Then you might win 75 British pounds (£75, roughly US$150) as a correspondent for Chortle: The UK Comedy Guide (site main page).

Chortle says:

General comment pieces about particular aspects of the comedy scene are encouraged more than reviews of individual shows or performers, though we may also use these.

Pieces for the monthly contest should be:

at least 500 words in length, in a similar tone to something you might read in a broadsheet newspaper.

Good luck.

• animated GIF images
• quizzes, some of which are based on song parodies, and
• puns.

You can now see a link to this site’s homepage on the sidebar at right.

a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.

The authors have fun with the good bad-writing. I especially liked the delightful audacity of

• the Children’s Literature winner, Dave McKenzie (“Danny, the little Grizzly cub . . .”), and
• the Romance dishonorable mention, Linda Morgan (“Ruthanne felt as though she was frozen in time . . .”).

Sadly, the English Department missed a simple fact of math when they said:

2007 is the silver anniversary of the Contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982, making Jim Gleeson the 25th grand prize winner.

It is the 25th, silver, anniversary (Current year – First year), but they presumably awarded a prize the first year, making 2007′s Jim Gleeson the 26th grand prize winner (Current year – First year + 1).

See also my post:
2006 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners

MySpace already has short clips from past festivals on the Just for Laughs MySpace page (no big laughs, but I liked Dane Cook’s and Ray Romano’s clips).

Just for Laughs official site

Juste pour Rire site officiel

If you’re a U.S. resident, 18 years old or older, you can enter and possibly win a print of the cartoon with your caption and the artist’s signature. Before that, the three finalists (with names, cities, and states) will have their captions published in the magazine in order to be voted on.

Official Rules

As for the regular cartoons, Robert Mankoff, cartoon editor of The New Yorker, said in a November 2006 interview, that he’s looking for a variety of humor: gags, ridicule, incongruity, “Theory of Mind” (showing a character’s perspective), “ludic” (playful silliness, which can be somewhat subversive presumably in the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Monty Python tradition), and so forth.

More generally, Mankoff said in a 2004 Q&A that he wants cartoons that are “funny and communicate some idea about our culture.”

See also:

• Book collections and more of New Yorker cartoons
• 2004 radio interview with Robert Mankoff

Sven Svebak, Ph.D. (Faculty of Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and others at St. Olav University Hospital studied forty-one patients with chronic kidney failure and discovered a lower mortality rate after two years among patients with a sense of humor.

Sense of humor, based on a self-report survey, seemed more important for survival than age/gender/education or duration of disease/number of dialyses per week/co-morbidity [additional health problems].

According to the article abstract in The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine (Volume 36, Number 3 / 2006):

A highly significant increase in survival was due to the psychological variables of block three [quality of life and sense of humor] (p < .001) essentially accounted for by sense of humor (p < .005). Those who scored above the median in sense of humor increased their odds for survival by on average 31%. Conclusions: Sense of humor appeared to mediate better coping and, therefore, protected against detrimental effects of disease-related stressors upon survival.

This finding, with a somewhat small sample size of forty-one probably ethnically homogeneous patients, is in line with the notions that stress weakens the immune system and that humor can reduce stress.

Another angle that researchers are taking is the idea that stress reduces blood flow and laughter increases blood flow. A preliminary study by Michael Miller, M.D., and others (all from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore) used violent and comedic movie scenes with twenty patients.

In 2005 Miller reported that “‘average blood flow increased 22 percent during laughter, and decreased 35 percent during mental stress.’” Miller said we still need to exercise regularly, but “’15 minutes of laughter on a daily basis is probably good for the vascular system.’”

For most people, laughter can’t hurt and may improve health. You might try some Laughter Yoga, especially for World Laughter Day on May 6, 2007 (first Sunday in May).

See also:

Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (including Dr. Patch Adams, as portrayed by Robin Williams)

Humor Matters

1) Where is my room?
2) Where is the beach?
3) Where is the bar?
4) Don’t touch me there!

It even has pop-culture versions and English transliterated into other languages’ writing systems.

