If you're looking for a laugh, head to the Windy City.
Chicago topped the list of the nation's funniest cities in a new study released Sunday by the University of Colorado-Boulder. (See the full list below.)
In a release, CU-Boulder called the study "the most comprehensive analysis of humorous cities," with a team of academics using an algorithm created in the school's Humor Research Lab -- also known as HuRL.
“We found humor often has a local flavor,” Peter McGraw, associate professor of marketing and psychology at CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business said in a statement. “The jokes that get laughs at comedy clubs in Denver seem unlikely to fly with a cartoon editor at The New Yorker, for example. The kind of torturous game shows that some Japanese find amusing would likely fall flat to a sitcom producer in Los Angeles.”
Researchers took the following factors into account to determine which city was the funniest of them all:
- 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
“A city’s humor score isn’t just a measure of historic reputation or big-name productions,” said Adrian Ward, senior research associate at the Leeds School. “It’s a way of looking at the day-to-day lives of people in that city. A city’s sense of humor is a living, breathing thing, created by everything from coffee shop conversations to Web videos shared between friends to the laughter that erupts at comedy clubs.”