With Joel Warner (Post on Wired) MONTREAL — At this year’s Just for Laughs festival, podcast poster boy Marc Maron painted a picture of a world in which the old rules of the stand-up circuit are being turned on their head thanks to the web. Maron, a longtime comic who
Post Mortem Part 2 (See Part 1). With Joel Warner (Full post on Wired.com) . An important goal of all this comedy analysis is to dispel many of the stereotypes and misassumptions long held about humor. Take the notion that women inherently aren’t as funny as men, an idea that’s
Post Mortem Part I With Joel Warner (Full post on Wired.com) Do you shun social situations to avoid ridicule? Do you struggle to engage in natural, easygoing conversations? When you hear others laughing, do you tense up and flail about in awkward, stilted mannerisms, practically popping and locking like a
While attending the International Society for Humor Studies conference last week, I had a chance to meet Gil Greengross of the University of New Mexico. He is an an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist, and I asked him the question: How can evolution help us understand humor? His answer is a
I am at Boston University, attending the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) annual conference. ISHS is an interdisciplinary group — psychologists, linguists, historians and many others — who are interested in the study of humor. Having never been to the conference before, I am eager to sample the wide
There are two prominent issues related to comedy and timing: One has to do with the way that a joke is executed: how quickly it is uttered, where the punch line is placed, when to pause, etc. I will save this issue for a future post. The other has to
Co-authored with Phil Fernbach. In last week’s post, we presented an analysis of the captions for The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest #281 (which Roger Ebert won). We hoped that the analysis would help generate a general set of principles that would be useful to folks who want to win
Do you want to win The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest? The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest is the biggest of its kind in the world. Each week, thousands of readers submit potential captions for the cartoon on the last page of the magazine. The winner gets his or her
In this introspective episode of Solo Thoughts, Peter McGraw delves into the life-altering insights gained from a year’s worth of solo psilocybin trips, exploring
Welcome to the final episode of I’M NOT JOKING. Comedian JD Lopez returns from Episode 1 to debrief and reflect on Peter’s experience building
