We got ourselves a comedian here!

When writing "How to Talk to a New Parent" I was frustrated to discover that the quickest, most concise name for the "pull my finger" game is "The Pull My Finger Game." Seems wrong somehow.

MSNBC ran a story about a study that showed that most people respond to unsuccessful attempts at humor with "attacks intended to result in the social exclusion or humiliation of the speaker, punctuated on occasion with profanity."

I did not need a study to tell me this.

What amuses me most about the study is that it was conducted at Washington State University, which means it sampled the inhabitants of the towns of Pullman, WA and Moscow, ID, both towns I used to perform in regularly. I propose that conducting a study about hostility against people who think their funny in rural Washington and Idaho most likely skewed the results more toward the hostile end of the bell curve.