Funny sells Tomorrow, we leave Colorado to get a glimpse of the big business of humor. Although comedy can be found almost anywhere (as we discovered during our trip to Palestine) it’s most apparent where people have substantial resources to commit to creating – and enjoying – comedic entertainment. New York City is one of those places. […]
Month: September 2011
A serious non-serious research topic
Why bother studying humor? Because it may be one of the most important topics of all. With Joel Warner (originally posted at Psychology Today; based on one of my earliest posts ) Humor has been around for as long as there has been humanity — and considering that chimps and other primates laugh, humor has […]
A common joke in the Middle East.
I recently spent a day in the West Bank city of Hebron. Simply put, Hebron is a wacky place. To put it’s wackiness into perspective, I mentioned to Jacob Gough, the new director of the Freedom Theater (which is in the refugee camp of Jenin – the location of a high-profile murder of its founder, […]
A policy maker’s dilemma: Public safety or preventing blame?
Recently, one of my papers, co-authored with Alex Todorov and Howard Kunreuther received some (good) press (NPR and Washington Post). The gist of the argument we make is that anti-terror policy in the U.S. (and I suspect elsewhere) is guided not only by a scientific assessment of risk, but also by the potential blame that […]