Seth MacFarlane and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's '80s documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Journey, is finally coming to your TV. The 13-part series, which is produced by MacFarlane and hosted by deGrasse Tyson, was originally announced in 2011 for a 2013 launch, but Fox announced this week that the show will finally make its premiere sometime in 2014. Hopefully, Neil deGrasse Tyson will be bringing his StarTalk co-host Eugene Mirman with him in some capacity.
It's official: watching The Daily Show or listening to NPR will make you more well informed that most people. Watching Fox News or MSNBC will make you much less well informed. But wait, what about getting your news solely from reblogged Daily Show clips, colorful charts and Photoshops of the pepper spray cop on Tumblr? Are those people the most well informed?
Researchers worldwide have been conducting many critical studies on the science of comedy this past year, giving hope to all that a cure for cancer will never, ever be found. Here are some of the more extraordinary findings that will forever impact what it means to laugh.
- A study called “The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour” in the British Journal of Sociology found that comedy solidifies the levels of social hierarchy. People with money feel that their highbrow jokes about rich people things make them better than lower-class people, whose humor about everyday things like beer and rocks and arm hair are ”ignorant” and “thick.” Said [...]
Here's StarTalk Neil deGrasse Tyson's new web show, which premiered this week on the Nerdist Network. It's based on Tyson's podcast of the same name and features a ton of comedians as guests, with Sarah Silverman and Jim Gaffigan slated to appear in the future. In this first episode, however, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with Eugene Mirman, Kristen Schaal, John Hodgman, and some astronaut in front of a live audience to educate them about space and to take their smartass questions.
Oh, phew, more reasons to re-watch every episode of Louie instead of doing something terrible involving a StairMaster. A new study shows that laughing with friends releases endorphins, which in turn increase our threshold for pain, presumably until we are an elite breed of superhumans impervious to discomfort, our guffaws ringing gaily throughout the land.
A slightly more surprising finding was that "when subjects watched something that does not naturally elicit laughter, pain thresholds do not change (and are often lower)." In other words, saying that something is so un-funny that it physically hurts might actually have some truth to it, instead of just being a douchily hyperbolic [...]
Screw all these other posers, science has gone and solved the issue of who should replace Michael Scott on The Office: a computer program designed to make double entendres. The program is called Double Entendre via Noun Transfer, or DEviaNT, and was created by two computer scientists at the University of Washington, Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun. The program is based on an analysis of two bodies of text: 1.5 million erotic sentences, and another with 57,000 from standard literature. They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a "sexiness" function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS [That's What She Said]. Examples of nouns with [...]
After the clip-and-music driven intro to almost every WTF with Marc Maron podcast, the show’s host introduces himself and welcomes his listeners. But instead of merely acknowledging the masses who have made WTF one of the most popular podcasts on the iTunes store and everywhere else, Maron lists and classifies them.
Over the course of 240 episodes, he has grouped his audience into categories ranging from the mundane (“What the fuckers”) to the arcane (“What the Fuckminster Fullers”). There have been creative references to patriotism (“What the fuckanadians”), activism (“What the fuccupy Wall Streeters”) and Cosbyism (“What the fuckstables”). And yet perhaps the most interesting part of each nickname sequence is Maron’s [...]
Self-diagnose away: "Comedians are all afflicted with a personality disorder that drives our pursuit of impracticality. Personality disorders can be broadly defined as fixed fantasies, where a person functions with core beliefs that result in behaviors different from the norm. Unlike chemical imbalances which cycle in severity, the symptoms of a comedian remain constant. Attention seeking behavior, difficulty in relationships, and the inability to self regulate can all afflict comics, while falling under existing diagnoses like narcissist and histrionic personality disorder. But the engrained goals of a comedian combined with a stimulating environment creates additional symptoms that can be defined as Comedian Personality Disorder (CPD). Like most personality disordered [...]
When I analyzed episodes of 30 Rock and S#*! My Dad Says for their relative joke tallies, many readers pointed out it’s unfair to compare two different comedy formats –- 30 Rock is a single camera, ensemble comedy, whereas S#*! My Dad Says is a more traditional, multi-camera, laugh-track comedy focusing on one main character. Furthermore, some argued, many comedies are light on jokes but nonetheless hilarious, such as Louie.
Again, I agree that it’s more important to look at the kind of jokes a show makes, and how funny those jokes are, in addition to their frequency. However, even if the results aren’t scientifically valid, I [...]
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