The West

Simplify!

All colors are purple! Every proper name is Johnson! Adverbs? There are no adverbs! Simplify! Simplify your language and your life with Simplify, from The Stanford Chaparral’s Owen Ellickson!

Simplify! Read More »

It’ll Soon Shake Your Windows and Rattle Your Walls: Using Theatre to Understand Ferguson

Spencer found this poem the other day. And I found this. Who is sad right now? Who is furious? Who is uncomfortable? Who is tired? We’ve been thinking and fighting and posting on our own about the events rocking our country right now, and we’ve decided we want to talk about it with you, as

It’ll Soon Shake Your Windows and Rattle Your Walls: Using Theatre to Understand Ferguson Read More »

Our Approach to Humorology

Our humorologists’ approach to humoronomy focuses on Comic Isolation; i.e. the distillation of a comic premise to its most basic, irreducible components and analyzing why, exactly, it all is funny. Our approach to a joke begins with a Set-Up, in which the rules for the world of the joke are created; the Pivot, the introduction

Our Approach to Humorology Read More »

Interrobang’s Sketch Comedy

Before we became The West, we created sketch comedy as Interrobang. Interrobang was originally a research institution focusing on humorology and humoronomy. Founded in early 2009 by the Executive Advisory Board of the Institute for Gravitronomic Inertiametrics, Interrobang’s main goal was to rigorously analyze comedy and reproduce it under laboratory conditions. In May, 2009, a series of Scientifically

Interrobang’s Sketch Comedy Read More »