The proof is in the laughter: how a course in stand-up comedy helped students become objectively funnier

Abstract Those of us who teach stand-up comedy know students improve as a result of our classes. We can see how their stage presence, confidence, and joke writing ability expand over the course of a semester. Unfortunately, we have lacked any objective proof of that improvement – until now. The following study provides empirical evidence that students can become objectively funnier with training and practice. In this paper, we provide an overview of the pedagogical techniques we employed, the methods we used to assess student improvement, and an account of our results. Those results include notable increases in the average amount of laughter and applause received by our students. In addition, we present an analysis of two student performances to demonstrate the link between learning humor techniques and laughter and applause, a discussion of the implications of our experiments for stand-up pedagogy, and suggestions for future research. Results showed that there was an increase in laughter and applause, and this was also shown in terms of rates (seconds per minute). Inferential statistics outcomes echoed the descriptive statistics findings. Laughter more than doubled (increased by 129.38 %). Perhaps most significantly, our case studies support previous research (Rutter 1997; Wells 2007) which found that comedians whose performances simultaneously combined multiple techniques were more effective than those who did not. By pre- and post-testing students, we were able to collect data that strongly suggests those same techniques can be taught and learned and that this sort of training can help people to become objectively funnier.