In this paper, we discuss another approach based on mimicry for interactive comedy, a relatively new genre in interactive drama. An interactive comedy system is proposed in which the main character agent tends to mimic an agent controlled directly by the viewer. At the same time, the main character agent plays its original role through achieving its pre-assigned goal. Heuristic Search Planner i...

Positive mood has been repeatedly shown to affect decisionmaking under risk. In this study I exploit the time-series variation in the domestic theatrical release of comedy movies as a natural experiment for testing the impact that happy mood (proxied by weekend comedy movie attendance) has on the demand for risky assets (proxied by the performance of the U.S. stock market). Using a sample of da...

Women have been prominent in show business since long before the advent of the feminist movement. However, today--in contrast to all other areas of show business--women are still in the minority in stand-up comedy. Why is comedy mate dominated? To answer this question, this study investigated the personality traits of women in comedy, their family backgrounds, and their psychosexual dynamics. T...

We investigated the effects of laughing and weeping induced by watching comedy and tragedy videos on mood and autonomic nervous function. Ten healthy female subjects volunteered for the experiment. Chest electrocardiogram and respiration curve were recorded before, after, and during watching a comedy or a tragedy video. We also asked them to fill out profiles of mood states (POMS) to evaluate t...

In contrast to the well-established scientific evidence linking negative emotional states (e.g., depression, anxiety, or anger) to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, much less is known about the association between positive emotional states (e.g., laughter, happiness) and cardiovascular health. We determined the effects of mirthful laughter, elicited by watching comic movies, on endothe...

“Poetry,” claims Aristotle, “is a more philosophical and more serious thing than history.” Exactly how tragedy can be such occupies much of Aristotle’s subsequent thought in the Poetics, but he is referring here to all dramatic poetry. This is significant; it implies that comedy (the other dramatic genre he discusses) shares tragedy’s capacity for serious speculative thought. Just how comedy mi...

Global temperatures are rising. So are the oceans. Climate change has become inevitable and irreversible. To NASA climate scientist JoshWillis that sounds like the setup for a joke. “Greenland’s been on Jenny Craig,” he quipped at a public lecture in February. “It’s lost a couple trillion tons.” Willis, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, frequently gives talks on the gloom and doom ...

546 doi: 10.1097/ALN.0000000000001289 Instead of dance, Erato (“beloved”) governed romance as the Muse of Love Poetry. On this Italian card advertising a company cofounded by chloroform pioneer Justus von Liebig (1803 to 1873), a seated Erato (right) is pictured playing the cithara, the musical and etymological precursor to today’s guitar. If a 20th-century actor portrayed Erato poorly, that th...