Joel Warner


Joel Warner is an American author and journalist. He is the managing editor of The Lever investigative news outlet, and formerly worked as a staff writer for International Business Times and Westword. He has also written for Esquire, Wired, Men's Health, Men's Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications. He is co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search For What Makes Things Funny, and the forthcoming The Curse of the Marquis: A Notorious Scoundrel, A Mythical Manuscript, And The Biggest Scandal In Literary History.

The Humor Code

In 2010, Warner met Peter McGraw, a professor at the University of Colorado. Warner was fascinated by McGraw's research and unified theory of humor, the Benign Violation Theory. Starting in 2011, the two created "The Humor Code Project," a two-year, 91,000-mile global search for what makes things funny. Their travels took them to Tanzania, Scandinavia, Japan, Israel, Peru, and several other destinations in North America. McGraw and Warner authored The Humor Code, a book about their travels and the experiments they conducted along the way. The two maintained multiple blogs about their adventures on Wired, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.

Works

As a staff writer for International Business Times, Warner received a Society of American Business Editors and Writers' Best in Business award for his article "Marijuana Inc".
As a staff writer for Westword, Warner received several awards for his feature writing:
"Black and Blue"
"Martial Law"
"The Boy Who Wouldn't Tell"
"Lax and the City"
  • 2011 Education Reporting Award, National Education Writers Association
  • 2011 Salute to Excellence Award, National Association of Black Journalists
  • 2011 Best of the West, First Amendment Funding, Inc.
"Trial by Fire"
  • 2011 Salute to Excellence Award, National Association of Black Journalists
"Taken for a Ride"
  • 2011 Salute to Excellence Awards, National Association of Black Journalists
"Growth Industry"
  • 2010 Maggie Award, The Magazine Awards of Western Publishing
"Cash Crop"
  • 2010 Maggie Award, The Magazine Awards of Western Publishing,
"The Good Soldier"
"Father of Invention"
2009 AAN AltWeekly Award
"You Do the Meth"
"Mr. Big"