Take Boulder Startup Week as an example.

 

Each May, we throw a 5-day event that showcases the unique startup culture of Boulder. No registration required. You’ll find meetups, coffee shop pow-wows, the largest Ignite in the world, parties, drinks, food, hikes, bike rides, sun, and good people.

Find the full schedule is here. (Note: the Humor Code is participating. Joel and I are presenting a talk on the science of funny marketing.)

The week kicks off on with Ignite Boulder (tonight: 5/16). If you are attending, here are three “Sparks” you don’t want to miss:

– RFID = Really F***ing IncreDible (Carrie Requist)

– Cholesterol is Good! (Michael Gaeta)

– Opera is a fish oil supplement (Tierney Bamrick)

From left to right: me, Joel Warner, Pete Holmes, Myq Kaplan, Mary Mack & Jordan Morris. Photo: Jaqi Furback

From the beginning the notion that science can explain comedy was under attack. Pete Holmes quipped, “You’re letting light into a room that I like very dark.” Nonetheless, we had lots of laughs and an enjoyable discussion of the the Mad Men experiment and my glimpse into the New Yorker Cartoon Contest.

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You can listen to the panel at Wired.com, Huffington Post, or here:

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Finally, if you want better articulated thoughts about why it is important to use science to understand humor, check out our writings at Psychology Today here and here. article or this one.

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For more about the Humor Code:

Web page.

Facebook page.

Twitter account.

Wired blog.

Huffington Post blog.

Psychology Today blog.

Just type your Twitter into the klouchebag.com, and it kicks out a score between 1 and 100. What is being measured?

Klouchebag uses the ARSE rating system.

Anger: profanity and rage.

Retweets: “please RT”s, no or constant retweeting, and old-style.

Social Apps: every useless checkin on foursquare or its horrible brethren.

English Usage: if you use EXCLAMATION MARKS OMG!!! or no capitals at all, this’ll be quite high.

On Monday, I checked my score:

……………………….And I thought that retweeting was a nice thing to do.

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Alas, it looks like I am one of those people. I am not sure why my ‘social apps’ score is so high. I recently started using Instagram. Maybe that is it.

Is the ARSE system the best set of attributes? Slate does a nice job  suggesting other attributes that Tom could include. For example:

Frequency of tweets: This category might need to be scaled depending on the type of Twitter account in question, but, for a personal account, anything over 20 tweets per day warrants some kind of penalty.

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Of course, I wanted to know how I am doing relative to others. Sadly, I am worse than hip hop performer, Chris Brown:

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At least I can take solace in knowing that Piers Morgan is way klouchier than me (and everyone else on Twitter).

What is your Klouchebag score?

How do you cope with physical pain?

She differentiates two types of pain and talks about the strategy she uses depending on the pain.

For sharp pain, Heather uses distraction. (She later told me that she counts her pedal strokes.). Distraction is highly effective because it draws attention away from the source of the pain and requires cognitive resources that would normally be used to process pain information. Interestingly, research shows that more demanding attentional tasks are even more effective. In Heather’s case, counting by five’s might be even more effective.

For dull prolonged pain, she uses a form of dissociation — imagining another version of herself who is experiencing the pain and is separate from her. The technique is interesting and reminds me of research that investigates how we can have multiple selves. For example, the person who sets the clock before bed is a much different person than the person experiencing the alarm the next morning. The difference with Heather’s case is the two selves are present at the same time.

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…………………………………..Heather, pain free

Further reading:

Bazerman, M. H., Tenbrunsel, A. E., & Wade-Benzoni, K. (1998). Negotiating with Yourself and Losing: Making Decisions with Competing Internal Preferences. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 225-241.

McCaul, K.D., & Malott, J.M. Distraction and coping with pain. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 516-533.

The New Yorker article, Later, on procrastination.

On Friday, I am presenting a session. Check it out:

What Makes Things Funny?: Connecting Humor’s Antecedents to its Consequences.

For millenia, philosophers, scientists, and entertainers have puzzled over the question of what makes things funny. Although great progress has been made answering the question, one of the surprising aspects of prevailing humor theories is that they are not well-connected to the well-developed literature that features humor’s diverse consequences – especially how humor can just as easily hurt as it does help. I will review prominent theories of humor and discuss the challenges they have explaining the many therapeutic, social, and interpersonal consequences of humor. Finally, I will present new psychological research that suggests that a parsimonious account of humor can explain what makes things funny (and not funny), while also explaining humor’s costs and benefits outside the laboratory.

