarly endowed acolytes, a Legion of Substitute Stewarts that grew to include Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, and Samantha Bee. Murrow had, and was always the first to remind commentators that he was a comedian, not a reporter.

But this was mostly just a pretty transparent way to preempt criticism. This change is often framed as a decline of traditional media, but to my mind, the real story was the new legitimacy and relevance of comedy. In the late sixties, when the Smothers Brothers were doing the edgiest, counterculture-friendliest comedy on TV, the network still carped about every joke that mentioned Vietnam, the most important news story of the day. That cemented the TV status quo for decades: The rule worked mostly because the viewership was fine with keeping its news and its comedy in separate time slots.

In fact, they loved him for it. He could even snipe at his own network. Instead of getting fired like the Smothers Brothers, he became the highest-paid performer on television. Was it any wonder that jokes began to receive more scrutiny and Monday-morning quarterbacking than ever before? This was now serious business; comedy could quite literally change the world. The Magic Spell of Khlebnikov How did we get to this point? The futurists, as the name of their movement implied, were young artists besotted with the speed and dynamism and violence of mechanized modernity, and eager to replace the tired old art of the past with experimental new forms in their new century.

O, laugh out, laughers! You who laugh with laughs, you who laugh it up laughishly O, laugh out laugheringly O, belaughable laughterhood—the laughter of laughering laughers! O, unlaugh it outlaughingly, belaughering laughists! Laughily, laughily, Uplaugh, enlaugh, laughlings, laughlings Laughlets, laughlets. The poem came true.

How Comedy Took Over Our Culture

So why not make him a prophet of comedy as well? The secret history of the twentieth century is, after all, largely a history of humor. The old gods were dead, and what was left to us was the laughter of laughering laughers. People have always made jokes, and most of them went unrecorded. But the culture of which jokes we tell, and when, and why, does change.

The funnying-up of modern life has mostly been an organic and imperceptibly slow process, like a glacier inching toward the sea. But sometimes there are watershed moments on a cliff where the ice cracks all at once, and everyone on the cruise ship claps and the landscape in a certain place is changed forever. April 9, —seven years after Khlebnikov published his incantation—was such a date. Duchamp called it Fountain. VI That explains those sixteenth-century Arcimboldo portraits where some Saxon elector or naval hero is constructed entirely of fruit and fish, or those Jan Steen tableaux of merry domestic chaos, where chubby children are chasing each other around a table and the dog has just knocked over a platter of something.

He started an avalanche of art that was incomplete without the laugh: The old masters still cast a long enough shadow that these new jokes could be powered by surprise at their mild subversion. That was their whole impact. Ha, someone made that?

Over 1,700 Hilarious Jokes and Wisecracks

And someone else hung it up in their gallery? The playful postmodern impulse eventually bled into all the other visual arts—even architecture, where it had been axiomatic since the days of the Bauhaus that function and efficiency were all that mattered. And so the pendulum swung back toward the winking neon of Charles Moore and the cheekily ornamented faux casinos of Michael Graves and the rippling titanium currents of Frank Gehry.

But it was enough that the architect seemed to have acknowledged that fun exists. Sports heroes in those days were, almost to a man, not funny. They were sleepy-eyed white dullards with pomaded hair and beer bellies. It was all so dire that the funniest athlete of the s—you can look this up—was actually Seabiscuit. The hinge on which that change turned was Gorgeous George strutting down the aisle in a satin robe, accompanied by a rose-water-spritzing valet, and his newest fan Cassius Clay sitting up tall in his seat and seeing an alternate future in his head: But every wisecracking modern athlete today of every race has the same model: Two months after sports got funny, a similar milestone, also spurred on by a single force of personality, changed another corner of pop culture: At the time, superhero comics were in a snoozy decline, still dominated, as they had been for decades, by Superman and Batman and the other square-jawed champions of DC Comics.

They both had dogs and boy sidekicks and secret clubhouses full of trophies, and planned each other surprise parties and treasure hunts every year for their birthdays. Spider-Man fought crooks in between long anxious thought balloons about his money troubles, or his sick Aunt May, or the kids who bullied him at his Queens high school. The Mighty Marvel Way was nothing more than grafting soap opera elements onto traditional superhero tropes, and the publisher would successfully stick with that human-interest formula for decades: Soon, the rest of the industry was scurrying to catch up. But what really made those early Marvel comics such a pleasure to read was that, despite all the adolescent angst, they were genuinely funny.

