Originally Posted: Oct 23, 2015
Last Updated: Nov 3, 2015
Who cares about student-faculty ratio?! Get your lolz with the funniest colleges in the country! The results might surprise you . . .
When you’re paying $25,000++++ a year for your education, sometimes you need to laugh to keep from crying. Maybe that’s why college seems to be the place where so many of our funniest citizens get their start.
So, we got to wondering, what are the funniest campuses? We have lists for the most stressful colleges and the most accepting ones, but what about the places you can get a good laugh beyond your chemistry professor’s periodic table puns? Ahem:
That’s why we spent far more time and research than is probably appropriate to research this list of the funniest colleges in the country! And by that we mean the schools that seem to have a preternatural gift for churning out the funniest people by offering the funniest environments.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one, but here they are:
Top 10 funniest colleges
- New York University
- University of California—Los Angeles
- University of Southern California
- Northwestern University
- Columbia University
- Yale University
- Cornell University
- Harvard University
- Emerson College
- California Institute of the Arts (tie for 10)
- Carnegie Mellon University (tie for 10)
Other rather amusing schools
- Boston College
- Boston University
- CUNY—City College
- Dartmouth College
- Georgetown University
- Juilliard School
- Queens College
- Stanford University
- Syracuse University
- Temple University
- The University of Arizona
- University of Chicago
- University of Michigan
- University of Pennsylvania
- University of Wisconsin—Madison
- Washington University in St. Louis
The #1 school, New York University, wasn’t exactly the biggest surprise ever, since they’re in the epicenter of comedy. But they still won by a landslide (sorry, UCLA). Plus, they earned it, having given us the likes of Billy Crystal, Andy Samberg, Aziz Ansari, Neil Simon, and, of course, the Olsen Twins.
How did we come up with this list?
A lot of it’s based on the alma maters of the funniest people in and behind your favorite comedies, including comedians, the showrunners for the top comedy TV shows and movies, and Emmy Award winners and nominees for writing and acting in comedy. But we also gave points for colleges with comedy extracurriculars on campus, like improv groups and humor publications. We even interpolated the most fun-loving campuses. Then we narrowed down 1,162 entries to the ones you see here.
So enjoy this list of the nation’s funniest colleges, bastions of everything from the sharpest political satire to admittedly less sharp (one would hope) poop jokes. They may not be able to teach you to be funny, but they’re not a bad place to start. Plus, fingers crossed for hilarious commencement speakers.
View the college-rankings-style list here.