And yes, I will be presenting the benign violation theory.

For a long, long time, Portland’s comedy scene was anemic. No “A-room” comedy clubs, no big comedy bookers, no national buzz. That changed in 2008, however, with the launch of the city’s Bridgetown Comedy Festival, which featured 50 comedians and headliner Patton Oswalt. The following year, the festival was considerably bigger, and a year after that, bigger still.

Now, it’s considered one of the hottest comedy events in the country, with this year’s festival, running from April 12-15, boasting hot acts like Eric Andre, Doug Benson, Maria Bamford, Amy Schumer and Myq Kaplan. (Full disclosure: The Humor Code will be there, too, hosting a presentation on the science of comedy.)

There’s no question Portland is now firmly established on the national comedy map — and the credit goes largely to Andy Wood, an electrical engineer turned comic who helped launch Bridgetown and has served as its producer since. But success hasn’t gone to Wood’s head. He’s still plugging away at his stand-up career, and during this year’s festival, you’ll find him trading sets with comedians he’s invited from all over the country.

We wrangled a few minutes out of Wood’s busy pre-festival schedule to grill him about the pros and cons of Bridgetown blowing up, how engineering instructs his joke construction, and why alpha males aren’t funny.

Andy Wood (Image credit: Luke Reznor)

Humor Code: Why start the Bridgetown Comedy Festival? What are you trying to accomplish?

Andy Wood: When we started the festival, I don’t think any of us pictured it growing into what it has become. It was a small-scale idea. As a relative newcomer to stand-up and a lifelong comedy fan, I was frustrated at the lack of attention the comedy scene in the Northwest was getting. Selfishly, I also really wanted to see my favorite comics perform live in my city, and that wasn’t happening much at that time. Matt Braunger, Kimberly Brady and I put our heads together and came up with a list of comics we all liked, and it was surprisingly easy to get them up to Portland to perform.

I don’t think we were trying to accomplish anything beyond throwing a big party of sorts and turning people on to some performers we thought were great.

Humor Code: How did being a comedian inform how you wanted to run your festival? What had other festivals always done wrong, from your perspective?

Wood: It was a blessing and a curse that I’d not only never performed in a comedy festival before starting Bridgetown, but I’d never even been to one. I just looked at the problem of how to organize a festival from the standpoint of a comedy fan: How would I want this thing to be laid out to make it the most fun to attend, and to maximize the comedy that I could see in a weekend? It’s probably easier to start from square one like that rather than seeing how someone else has tackled the problem and trying to reverse engineer it.

Some of the things people have told us they like about Bridgetown that separates it from other festivals are the close proximity of all the venues, the affordability of the tickets, the wide range of acts, and the fact that we have a ton of fun activities for the comics to do together outside of the shows they’re performing on. That last part might be the most important factor in the festival’s success. A lot of comics say this is the most fun weekend of their year and that it’s like a giant summer camp for comedians.

Humor Code: For comics, what are the major differences between performing at a big festival like this and doing regular shows? Are some comedians better at one or the other?

Wood: Comedians who have been to Bridgetown say they have a good time because they’re in the company of their peers, the fans are rabid, and it’s a low-pressure situation. The lack of industry frees people up a bit and lets them do the kind of act they want to do. I think it has a much different feeling from doing a weekend of shows at a comedy club, where half the audience might have been coerced into coming, and the other half is just there for a bachelorette party and is drunk before the show starts.

Most comics I’ve seen at Bridgetown are at their best in a festival environment, but as our event grows and starts to have more of an industry presence, there’s a risk of that changing. I’m not sure how to avoid that, because we want industry there to discover new talent, but we also want all the performers to have a good time and be free in the choices they make onstage.

Humor Code: Before becoming a comedian, you were an engineer. How does your engineering background inform your work in comedy?

Wood: It definitely informs my work on the festival. The four months leading up to Bridgetown every year taxes both sides of my brain in equal amounts, which is fun for me. Well, maybe “fun” isn’t the right word. I guess it just makes me feel less lazy about the left-brain atrophy that I go through the rest of the year. I was never the best engineer when that was my full-time job, and I’m far from the best comedian, but I’m decent at both, which might be a rarer thing than being really good at either. That comes in handy when we’re trying to solve the hundreds of logistical problems that come up when you run a festival with 240 comedians performing on 12 stages in one weekend.

