The RoastMe practice emerged in 2015 on the online platform Reddit. Devotees of RoastMe post pictures of themselves (i.e. the Roastee’) whilst holding a placard (of some kind) with the phrase ‘Roast Me’ written on it – with the idea of attracting amusing insults (as comments) The first academic review of the practice appeared in […]
Tag: laugh
Taking Laughter Seriously at the Supreme Court [study update]
Studies into possible implications of laughter episodes at the US Supreme Court were initiated in 2005 by Professor Jay D. Wexler (Boston University School of Law) who was the first to calculate the ‘Laughter Episodes Instigated Per Argument Average’ (LEIPAA) from the records of court proceedings. Details here in a 2016 Improbable Article. Then, in 2019, […]
You can lead a horse’s ass to wonder, but you can’t make him think
This tiny video, by Gracie Cunningham, is a beautifully subtle example of how to make people laugh, then think. The twitter comment about it, by Alex Turner, is a good example of how you can lead a horse’s ass to wonder, but you can’t make him think. https://twitter.com/i/status/1298372968838508546 Gracie Cunningham was bombarded, on Twitter, with […]
The function of evil laughter in popular culture (new study)
One of the very few (perhaps the only) peer-reviewed scholarly studies devoted to investigating the function of evil laughter in popular culture has been recently been penned by Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, who is a doctoral researcher at the School of Communication and Culture, Department of English of Aarhus University, Denmark. In his new paper for The Journal […]
Profile: ‘International Journal of Smart Home’
The ‘International Journal of Smart Home’ (a publication of SERSC: (Science & Engineering Research Support soCiety) “- is intended to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in the area of SHE [Smart Home Environment] including business models, security services, and novel applications associated with its utilization.” For a sample paper, can we recommend : ‘The […]
The Kajimoto laboratory (part 2): Muscular laugh enhancement
For another cross-modal human/computer research project [see previous article in this series] which has been developed by the Kajimoto laboratory (a department of The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan) investigates ‘The Enhancement of Laugh by using Muscle activity’, [note: paper mostly in Japanese] “On television show, we are familiar with artificial sound of laughter […]
Putting animals in a funny order (1897 study)
Which animal, in your opinion, is funnier, a Narwhal or a Numbat? A: Narwhal B: Numbat C: Neither If your answer was A, or B, then it adds weight to the hypothesis that animals can be listed in order of ‘funniness’. Messrs G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Alliń made progress in this area as far […]
Tax demands – the funny side (he makes ’em LAUGH, then PAY)
John Morreall (pronounced Mor-el), is not only professor of religion and department chair at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, US, he also runs Humorworks, which, amongst other things, conducts corporate seminars on the subject of humor, with clients such as the Internal Revenue Service, The World Bank, and Ernst & Young. Thus […]
Study: Top (male) comedians die earlier?
A new study from professors Simon Stewart and David Thompson of the Centre for the Heart and Mind and the Mary MacKillop Institute of Health Research (MMIHR) at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) has found that : “Elite comedians are at increased risk of premature death compared to their less funny counterparts.” The team examined […]
They collect laughs
Laughter aggregated: “ILHAIRE Laughter Database,” Gary McKeown [pictured here], Roddy Cowie, Will Curran, Willibald Ruch, Ellen Douglas-Cowie, Eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) Istanbul, Turkey, 2012. The authors, at Queen’s University, Belfast, UK and the University of Zürich, Switzerland, explain: “The ILHAIRE project seeks to scientifically analyse laughter in sufficient detail to […]