I saw that Matt Kirshen (@mattkirshen) was performing at Denver’s Comedy Works. I cornered him in the alley and asked him: Is good comedy a conspiracy? Matt’s observation reminds me of the “minimal groups paradigm” in the psychology literature. Basically, you can take a bunch of strangers and arbitrarily create two groups (e.g., by having […]
One of my more irreverent posts. If you haven’t already seen it, check out Part 1. A few years ago I asked my students some peculiar questions as part of a voluntary anonymous survey. Besides getting their yes/no agreement, I also asked if the questions were funny (yes/no) and offensive (yes/no): Last week, I posted […]
Please don’t take today’s post too seriously. A few years ago I was wondering how pervasive the use of Adderall was among my students. To do so, as part of a class demonstration, I set up a voluntary survey at the end of the semester. To ensure anonymity I asked students to seal the survey […]
As part of my global expedition that explores what makes things funny, Joel Warner and I are grilling humorists about the science behind scoring laughs. “Co-creator of Chappelle’s Show.” With a credit like that, it would’ve been easy for Neal Brennan to quietly retire among the comedy gods once the celebrated sketch-comedy show (not to […]
