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Humorous Videos |
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| Posted by: | Kevin McCaul |
| Title/Position: | Professor |
| School/Organization: | North Dakota State University |
| Sent to listserv of: | SPSP |
| Date posted: | September 23rd, 2005 |
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Thank you all for such quick, thoughtful responses to our search for humorous videos. For those who might be interested, here is what we learned:
1. Saturday Night Live clips
a. One of Chris Farley's Saturday Night Live skits where he is the "motivational speaker". This has been very successful for me. 3 minutes long.
b. In a suppression and working memory experiment I am currently involved with, we are using a film clip from Saturday Night Live and asking participants to refrain from laughing at it. The clip is working well- the task is difficult for them. It is Chapter 16 from The Best of Adam Sandler SNL DVD.
c. I have had a lot of luck using short Saturday Night Live skits. There is a 25th Anniversary Edition of SNL that has several usable clips. I have used Dana Carvey's "Chopping Brocolli" and Bill Murray's rendition of "Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls." Both are approximately 2-3 minutes long and quite humorous.
d. A student of mine and I used short clips of Adam Sandler routines from Saturday night live. We have empirical support that it works as a mood induction of happiness (Gurung & Bloch, 2005- an APS poster).
2. Stand-up comedians
a. I seem to remember Jean Twenge (from San Diego State University) mentioning that she uses a Robin Williams video clip in her research. I believe it was just a clip of one of his stand-up comedy routines.
b. I've used a short clip from the video of "Robin Williams Live!" which has worked well to induce positive affect in college students. I believe I originally got the idea from a mid 1990's paper by James Gross and Robert Leventhal that summarized the effectiveness of using different film clips for affect induction (the citation is below). I don't have the exact start & stop times for the clip, but I remember contacting James Gross (he's at Stanford now) and he was happy to provide the information.
c. We have a 2 minute clip of Jay Leno excerpts that we have participants suppress their emotions to as part of a self-control depletion manipulation. If you send your address to me, I'd be glad to send a copy of the clip to you.
3. Shows/movies
a. Perhaps a video clip of an advertisement that is funny (or several 30 second ones) might work.
b. I have elicited laughter before but didn't use video clips. I had participants read passages and then flip up humorous photographs (from the net). Read Bachorowski from Vanderbilt. She played clips from monty python movies, had participants draw pictures of each other, and play games with one another.
c. I have used a 4-minute clip from the Blue Comedy Tour, specifically the first 4 minutes of Ron White's routine. Students think its real funny.
d. I also use a clip from Ferris Bueller's Day Off & Good Morning, Vietnam. Students seem to think that the Ferris Bueller clip is funnier.
e. Simpsons usually starts with a 3-5 minute introduction that leads into the main story. They are always very funny, and many of them would seem appropriate for research use (although many of your participants may have already seen them).
f. Simpsons episode worked fine for our laughter research.
g. We have used clips from "America's Funniest Home Videos," which we obtained from our local video store.
h. In a study on how oral health affects children's smiling patterns, we used a Bugs Bunny video (appr 4 min long) and coded from a funny incident about 1 Min 30 seconds into the video to the end. The first 1 min we used for baseline measures.
i. I’ve used the “Money Pit” with Tom Hanks in the past. I use a 3-4 min. clip where they take possession of their new house and start renovating it, only to find that everything is falling apart. Most people find it very funny, and it's mostly non-verbal.
j. Get candid camera classics there are many such
k. The Montreal comedy festival put out this series of segments called "Just for laughs gags", where they essential play practical jokes on random people in public... Each show is a collage of pranks that you could easily take an 3 minute excerpt from... and they even have the advantage of not having any language in them, so they would probably work great cross culturally. Some of them are very creative and really quite funny. Presumably you could write to the CBC or The Comedy Network to get tapes... or persuade one of your Canadian friends to set up their VCR For more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_For_Laughs_Gags
4. References
a. Rottenberg, Ray, & Gross (2005). Emotion elicitation using films. In J. A. Coan & J. J. B. Allen, The Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Assessment. New York: Oxford University Press.
b. James Gross has detailed information on preparing films to elicit various emotional states. I think the clips are from both feature films and non-commercial works. All of the film clips have been pretested (Gross & Levenson, 1995). Here is the web address:
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~psyphy/resources.htm
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