Joel Warner


Joel Warner is an American author and journalist. He is the co-author of The Humor Code, a former staff writer for Westword, Denver's alternative newsweekly, and has also written for Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications.

The Humor Code

In 2010, Warner met Peter McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado. Warner was fascinated by McGraw's research and unified theory of humor, the Benign Violation Theory. Starting in 2011, the two created "The Humor Code Project," a two-year, 91,000-mile global search for what makes things funny. Their travels took them to Tanzania, Scandinavia, Japan, Israel, Peru, and several other destinations in North America. McGraw and Warner authored The Humor Code, a book about their travels and the experiments they conducted along the way. The two maintained multiple blogs about their adventures on Wired, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.

Works

As a staff writer for Westword, Warner received several awards for his feature writing:
"Black and Blue"
"Martial Law"
"The Boy Who Wouldn't Tell"
"Lax and the City"
"Trial by Fire"
"Taken for a Ride"
"Growth Industry"
"Cash Crop"
"The Good Soldier"
"Father of Invention"
2009 AAN AltWeekly Award
"You Do the Meth"
"Mr. Big"