From Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball to Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey, and Nikki Glaser, discover what a century of comedy’s most inventive performers can teach us about getting funny—and staying funny.

From SCTV and Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld and BoJack Horseman, comedy kept changing. So did the people who made us laugh. Silent films, radio, television, streaming, and the internet each rewrote the rules: what comedians could do, what audiences expected, and what it took to get a laugh. Some comedians saw possibilities nobody else had imagined. Others reinvented themselves again and again.

Mel Brooks made racists the fools in Blazing Saddles. Albert Brooks put an entire life on trial in Defending Your Life. Harold Ramis turned a man living the same day over and over into a story about becoming a better person in Groundhog Day. These weren’t just great comedies. They were creative breakthroughs.

In Only the Funny Survive: How Comedy Keeps Finding a Way, edited by Paul Slansky, Rich Davis II reveals the pattern connecting comedy’s pioneers, their breakthroughs, and the changing world of entertainment. Tough crowds, failed jokes, demanding gatekeepers, and new technologies forced comedians to sharpen their instincts and develop new skills. The struggle didn’t just produce better comedy. It produced better comedians.

If you love comedy, you’ll discover new insights into the comedians and shows you’ve enjoyed for years—and what made them so extraordinary.

Now comes artificial intelligence, offering something no earlier generation of comedians had: a possible shortcut around the struggle that helped them become funny.

What happens if AI can improve the joke but doesn’t improve the comedian?