Two U. of Colorado professors have attempted to quantitatively rank America's 50 biggest cities on funniness:
His findings were drawn from surveys of residents (on the prevalence of humor in their daily lives) and of comedians, number of visits to comedy websites, tweets, radio stations, comedy clubs per square mile and native-born comedians per capita.
This seems like a hopeless effort. Yet, the topline finding -- Chicago is the funniest city in America -- seems not unreasonable. Off the top of my head, I probably would have picked Chicago #1 (although I might guess Toronto if North America was the category). I'm not exactly sure how I would have arrived at Chicago as my guess, but it's certainly reasonable. Los Angeles, of course, has a gigantic abundance of comedy professionals from all over the country, and there is more goofy stuff in Los Angeles than anywhere else. But I'm not sure if Angelenos on average as aggressively get the joke as Chicagoans.
Interestingly, this map with red dots for the ten funniest cities and black dots for the bottom ten looks a lot like the usual Moynihan's Law of the Canadian Border, such as lists of America's most well-read cities (Atlanta does well there, too).
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But humor has such variety!
Personally I find absurdist humor the best (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but my wife finds slapstick the funniest (The Pink Panther). I am a former New Yorker and my wife a Midwesterner.
Chicago and the Midwest in general, to me, are not very absurdist. They never struck me as Kafkaesque. NYC used to reign supreme in this regard, but I find that lately DC has clawed to the top in the absurd department ("Veep" is the perfect rendition of DC).
LA always struck me as "fart" jokes. That is to say, juvenile humor.
Here is a story about a 40 year old IT guy from Peoria who tweeted jokes as a hobby and got hired as a TV comedy writer based on his Twitter feed. Reminds me of that episode of 30 Rock where they went trawling for talent in 'real America'.
SF seems too stuck-up to be funny
Perhaps there's a lot of clubs there because the residents and patrons have a lot of money
The civil war was about who would be making fun of whom.
Black vs L in the UK
Christian nursery worker claims unfair dismissal over dispute with gay colleague
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/20/christian-nursery-worker-claims-unfair-dismissal-gay-colleague
Many, many years ago I once lost something of some nominal value in Virginia Beach. In retrospect, it was hilarious. Therefore I think the dude's data must be incomplete.
LA, where even comedians take themselves seriously.
Gilbert P
Funny "haha" or funny flaming queer. With that list, it looks to be the latter.
Steve,
If you haven't seen Alan Zweig's documentary "When Jews Were Funny", I highly recommend it. Not only is it very funny, but many of the interviewees are refreshingly candid about their ethnocentrism.
I suspect Zweig would agree with you about Toronto, too.
-Chris
I get it. This study like the one you published before on the ranking of 'well read' cities is a joke. Certainly the methodology is laughable.
Asking the citizens themselves how much humor plays a part in their lives only gives you a measure of their self image not their actual behavior.
It's the difference between asking people if they like ballet versus examining box office receipts. There is something that's changing with latitude here but it may just be the way people respond to surveys.
In your previous blog posting on reading the study came from a newspaper (USA Today) and measured newspaper readership. Imagine that. They also measured library attendance. I used to haunt public libraries as a teen but I haven't been in a library in more than ten years which was also about the time I cancelled my newspaper subscription. I don't read magazines anymore either. But I still read and I can prove it. I know I read more than two books a week. I have the dates and titles right here on my Kindle.
In fact the only person I know who still reads newspapers is you Steve Sailer. You get a lot of ideas for your columns from The New York Times. Then I and your other followers read these newspaper items at once remove by reading your blog. I read Drudge in much the same way. Drudge reads all those web sites for me. Some of those web sites may have their own people reading newspapers too.
In any case, reading ain't as simple as it once was. Nor is humor. Bill O'Reilly could have his man-on-the-street Jesse Watters go to all these cities and have him challenge passerby's to tell him a joke.
Albertosaurus
hired as a TV comedy writer
If he is going to work as an EMPLOYEE of The Frankfurt School, then the joke is on him.
He'll never see a fraction of the revenue which the purchasers of his Intellectual Property will realize.
BTW, may I assume that everyone in the Dark Enlightenment is aware that you only ever sign for a percentage of the GROSS, not of the net?
Right?
Bueller?
Anyone?
LA always struck me as "fart" jokes. That is to say, juvenile humor.
Have you seen what The Frankfurt School is doing with their Nickelodeon subsidiary?
You've just described about 100% of their content for the li'l chilrun'.
Sometimes I wonder whether this culture war onslaught is designed to force our kids to become so screwed up in the head that, once they grow up, they will shell out the big bucks for psychiatric "help" to rid themselves of all their demons.
"You will pay us to sell you the rope with which you will hang yourselves."
I think Chicago's has the edge partly because of earlier exposure to Canadian broadcasts of SCTV and Monty Python.
California was considered by Tom Wolfe as the epicenter of people who were "beyond" irony. When I get out of the South, especially the deep South, I find that love of give and take conversational humor pretty much diminishes. I suspect that the influence of black folks has made that type of humor a more southern thing in general.
I don't see how Atlanta can be funny. Unless they're comparing themselves to Detroit.
Moynihan's law seems strange to apply here because black people have long been well-represented in the world of comedy, especially stand-up. This is borne out in the map by the high representation of Atlanta with its large middle class black population and comedy clubs.
Universities waste their time on so much worthless crap these days you'd think all the great problems of the world had been solved.
Moral of the story
Hispanics aren't very funny.
Moynihan said that Reagan's military build up was actually aimed at curbing the increases in welfare spending by getting the country into so much debt that further social spending would be impossible. He said this was not an interpretation; he heard it in so many words from a administration insider. Now that's funny.
