Check out this “Real Time Economics” Blog post in the WSJ that estimates the amount of money you need to earn to make you happy in various cities. Although happiness is “attainable” in Denver at $75,750, you need $93,000 in Boulder. Boulder is a bargain, however, compared to the $163,500 in NYC. And you can […]
Last week at Ignite Boulder, Joel Gratz (@gratzo), a famous Boulder meteorologist and creator of weather websites for winter sports enthusiasts (coloradopowderforecast.com) and summer sports enthusiasts (dontgetzapped.com), gave a talk, “Hire a Meteorologist, Not a Stock Broker.” He argued that meteorologists are more accurate than you might think (and certainly more accurate than other people […]
I had a chance recently to conduct a brief interview with Eric Farone, owner of the Bovine Metropolis (improv) Theater (LINK). Eric is a funny guy and was a speaker at TEDxBoulder. He gave an entertaining talk, which I will post as soon as it is up. I asked him my favorite question of late, […]
As a consumer psychologist, I have been intently following the developments in the emerging academic and applied field of neuromarketing. But first, a definition courtesy of Wikipedia (as of 8/25/10): Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. Researchers use technologies such as functional magnetic […]
What makes things funny? Most think that humor has something to do with incongruity. Incongruity can mean that something is unexpected, like a cloud that farts pistachios. One critic of our recent paper argues forcefully that humor results from this type of incongruity: Another swing-and-a-miss from eggheads trying to explain comedy. Not all comedy stems from […]
Last week, the BBC World Service Radio rang me up and asked me what makes things funny. They also included a very funny comedian, Alonzo Bodden, on the call. You can listen to the entire thing by clicking the link below. Try to ignore my heavy breathing (I was excited). Click here: The BBC interviews […]
The folks at Big Questions Online asked me the question: “What is the Most Universal Type of Humor?” Here is an excerpt of my answer: My colleague Caleb Warren and I believe that the most universal forms of humor are play fighting and tickling. Our theory, the “benign violation theory,” builds on previous work by […]
In a previous post, I discussed why I am trying to answer the age old question of what makes things funny (LINK). In today’s post, I investigate whether or not books that help you pursue a career in comedy help answer that important question. These folks are funny, but do they know what makes things […]
