Although still new to comedy, Boston comic Vally D already performed at Denver Comedy Works, Boston’s Comedy Studio, Maine’s Portland Comedy Festival, The Riot Theater, Stand Up Break In and Reykjavik’s Goldengang Comedy Festival. She also acts and co-produces the show Laugh While You Can, a comedy show that benefits charity. — Our guest is […]
JD Lopez knows that first impressions are important – and first impressions in comedy are often physical. He learned this from his training as an actor. Put your best foot forward because people immediately interpret subtle cues and body language. Thus, JD opens his show with energy. As he says, you have to tackle the […]
Benign violation theory sighting in forthcoming research by Sam Yam and colleagues. Here is an article about it. What I like about this work is that it highlights both the risks and rewards of being funny at work: A leader who issues a steady drumbeat of ‘benign violations’ through his or her humor can inadvertently […]
Comedians often believe that words with a “k” sounds makes things funnier. Just google “K sound comedy,” and you will see lots of posts about it. Grammar Girl even dedicated a post to it: The humor potential of the letter ‘k’ has been part of comic lore for years. In the Neil […]
From the T9 function on flip phones to Swype on smart phones, spelling mis-predictions are the bane of handheld communication. It’s hard to catch all the typos that result from Autocorrect Fails. Using The Benign Violation Theory, we can break down when Autocorrect Fails will be (especially) funny. Humor arises when something is wrong yet […]
Working with a team of researchers at the Moral Research Lab (MoRL), I recently published a paper about how the most popular experimental stimuli in moral psychology has some problems. (See abstract below; The Atlantic also wrote about it.) Before we get started, here is some info about those stimuli, the trolley problem: If you […]
By Hillary Anger Elfenbein; Washington University in St. Louis So your three-year-old comes home and tells you that he wants chocolate for dinner. Now what? If you’re anything like me, you start by trying to sell him on what else you’ve prepared. This approach doesn’t work very well, and then he throws himself on the […]