New Orleans's absence from the map is conspicuous. Perhaps there's nothing funny or unfunny about deeply ingrained corruption & vice? Only John Kennedy Toole found the things in New Orleans worth laughing about, and then only through what is a penetratingly misanthropic, sad, grim lens.
Las Vegas is not funny because it's nothing more than an enormous, garishly lit, machine for maximum extraction of cash from the human moths it attracts.
Humor is a function of culture. I intuit that my ideass of what is funny and what not are essentilally orthgogonal to the ideas shared by the authors of this "research". Based on personal experience, the "red" cities contain very high proportions of folks whose standard response to non-PC humor is "I don't find that the least bit funny."
Moral of the story
Hispanics aren't very funny.
Many of the "least funny cities" on this list are whiter than most of the "funniest cities".
Tulsa, Arlington, Ft. Worth, Jacksonville, Tucson are whiter than the "funniest cities" save Portland, Seattle, and Denver.
Chicago is about 40% white and about 30% Hispanic.
Tell a homo joke and funny cities will not laugh but burn you at the stake. So much for funny.
"Chicago is about 40% white and about 30% Hispanic."
The last time I was in Chicago I was shocked.
There's a movie theater called Music Box and next to it, a school.
Long ago when I used to live there for a time in the 80s, the school was mostly Hispanic, had some blacks, and few white kids.
Passing by it recently, it was like 90% white kids of affluent whites in the playground.
It was like What the Hell moment.
University labels conservative areas lame and liberal areas hip and with it.
Whoa color me shocked.
Texas is not funny.
This is a commercial map of where The Comedy Biz does well as an industry, proving nothing about sense of humor. Atlanta is the regional power with lots of infrastructure, black and white, so of course it would be listed here. Why would any booking agent or HBO producer send you to Tulsa... Which brings up the only interesting thing about the study, the poor showing of Las Vegas
Texas is not funny.
Mexicans aren't funny.
I can picture some aspie libertarian-Vulcan economists putting their heads together on this one: "What if we performed a study to reveal the workings of this human phenomenon known as 'comedy?' Naturally where there's a popular demand for it the local market will supply as many bars, theaters, and civic auditoria to meet it at a price congenial to consumer choice -- it is a truth universally acknowledged by all comedy club owners"
Gieseking-Gould connection: never thought of it that way. Both were eccentric in their interpretive approach, though.
I believe it was Celibidache who said to Cortot, "How many women does it take to screw in a light bulb?" Since the answer isn't funny in the USSA's swpltopias, I will omit it.
Speaking of what passes for culture, has anyone noticed how wit and today's dummies don't mix when it comes to adventure and sci-fi movies? For example, there used to be humor in the Bond films. But the later ones are simultaneously grimly humorless and ridiculously unbelievable. Like in the one (I believe it was a Bond) where they're running on foot so fast they can suddenly run up the sides of skyscrapers! Just DUMB, completely unrealistic even for Bond (imagine Connery doing that?) but presented seriously, and in a manner of self-important earnestness. This applies to many such movies, not just Bond. ("Salt" is another example.) The dumber people are, the less able they are to perceive absurdity and hoot at it. In the old days, when, say, a comic book hero did something impossible, there was at least some tongue-in-cheek feel in the presentation. Now, characters do the most ridiculous, laughable CGI crap - and nobody laughs. Because they are too dumb to laugh. Forget about audiences, this applies with even more force to the makers of such schlock. They apparently really think it's serious and deep. Is this nerd autism or just increasing dumbth or what?
Mexicans aren't funny.
Arlington and Ft. Worth are whiter than most of the "funniest cities".
Boston is much less funny than it used to be. Hot new comics used to come out of Boston on a regular basis, but I can't recall one over the last 10 years.
Rigorous PC has no sense of humor.
Moynihan said that Reagan's military build up was actually aimed at curbing the increases in welfare spending by getting the country into so much debt that further social spending would be impossible.
How's that workin' for ya?
My off the top of my head conjecture about why the South isn't funny (with Atlanta as the exception that proves the rule) is that humor requires a willingness to seem silly; a funny man doesn't make an impressive bully; and white southerners didn't want to look silly in front of the black man. This might go a little way to explaining why Germans have such bad senses of humor.
On the other topic, when Gould agreed to substitute for Michelangeli, Karel Ancel exclaimed, "Michelangeli, Gould, where do they find these kooks!" But Gould had the better line, "It's the rarest case of the best substituting for the second best."
Rigorous PC has no sense of humor.
That's why, contra Steve, Toronto doesn't spring to mind for me. Making so many subjects off-limits would seem only to leave room for stuff like "Boy that Sarah Palin sure is stupid!"
Moynihan seems to be a favorite among White guys who want to appear educated and respectable.
This is total BS. Seattle isn't at all funny. It's the least funny city I've ever been to, and I've lived in it for almost 40 years.
Portland isn't funny, either.
The Pac NW is where jokes go to die. This place is about as funny as the Spanish Inquisition (and they wouldn't get that joke here).
The Pac NW is where jokes go to die.
Pac NW? Humor of the Midwest, phoniess of SoCAL, goodiness of NorCAL and the self-regard of Cambridge, MA.
As far as I am concerned, they have the most beautiful landscapes (ocean, rain forest, high desert, alpine mountains) in the country and the worst people.
Or, as someone once told me pithily "techno-hippie rednecks."
Cambridge in the late 70s/early 80s was ground zero for comedy. Jay Leno, Steven Wright, Jimmy Tingle, et al came out of what was essentially a Cambridge, as opposed to Boston, scene. But that was when Cambridge still had a good number of working-class ethnics.
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