C.V.

Tag: Humor

Taking The Stage: Your Best Foot Forward with JD Lopez

Taking The Stage: Your Best Foot Forward with JD Lopez

JD Lopez knows that first impressions are important – and first impressions in comedy are often physical. He learned this from his training as an actor.  Put your best foot forward because people immediately interpret subtle cues and body language.  Thus, JD opens his show with energy. As he says, you have to tackle the […]

New research on humor in the workplace

New research on humor in the workplace

Benign violation theory sighting in forthcoming research by Sam Yam and colleagues. Here is an article about it. What I like about this work is that it highlights both the risks and rewards of being funny at work: A leader who issues a steady drumbeat of ‘benign violations’ through his or her humor can inadvertently […]

Pitch Lab comes to the Leeds School of Business

The robots are coming. With that in mind, I have been incorporating communication, creativity, and charisma lessons into my marketing management course. Students are going to need those skills during the fourth industrial revolution. The Leeds School recently covered a comedy-inspired “pitch lab” that I recently hosted.  Here is an excerpt from the article: In […]

Dads, please keep telling dad jokes (NPR story)

Dads, please keep telling dad jokes (NPR story)

Happy Father’s Day. One of the nice things about doing humor research is that I get to do fun interviews with fancy media outlets, such as NPR. They called this week to talk about dad jokes. FULL ARTICLE. There is a tendency to make fun of dads and their jokes. However, one thing that came […]

Another Benign Violation: Scare Pranks

At some point we have all been the victim of an unexpected scare by a friend or family, which often ends with one or both parties laughing. This Mannequin Scare Prank shows how fear is typically replaced by laughter: According to the Benign Violation Theory, humor arises when something is wrong yet okay, threatening yet […]

Another Benign Violation: Autocorrect Fails

From the T9 function on flip phones to Swype on smart phones, spelling mis-predictions are the bane of handheld communication. It’s hard to catch all the typos  that result from Autocorrect Fails. Using The Benign Violation Theory, we can break down when Autocorrect Fails will be (especially) funny. Humor arises when something is wrong yet […]