I must point out, though, that the English as transliterated into the Japanese katakana syllabary has errors. I’ll use doubled vowels for long vowels:

1) Where is my room?

ヱルイスマイルーム？ to ウェアイズマイルーム？

Weru isu mai ruumu? to Wea izu mai ruumu?

2) Where is the beach?

ヱルイスザービーチ？ to ウェアイズザビーチ？

Weru isu zaa biichi? to Wea izu za biichi?

3) Where is the bar?

ヱルイスザーバール？ to ウェアイズザバー？

Weru isu zaa baaru? to Wea izu za baa?

4) Don’t touch me there!

ドーントタッチミーゼル！ to ドントタッチミーゼア！

Doonto tatchi mii zeru! [katakana says "Donto"] to Donto tatchi mii zea!

1. You can’t use katakana ヱ (we). The Japanese language lost that sound centuries ago when the sound we merged with エ (e). The spellings, however, weren’t modernized until just after World War II. More recently, for foreign words with we, Japanese has ウェ (u with a small e).
2. Japanese tends to use British “r-lessness” after vowels (where, there, bar).
3. The word is has a voiced /z/.
4. The word the has a short vowel (ザ za). (Before a vowel in English (the artist), the is pronounced “thee” instead of “thuh.” In Japanese this is ジ (ji) because z- becomes j- before -i, but it is still written zi in some romanization systems.)

See also Omniglot’s:

• Japanese Katakana
• Translations of Useful Phrases in Many Languages

American Comedy Archives site

Not only did Dana donate his own materials, but he has also helped Project Manager Jenni Matz interview American comedy legends.

Oral History text excerpts / Oral History video excerpts

What they are doing is wonderful. I applaud Emerson College for giving the initial funding to this project, and I look forward to when all the archived materials are online. The study of humor indeed deserves more respect. However, the article makes it sound like Emerson College’s Archives are it. What about the American Humor Studies Association? What about the International Society for Humor Studies? What about the University of Maryland’s Art Gliner Center for Humor Studies (sph.umd.edu/hlsa/gliner/about_center.cfm”) [EDIT (5/29/10): dead link] (apparently more about teaching, but with some offline archives (humorcenter.umd.edu/collections.htm) [EDIT (5/29/10): dead link]? There are also several groups (humorcenter.umd.edu/links.html; [EDIT (5/29/10): dead link, but see the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor and their links]) involved specifically with “the recuperative powers of laughter” that reportedly interests Dana.

There’s quite a bit about humor studies out there if you look around. The American Comedy Archives are a significant addition to the field.

In sum:

Marie Gillespie, senior lecturer in sociology with the Open University, said: “We all tell funny stories and jokes but not all of us get a laugh. We will be analysing the component parts of what it is that makes a story funny and why some jokes are funny and others not.” She added: “Are there themes or jokes that recur? Is there one Big Joke in Britain today? What does the Big Joke tell us about British identities today?”

Personally, I’d rather hear humorous stories than canned jokes. I rarely find the latter funny.

The article goes on to say:

Stand-up comics may recoil at the prospect of sociologists analysing something as instinctive as humour.

I don’t know why comedians would recoil. Humor isn’t usually instinctive for them. They are in the business of analyzing and crafting humor (writing, rewriting, testing on audiences, rewriting, altering for different audiences). I’ve read that even Robin Williams prepares some of his bits in advance.

See also:

• LaughLab joke survey (British Association for the Advancement of Science)
• Jester: The On-Line Joke Recommender (University of California, Berkeley, USA) [registration required]

To fully appreciate their “special qualities,” you have to read the entries slowly and think about what kind of novels would follow. Then be glad those novels will never be written (because it would be a hassle to round up enough pitchforks and torches for the ensuing unruly mobs).

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest site

If you prefer shorter, snappier bad openings, there’s a contest for those as well: The Lyttle Lytton Contest.

Entries for both annual contests are due by April 15th (Pacific Daylight Time), but the “long” Lytton apparently can be later.