Category Archives: Humor Research

UK comedy guide seeks paid contributors

Posted on December 14, 2007 by Kevin

Do you have opinions about comedy? Can you organize them and write them down? Can you spell the word humor with two U’s (but not in a row)? Then you might win 75 British pounds (£75, roughly US$150) as a … Continue reading →

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Second City college comedy classes

Posted on February 16, 2007 by Kevin

Chicago’s famous The Second City Training Center is now offering a college “semester abroad” in comedy history, performance, improvisation, and writing through Columbia College Chicago (suburbanchicagonews.com/newssun/entertainment/253209,5_1_WA12_ILLCOMEDY_S1.article) [EDIT (6/4/10): dead link]. Comedy Studies program There have been individual college classes in … Continue reading →

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Humor might save your life

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Kevin

Humor can help us deal with difficult situations; laughter can make us feel better. But can they help with disease, as American Norman Cousins (more) believed about his own heart disease? A modest study in Trondheim, Norway, shows there may … Continue reading →

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Follow-up: Oral language-play for speech impaired

Posted on October 6, 2006 by Kevin

Back in August I posted (Oral language-play for speech impaired) about the System to Augment Non-speakers Dialogue Using Puns (STANDUP) project that helps speech-impaired children develop language analysis through puns. The Discovery Channel has a little more information. The program: … Continue reading →

Posted in English as a Second / Foreign Language, Foreign Languages, HUMOR, Humor Research, LANGUAGE, Language Media, Language Technology, Linguistics | Comments Off

Comedy veteran Bill Dana aids humor archive

Posted on September 18, 2006 by Kevin

Bill Dana (IMDb entry), probably best known for his José Jiménez character on The Steve Allen Show and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s and more recently for a recurring role on The Golden Girls in the early 1990s, has … Continue reading →

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Oral language-play for speech impaired

Posted on August 24, 2006 by Kevin

Researchers at the Universities of Dundee, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh in Scotland have developed experimental pun-generating software for children who use computerized assistance to communicate. It’s called System to Augment Non-speakers Dialogue Using Puns (STANDUP). Kudos to the researchers for recognizing … Continue reading →

Posted in HUMOR, Humor Research, LANGUAGE, Language Technology, Linguistics | 1 Comment

BBC show studying British humor / humour

Posted on August 15, 2006 by Kevin

The UK’s Open University (home page, distance learning) will go around Britain with a “joke booth” to solicit jokes and humorous stories from the public for academic analysis. Then British comedian Lenny Henry will host a BBC One program about … Continue reading →

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