In honor of April Fool's Day, our friends at the Daily Beast (who, as you may recall, previously declared St. Louisans ugly and dumb) have decided to rank the 30 funniest cities in America. Apparently the Daily Beast doesn't remember that the whole point of April Fool's Day -- at least as we have always understood it -- is to make up some huge whopper of a story and then, as soon as some sucker starts to believe it, yell "April Fool!" as obnoxiously as possible.
So we at Daily RFT refuse to be sucked in by the Beast's latest attempt at ranking America's cities, upon which St. Louis appears nowhere, but Kansas City comes in 24th, two places behind Scranton. (Scranton! Don't people know The Office isn't real?) But just in case you're curious, positioning on the funniest cities list is based on five criteria: the percentage of adults who consider themselves funny, watch primetime sitcoms, watch syndicated sitcoms, go to comedic/romantic comedic movies and have visited a comedy club three or more times in the past year.
You will notice that most of these criteria are characteristic of college-aged males.
Accordingly, the funniest city in America is Austin, Texas, home of a really big-ass university. (Example of local humor, according to the Beast: "You know you're in Austin when your co-worker tells you they have eight body piercings--and none are visible." That's funnier than "Hook 'em, horns" and that weird finger thing, especially as executed by a drunk person? Really?)
Anyway, so far as we can tell, at least by these rankings, is that roughly a quarter of Americans in "funny" cities consider themselves funny. About a third watch their sitcoms in prime time and half watch them in syndication and go to funny movies.
Also, almost nobody goes to comedy clubs, except, apparently, under duress: In New York City, only two percent of the population admitted they had gone to a comedy club more than three times in the past year.
