What Will Make Us Laugh?

By Ben Stiller

Trying to predict what will be funny in 25 years is as hard as trying to figure out what will be funny five minutes from now. In fact, I would be hard pressed to identify what it is we all laugh at today.

Computer scientists, bioresearchers and gagmeisters are all in agreement that the face of comedy will change drastically in the next quarter-century. But what will that face look like? Will it have good skin and aquiline features, or will it be pockmarked and disfigured? No one knows, not even our most respected comedic minds. I attempted to get in touch with George Lucas, who last year brought us the highest-grossing comedy feature of all time, Star Wars: Episode I--The Phantom Menace. But he didn't return my calls.

So here are several speculations, based on a fair amount of fact, as to what we have in store.

Breeding New Comedians While there has been much ballyhoo in the past decade over progress in cinematic special effects with computer-generated imagery (CGI), no one has been talking, at least publicly, about the incredible breakthroughs in the relatively nascent field of comedic gene engineering (CGE). Manipulating genes to alter the makeup of a human's looks and personality has been in the realm of possibility for years. But the prospect of doing it for comedic effect is just starting to take shape. Scientists are working to isolate the specific genetic code responsible for what makes us laugh--the "funny-bone gene," if you will. By breaking down the DNA of such comedic greats of the past as W.C. Fields, researchers are hoping that they can learn what it was in these classic funnymen that made them funny. While the research has yet to hit pay dirt, an unexpected side benefit has been the discovery of a new "alcoholism gene."

Once scientists succeed, the possibilities for comedic breeding are unlimited. By scraping cells from the fingernail of Lucille Ball, say, and from one of Ed Asner's eyebrows, a geneticist would have the tools necessary to fertilize the embryo of a child with specific kinds of comedic potential. Though testing so far has only been done on pigs--not a legitimate gauge, since it is hard to distinguish their laugh from an oink-snort--results are promising. Some studios and networks are toying with the idea of "development nurseries" that would venture to create the optimal candidates for sitcom stardom through gene manipulation.

Serious moral and legal questions are already being raised by these gene experiments. For example, if a clone of comedian Don Rickles were to grow up and entertain a whole new generation of audiences by insulting them with the term hockey puck, would the Rickles estate be entitled to royalties? Or could Ricklebaby claim them as his own, since it was his natural instinct to use the term? And for that matter, can anyone at all claim ownership of the term hockey puck, including the National Hockey League?

Fast Is Funny

As we race through the new millennium, one thing is certain: time will be our greatest commodity. In the past 20 years, we have seen the pace of almost every aspect of life speed to dizzying proportions, and in the future attention spans will get shorter than we can imagine. The time it takes to make us laugh will thus be the true test of the most successful entertainer. Stand-up comedy, nearly extinct in the '90s, will have trouble surviving at all. The reason? No time to go to a club to hear a live human being tell jokes, or wait through 45 minutes of Late Night with Conan O'Brien before the stand-up appears. People looking for a laugh will simply log on and sift through the database of every joke and routine any comedian has ever told on TV, radio or record. The computers will then cancel out redundant routines--any piece of material that has been done by more than one comedian. This will leave Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Robert Klein as the only comedians we will ever need to listen to.

The Death of the Sitcom

Though TV sitcoms already have an incredibly fast-paced, joke-every-3-sec. tempo, in the future that will seem to have an almost Shoah-like pace. One possibility is that story lines will be junked altogether to get straight to the laugh--since, as any sitcom producer will tell you, the same seven plots have merely been recycled endlessly since the beginning of television. Realizing that likable characters are the key to a TV comedy's success, the networks will establish new characters in 2- to 3-min. "mini-coms." Then, after viewer response is gauged via an Internet hookup, those favorites will appear on the air regularly, in 5- or 6-sec. bursts, much like the network promos we now see. You know the ones: Ross from Friends dancing in a bubble held by Rachel, then getting "popped" by a giggling Monica. These short bursts will eventually replace the shows themselves, allowing viewers at home the chance to watch their favorite comedy character make faces, dance a jig and convey a warm sense of familiarity, without all the boring stuff in between. This will, however, also lead to the extinction of the "comedy writer" as we now know the species.

Of course, I believe, as many do, that all these changes will become moot owing to the coming invasion of Superior Beings from the 12th Quadrant of the Fifth Dimension, known to us earthers as the Great Nebula in Orion (see my essay "Who Will Destroy Our Civilization and Lay Waste to Life on Earth as We Know It in the Next Century?" in the next Visions issue). If the indicators are correct, the mother ship of these Ecstatic Beings will emit a cloud of radioactive gas that blankets the planet, wiping out all life for a period of 10,000 years. Then and only then shall comic reconstruction begin.

At that point there will be a new assessment of what is funny. And my bet is there will be a major rediscovery of the comedian Carrot Top. If there is one thing for sure in comedy, it's that props always get a laugh.

Ben Stiller directed and starred in the movie Reality Bites and co-starred in There's Something About Mary