As part of our global expedition exploring what makes things funny, we’re grilling humorists about the science behind scoring laughs. (This post was previously published at Wired.com.) Film has Cannes. Athletics have the Olympics. Music has South by Southwest. Comedy? It has Just for Laughs. The Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, currently celebrating its […]
This post was originally published on Huffington Post and was co-authored with Joel Warner. The studies run in the Humor Research Lab often require subjects to create something funny, like a write a joke or come up with an amusing caption. But when other folks are asked to rate what they’ve come up with, we […]
I recently gave an Ignite presentation about the Humor Code’s Mad Men experiment. It was a pretty funny affair – thanks to some very creative ad folks who were inspired by the Benign Violation Theory. Look here if you want to see more (funny) diagrams. If you are curious about the short presentation style: the […]
As part of our global expedition that explores what makes things funny, Joel Warner and I are grilling humorists about the science behind scoring laughs. Folks are a-twitter over all the ladies taking over comedy these days. Chelsea Hander. Amy Sedaris. Kristin Wiig. Lena Dunham. Does this mean the women of comedy are finally getting […]
With the Behavioral Research in Decision Making conference in town, now would be a good time for a lesson about defaults (which have long been a topic of study in the field). A default choice is an option that is selected automatically unless the decision maker specifies some alternative option. To learn everything you need […]
More nerds are coming to Boulder. The Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado is hosting two conferences next week: 1. The Behavioral Decision Research in Management conference (BDRM) brings together the best behavioral researchers. The topics of study are quite varied: Consumer behavior, organizational behavior, negotiation, managerial decision making, behavioral finance, experimental/behavioral […]
I recently visited Chicago to give a talk at the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. Here is a post with Joel Warner about the conference (Posted previously on Wired) CHICAGO — The 2012 Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor Conference is probably the only convention where it seems appropriate for a sock puppet to deliver […]
Thinking about magical thinking and disgust sensitivity… There were 32 tasks featured in the study. Here are a few of the more interesting ones: -Willingness to wear a Nazi hat. -Willingness to eat chocolate fudge in the shape of dog feces. -Willingness to put a fake gun to one’s head and pull the trigger .. […]
