Peter McGraw

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Peter McGraw is an American professor who teaches marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder. He studies how people think, feel, and decide, and why humor works. He helped create the Benign Violation Theory, which says jokes happen when something feels both wrong or threatening and still acceptable.

McGraw co-wrote The Humor Code (2014) with Joel Warner, a book about the science of humor and their travels around the world. He created the live game show Funny or True? (2015) where scientists and comedians compete. He hosts the podcast I'm Not Joking (2018), which looks at the lives of funny people in business, science, and the arts. In 2020 he published Shtick to Business, sharing lessons from comedy for serious careers. He earned his PhD from Ohio State University in 2002 and did a postdoc at Princeton with Daniel Kahneman. He joined CU Boulder in 2004 and also has roles in the psychology and neuroscience departments.

At CU, he directs the Humor Research Lab (HuRL) and co-directs the Moral Research Lab (MoRL). He has been named a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar. Outside of academics, he has coached lacrosse and led Princeton’s lacrosse program earlier in his career. In 2011 he and Warner started The Humor Code Project, a long global search for what makes things funny. The project led to The Humor Code book and media coverage, and they created The Humor Algorithm, which ranked the 50 funniest cities, with Chicago named the funniest. In December 2019 he launched Solo: The Single Person’s Guide to a Remarkable Life, a podcast about single life with guests.