Hi there reader, I’m Mike Cundall, a philosophy professor, humor researcher, author, speaker, and consultant. I published my first book, “The Humor Hack” in April 2022 and am working on another one. I had a blog on my website (www.mirthmanagement.co) but it never really took off. I am going to see if the substack community works out a little better. Hopefully I can get a nice community of readers, commenters, and such to keep me engaged. I am really interested in how humor helps with engagement. It’s mostly what my book is about.
My main focus, as you can tell, humor research. As a philosopher I enjoy questions about how we understand humor, what humor “is,” as well as more practical issues like how humor can better our lives. I think that humor is an ignored and totally untapped way to help us build better engagement. I am sure I’ll have lots more to say about it in later posts. I am going to work to make my posts fit with content that I have on my YouTube channel, The Humor Hack. I think writing these posts will be a way to get me to be more regular about posting. I am hoping for three to four posts a month. There may be more, but we’ll have to see. I am going to try and keep the posts to a manageable reading length. I amy post some longer form pieces, but not too often. The main idea is to keep the focus on humor, laughter, and the rest. But I can’t promise I won’t drop a couple posts that are good old philosophy, or perhaps a post here and there that’s just meant to be fun and funny. Individual results may vary. If any of this interests you, or you want to support a philosopher go ahead and hit that subscribe button. I look forward to seeing how this experiement moves ahead, how we work together, and how we can build and engaged and enriching community.
Hi Dr Mike,
I also did a research on humor for my PHD. It’s true that humor has not really been explored academically. I have planned to start a blog to record humorous things that happen around me (but the blog has never taken off).
Great first post, but the tone is too serious for the topic! Lighten things up, give us some meta-humor (I never met a humor I didn't like!). Hmm, well at least you included a Freudian: "I amy post some longer form pieces".