For one thing, the heroes themselves were jokers. Peter Parker, the amazing Spider-Man, had an even lighter comic touch, using wisecracks to mask his own teenage insecurities and surprising foes just as often with a snarky put-down as with his trademark webs. Every issue was narrated in the knowing, irreverent voice of scripter-editor Stan Lee, immediately creating an over-the-top house style that defined Marvel for decades.

Superhero comic books, for the first time in a long time, were actually comic books. Laughing Through a Mouthful of Tapioca Foam The dominoes kept falling as the twentieth century neared its end. With shelter and clothing taken care of, just one basic survival need remained stubbornly unamusing: The watchword was always surprise. This mandarin orange is full of chicken liver parfait! Just like a circus act, an avant-garde food menu is designed to elicit laughter and gasps in alternation—and sometimes in combination. We were the first table served, and got to enjoy the wave of periodic slurps that circuited the dining room over the next hour.

A hot potato soup was served in a wax cup punctured by a skewer; when the skewer was pulled out, five different cold garnishes would plop into the soup, which you could then down like a shot. Not every dish was slapstick comedy. Medallions of lamb served with an array of forty-eight different toppings—choose your own adventure! But nothing was over the top like dessert was over the top: Does it sound gimmicky? It was absolutely gimmicky. But even so, Achatz and his peers achieved the apparently impossible: At Alinea, that price also includes the wine pairing, which of course makes everything seem funnier.

In each of these four case studies, the push for more and more humor was powered by something completely different. In art, it was driven by mechanization. The invention of photography lifted from artists the responsibility of mimicking reality on canvas, and allowed them access to a broader palette of approaches and effects—humor among them.

The change in sports came from technology as well, but this time from the invention of modern media culture. Mass media created an instant demand for athletes whose ability to entertain a home audience was just as important as whether they won or lost. The irreverent comic books of the same era were mostly a symptom of the growing cultural influence of youth.

Baby boom America had just invented the teenager, and that new market demanded its own light entertainment, with comedic markers that would differentiate it from the routine, serious world of working adults. Funny food at the end of the century felt like something a little more ominous: But all these trends eventually converged into one spot: A Stranger Here Myself The world that has been delivered to us now seems to have the goal of packing in as many laughs into every second of the day as possible.

This weight-loss wisecrack: | Book <3 | Pinterest | Jokes, Humor and Books

Once you start noticing it, funny is everywhere—even the tiniest, dumbest places. IX Online culture in particular seems to demand an even higher comedy quotient than real life. In I saw a New York Times story about an experimental new technique to save the life of trauma patients by injecting them with freezing salt water and inducing hypothermia—not a particularly hilarious topic, obviously.

I am not, generationally speaking, a Comedy Native. We had to hoard what little of it we had on albums and cassettes and videotapes. The very first movie I ever saw on video Betamax, specifically was a comedy: X I grew up rewatching the same worn VHS comedy tapes over and over: I reread Peanuts treasuries until the pages fell out. The scarcity of comedy meant that we watched or listened to things until we knew them letter-perfect. That cool, refreshing drink!

I was a comedy geek. Not a first-generation one—those would be the kids about ten years older than me with George Carlin records and subscriptions to the National Lampoon.

That was all that mattered. This is largely hindsight, by the way. Things were on; you watched them. If they were good, you taped them so you could watch them over and over. But being a funny kid was a big part of my identity, almost as far back as I can remember. XI Do you remember? Funny Kid is a lot less lonely, as identities go. Not everyone can make people laugh, and children figure out pretty quickly who has the knack and egg them on. Helens blew its penis yesterday! In that situation, where all might be lost for others, at least the Funny Kid can tell jokes.

You joke about your own bad haircut. Tell the joke you fear others might tell about you. You can also deflect by joking about literally anything else: XII And after I became a professional ex—game show contestant and started to write for a living, I suddenly had a little online venue blogs, then social media to post things that cracked me up instead of just annoying my family and friends with them.