By Daniel Rigney
Have you noticed that some cities are more comically gifted than others? People are drawn to New York and Los Angeles, in part, by their reputations as centers of comic consciousness. Houston, by contrast, is a metropolis of measured mirth. No one has ever thought to describe us as “The City of Laughter.”
When we moved to Houston three years ago, I was struck by how serious and hard-working its people are. The culture here is corporate from top to bottom. The business of business is to make serious money as efficiently as possible, and make no mistake: Houston means business.
Here even life itself is a business. Fun for fun’s sake is a distraction from the pursuit of life’s main purpose, which is to add value to the bottom line. Golf is not just a game, but a networking tool and a complement to one’s corporate skill set.
Suspecting that Houston may be among the most humorless cities in the United States, I was curious to know whether other cities might be even more laughless than we are, so I decided to conduct my own serious scientific investigation of the matter.
For starters, I needed a metric. (You can never have too many metrics these days.) One way to measure a city’s sense of humor is to consider the vitality of its live-comedy culture. I consulted the review site yelp.com to estimate the number of comedy clubs in each of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.
I counted the number of clubs in each city that had garnered 10 or more crowd-sourced yelp reviews, an indication of how many viable venues the city is currently supporting. In New York and Los Angeles, 30 or more clubs met this criterion. In other large cities, the number of comedy-specific venues was near zero. (I didn’t count hybrid bars and restaurants unless comedy was their main attraction. Inevitably there were judgment calls.)
“Caroline’s” in New York, “Second City” in Chicago, “Improv” and “The Groundlings” in Los Angeles made the cut easily. “Laff Spot Comedy Club and Defensive Driving School” in Houston did not.
Having estimated the number of live comedy venues in each city, I divided that number by the city’s metropolitan population (2012 est.) to arrive at a Comedy Quotient (CQ) for each metropolis.
A high CQ suggests a city with a hearty appetite for laughs, chuckles, chortles, giggles, snickers and the like. A low CQ suggests a city of soulless stiffs. Just kidding.
The resultant CQ for each city is simply the number of comedy clubs in a metropolitan area per 10,000 residents. One might think of this as the city’s “comedy I.Q.”
Here’s what I found.
The
findings contain some surprises. While it’s no surprise that the three
comedy giants, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, support the largest
absolute number of comedy clubs that meet our criteria, we find
sophisticated San Francisco harboring the largest number of clubs for
its size (per 10,000 residents), earning a CQ of 266
and edging out its California rival, the City of Angels, by a scant
margin. Pound for pound, the City by the Bay may lay claim to being the
comedy club capital of the country, at least in the middleweight
division.
But wait. If we include smaller metros in our study, we discover that even San Franciso is eclipsed by cities like Austin (CQ = 278) and Portland (CQ = 304), both of which claim the slogan “Keep [city’s name] Weird” and pride themselves on their comically creative energies.
And the CQ of America’s truly weirdest city, Las Vegas, is off the charts. (Of course, Las Vegas comedians and audiences are both imported from elsewhere, so Sin City's high CQ doesn't necessarily reflect its own indigenous sense of humor.)
Houston, as we hypothesized, did not fare well in this test, trailing even the laugh-gridlocked Washington D.C. in comedy per capita. Fortunately for Houston’s Chambers of Commerce, though, several cities were even more humorless than we are by this whimsical measure. Philadelphia, Miami and Detroit fared even more sadly, and St. Louis and Tampa Bay were found languishing in the comedy cellar.
Thinking positively, Houston (along with other low-laugh cities) could frame its low CQ not as a cultural deficit, but as an opportunity for growth, a chance to drill a few wildcat wells and frack the city’s collective unconscious for hidden reserves of repressed laughter.
For the seriously business-minded, there's good money to be made from tapping into deep and previously inaccessible veins of comic life underneath a city that sometimes seems, on the surface at least, like a comedy desert.