As a performer, my engineering background makes me approach joke-writing more analytically, and it affects my tastes as a fan of comedy. I can’t tolerate comedy that’s based on a faulty premise, for instance — in fact that’s one of my biggest stand-up pet peeves — and I’m sure that’s because of the engineer in me.

Humor Code: If folks are coming to your festival to try to spot the next big thing in comedy, what should they be looking for? What comic characteristics do you think indicate a shot at the big time?

Wood: A consistent, well-defined voice is as good an indicator of success as anything else. Audiences respond best when you inspire confidence in them — when they know they’re in good hands and can sit back and trust that you know what you’re doing. Even when someone’s onstage persona is intentionally timid or low status, if the comic does it well, the audience can tell that he’s in control, and they’ll respond. That kind of confidence can make up for a lot of deficiencies, but when you also combine it with strong, original writing, that makes for an unstoppable comic.

Humor Code: Were you born funny, or did your funniness come from practice and development? Does good comedy have to come from a screwed-up childhood?

Wood: I wasn’t born funny, and I don’t think anybody is. I always had a love for stand-up comedy growing up, and that, combined with a dash of middle-child syndrome, is probably what pushed me into stand-up. I don’t think comedy requires a screwed-up childhood, but you don’t find a ton of great comics who were alpha males and females in their social circles growing up, so it certainly helps to have been an outcast in some fashion in your formative years.

Comedy does come from practice and development, even if you’re not conscious of the fact that you’re developing it. Some people are forced by their circumstances to start doing that at an early age, which obviously gives them a huge advantage later in life if they want to pursue a career in comedy.

Humor Code: How could the comedy industry do better at finding, fostering, and promoting new talent?

Wood: Um, come to the Bridgetown Comedy Festival? Come on. That one’s a layup.

I do think that our selection committee does a decent job of reviewing the hundreds of applicants to the festival objectively. We don’t read people’s bios and resumes first; we just watch the tapes. We try not to be influenced by managers, social obligations, et cetera, and pick the lineup based on whether the performances make us laugh.

As somewhat of an outsider to the comedy industry in general, I can’t speak to how networks and other festivals make their talent decisions, but I sometimes get the feeling that performers are championed not because any decision maker was blown away by them, but because they thought they knew how to sell them. That seems backwards to me. Why not get behind people who actually inspire you?

Read the full post at The Humor Code

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For more about the Humor Code, check our:

Web page.

Facebook page.

Twitter account.

Wired blog.

Huffington Post blog.

Psychology Today blog.

What do you think?

Here is an amusing look at what the experiment was like:

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 them count off odd and even numbers), and almost immediately people will like the members of their group and not like the members of the other group. In this way, a comedian who creates a group atmosphere can enhance the audience’s experience.

His answer also highlights the two-way relationship between humor and social bonding. Research shows that humor can improve social bonds, but conversely, building social bonds also improves humor.

Check out Matt on his recent appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson:

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 the questions that more than half of the students said yes to. Here is the other half of the questions:

…

……“I swear that I am not Peter North.”

Some observations:

-Across all the questions, there was a positive correlation (r = .47) between mean funniness and offensiveness ratings. That is, the more offensive the question was judged the funnier it was also judged.

-There are some really peculiar questions here.

-The responses to the bed wetting questions is the most disturbing to me.

- I don’t know what to make of the response to the unicorn question.

- My students are more likely to know a porn actor than a

…..

What do you notice?

……….One kind of Dutch Oven, but not the funny kind.

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 in an unmarked envelope.

I asked:

Have you taken Adderall for non-medical purposes? yes/no

I also asked if the the question was A) funny (yes/no) and B) offensive (yes/no).

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said that they had taken Adderrall for non-medicinal purposes. I was surprised that the number was so high, but the number was consistent with research that reveals high rates of Adderall use in university populations.

Mostly for fun, I added some other questions that might be funny or offensive. Here are the questions that a majority of students said “yes” to:

..

.One type of Dutch Oven. Though, not the funny kind.

Some observations:

-Some of these questions are truly peculiar. I can’t take credit for them all, however. I asked friends and colleagues for ideas. And yes, I censored some potential questions.

-Don’t read too much into the responses for the “Dutch Oven” question, as it has more than one meaning. If you want the alternative answer, just type Dutch Oven into Urban dictionary.

-The students were much more amused than offended by the questions.

-Given the high rates of agreement, the students seem to be fairly honest in their responses.

…….

What do you notice?

…….

Look for more questions, answers, and observations in Part 2 next week.

……….One kind of Dutch Oven, but not the funny kind.