By Khalida Sarwari
If cities had yearbooks, San Jose would definitely make the superlatives list. Maybe it wouldn’t receive the honor of being named “best dressed” or “the life of the party,” but it would get the coveted “class clown” title—that is, if a new stand-up comedy streaming app had a chance to vote.
According to San Francisco-based startup Laugh.ly, San Jose is the funniest city in America, or at least the city most willing to embrace comedy. Citing the cornucopia of comedy clubs and improv schools, high listening volume of standup comedy and minimal interest in documentary films, Laugh.ly gave San Jose a perfect 100 out of 100 score. No other city on the West Coast even came close.
The outcome was a bit of a surprise to Laugh.ly founder Dave Scott, a San Mateo resident who was born and raised in Sacramento and performed stand-up before starting his company.
“We were surprised by several of the results including San Jose, which is better known for lattes, tech and yoga studios than a place where people actually laugh,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure what cultural components led to that, but I do know that the data doesn’t lie.”
So how does a city even get such a billing? Laugh.ly maintains what it calls a “humor index,” a quantitative analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Facebook, local business information, Google search volume and listening trends on its own app in the top 50 metropolitan areas across the country. The index also factored in components such as the number of local comedy clubs and improv schools in each city as well as negatives such as suicide rates and number of depressed people, according to Scott.
Their research yielded some interesting facts and figures. For example, San Jose boasts 10 comedy clubs and 60 improv schools, with San Jose Improv among the stand-out venues, according to Scott.
The Improv “definitely helps anchor the South Bay, which is unusual for a city the size of San Jose to have such a prominent comedy club,” he said. “It’s got one of the best crowds, very responsive, and (it’s) one of my favorite places to get on stage.”
Scott highlighted a few other “unique” South Bay venues, including Sunnyvale’s Rooster T. Feathers, City Lights Theater Company and ComedySportz.
Survey results indicated the ratio of listeners are skewed toward men, as 72 percent of Laugh.ly users are male, Scott said. The median age of listeners is 26, and the prime time for comedy consumption is during commute hours and from 7 to 9 p.m.
“People use comedy to de-stress at the end of a long work day,” Scott explained. “When we surveyed our customers during that time, they’re multi-tasking, either cooking, studying or surfing the Internet, and they’re also listening to comedy.”
A slew of mostly Bible Belt cities follow San Jose on the “funniest cities” list. Jacksonville takes second-place honors, with Charlotte and Memphis following. Milwaukee rounds out the top five.
Naturally, this list also identifies the grouchiest of the bunch. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Washington, D.C., tops the list. Phoenix, Miami, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati also made the list of cities where laughing is not too common.
These cities should take note of all the wellness experts and TED talks extolling the power of laughter and benefits of humor.
“You know, after the election, people may need time to heal,” said Scott. “So from that perspective, we think we’re providing a service.”
Launched just three months ago to deliver stand-up comedic content, Laugh.ly is a first-of-its-kind streaming app that emulates music streaming service Pandora in that it allows users to listen by artist, album or track. The platform features content from more than 600 comedians, including Kevin Hart, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari, Amy Schumer and Richard Pryor, and also has curated playlists that allow users to explore new and emerging comedians. The service offers both a paid tier and free tier for its users as well as profanity-filtering options.
While comedy is the startup’s main focus, data comes a close second. Developed by analysts from research institutions such as ITT Technical Institute and Trump University, the humor index is Laugh.ly’s first attempt at quantitatively analyzing humor in the United States. In a previous study, the platform tried to identify the most popular comedian across red and blue states. Unlike the presidential election, one comedian emerged as the most popular across the partisan board: Ansari, a comedian and actor born to Muslim immigrants from India.
Locally, Scott recommended keeping an eye on Kabir “Kabeezy” Singh, another comedian of Indian descent who has previously performed at San Jose Improv and won numerous local comedy competitions, and Ali Wong, an Asian-American actress and stand-up comic from San Francisco.
“Download and listen to our app and try them out before they even show up,” Scott suggested.
