Chicago Is America's [Intentionally] Funniest City, Says New Study

By Jon Graef in News on Apr 26, 2014 7:00PM

The Puterbaugh Sisterz perform at a Chicago Underground Comedy showcase. Photo Credit: Erin Nekervis

A study from the University of Colorado at Boulder found that Chicago was America's funniest city, as if such a thing was actually quantifiable in an academic setting. (Comedy, much like beauty, is solely in the eye of the beholder.)

But, lo and behold, a quartet of researchers from the university's Humor Research Lab found the Windy City was America's funniest using a self-developed humor algorithm.

The algorithm was more for measuring numbers related to elements like the number of comedy clubs per square mile, and how frequently the city's residents visited comedy websites like Lolcats.

What apparently went unexamined was the Kafkaesque horror show of bureaucratic incompetence and indifference otherwise known simply as "living in Chicago."

The Tribune has more:

[The researchers] surveyed more than 900 people living in the top 10 cities as determined by the algorithm. Researchers asked residents about the kinds of funny entertainment they enjoyed, whether they considered humor an important quality in friends and significant others and subjected them to a personality test. They also had participants describe their city’s sense of humor and recount their favorite joke.

And, despite their funny ranking, it seems Chicagoans are lousy joke tellers.

“For a place that’s the funniest city in the country, Chicago doesn’t seem to boast a lot of jokes,” the study states. “Many Chicago residents surveyed noted that they could not think of any zingers, since they prefer to mine observational humor from the situations in which they find themselves

There's an understatement.

Other cities ranked include usual suspects like New York and Los Angeles, along with Portland., Ore (about whom researcher Peter McGraw said were "just plain weird"), San Francisco, and Boston.

If nothing else, Chicago can lay claim to comedians like Tina Fey, Key and Peele, Bill Murray, John Belushi, and Hannibal Buress, and many, many more. That's not for nothing. But note that, last year, it was Atlanta who won the funniest city in America crown.

So it entirely depends on who you ask. But, if nothing else, maybe Chicago can help the rest of Illinois laugh off its woes. It's certainly worked wonders for us. Right?

Here's the PDF of the study.