The Funniest Cities in the United States as Ranked by the Humor Research Lab at University of Colorado

While researching his new book The Humor Code, University of Colorado professor Dr. Peter McGraw enlisted fellow Humor Research Lab team members to create the Humor Algorithm (HA) in attempt to find the funniest city in the US. Research included interviews with more than 900 residents in the country’s ten largest cities, as well as online data collection.

Over a nine-month period, the team collected extensive data for the project. First, they mined the Internet and the comedy industry for a variety of objective measures:

• Frequency of visits to Cheezburger comedy websites, such as Lolcats and FAIL Blog
• Number of comedy clubs per square mile in each city
• Traveling comedians’ ratings of each city’s comedy-club audiences
• Number of famous comedians born in each city, divided by city population
• Number of famous funny tweeters living in each city, divided by city population
• Number of comedy radio stations available in each city
• Frequency of humor-related web searches originating in each city

According to the research, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta top the list of America’s funniest cities.

images via The New York Times, Humor Research Lab

via The New York Times