Danagram
;] in collaboration with Rimshot the Sitdown Comic
Have you noticed that some cities are more comically gifted than others? People are drawn to New York and Los Angeles, in part, by their reputations as centers of comic consciousness. Houston, by contrast, is a metropolis of measured mirth. No one has ever thought to describe us as “The City of Laughter.”
When we moved to Houston three years ago, I was struck by how serious and hard-working its people are. The culture here is corporate from top to bottom. The business of business is to make serious money as efficiently as possible, and make no mistake: Houston means business.
Here even life itself is a business. Fun for fun’s sake is a distraction from the pursuit of life’s main purpose, which is to add value to the bottom line. Golf is not just a game, but a networking tool and a complement to one’s corporate skill set.
Suspecting that Houston may be among the most humorless cities in the United States, I was curious to know whether other cities might be even more laughless than we are, so I decided to conduct my own serious scientific investigation of the matter.
For starters, I needed a metric. (You can never have too many metrics these days.) One way to measure a city’s sense of humor is to consider the vitality of its live-comedy culture. I consulted the review site yelp.com to estimate the number of comedy clubs in each of the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.
I counted the number of clubs in each city that had garnered 10 or more crowd-sourced yelp reviews, an indication of how many viable venues the city is currently supporting. In New York and Los Angeles, 30 or more clubs met this criterion. In other large cities, the number of comedy-specific venues was near zero. (I didn’t count hybrid bars and restaurants unless comedy was their main attraction. Inevitably there were judgment calls.)
“Caroline’s” in New York, “Second City” in Chicago, “Improv” and “The Groundlings” in Los Angeles made the cut easily. “Laff Spot Comedy Club and Defensive Driving School” in Houston did not.
Having estimated the number of live comedy venues in each city, I divided that number by the city’s metropolitan population (2012 est.) to arrive at a Comedy Quotient (CQ) for each metropolis.
A high CQ suggests a city with a hearty appetite for laughs, chuckles, chortles, giggles, snickers and the like. A low CQ suggests a city of soulless stiffs. Just kidding.
The resultant CQ for each city is simply the number of comedy clubs in a metropolitan area per 10,000 residents. One might think of this as the city’s “comedy I.Q.”
Here’s what I found.
The
findings contain some surprises. While it’s no surprise that the three
comedy giants, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, support the largest
absolute number of comedy clubs that meet our criteria, we find
sophisticated San Francisco harboring the largest number of clubs for
its size (per 10,000 residents), earning a CQ of 266
and edging out its California rival, the City of Angels, by a scant
margin. Pound for pound, the City by the Bay may lay claim to being the
comedy club capital of the country, at least in the middleweight
division.But wait. If we include smaller metros in our study, we discover that even San Franciso is eclipsed by cities like Austin (CQ = 278) and Portland (CQ = 304), both of which claim the slogan “Keep [city’s name] Weird” and pride themselves on their comically creative energies.
And the CQ of America’s truly weirdest city, Las Vegas, is off the charts. (Of course, Las Vegas comedians and audiences are both imported from elsewhere, so Sin City's high CQ doesn't necessarily reflect its own indigenous sense of humor.)
Houston, as we hypothesized, did not fare well in this test, trailing even the laugh-gridlocked Washington D.C. in comedy per capita. Fortunately for Houston’s Chambers of Commerce, though, several cities were even more humorless than we are by this whimsical measure. Philadelphia, Miami and Detroit fared even more sadly, and St. Louis and Tampa Bay were found languishing in the comedy cellar.
Thinking positively, Houston (along with other low-laugh cities) could frame its low CQ not as a cultural deficit, but as an opportunity for growth, a chance to drill a few wildcat wells and frack the city’s collective unconscious for hidden reserves of repressed laughter.
For the seriously business-minded, there's good money to be made from tapping into deep and previously inaccessible veins of comic life underneath a city that sometimes seems, on the surface at least, like a comedy desert.
Danagram
;] in collaboration with Rimshot the Sitdown Comic
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