Marc Hye-Knudsen

My research focuses on humor, and my PhD-project will specifically be aimed at examining the positive functions humor has in modern workplaces—and the negative consequences that can follow when it goes awry. Prior to joining MGMT as a PhD, I have worked for the last two years as lab manager at BSS’s Cognition and Behavior Lab. Hence, I am no stranger to the campus, and I already know and have worked with some of the great people here at MGMT, helping them run their experiments in the lab. My advisor is Christian Waldstrøm, and my co-supervisor is my former boss, lab director at the Cognition and Behavior Lab, Dan Mønster.

Although I have worked at BSS for the last two years, my master’s degree is actually from the Faculty of Arts, where I studied English and Scandinavian Languages and Literature. This is where I first became enamoured not just with studying humor but also with cognitive and evolutionary approaches to human behavior, in large part through working with Mathias Clasen, the co-director of Arts’s Recreational Fear Lab. My research into humor up until now has focused on humor largely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective, and just prior to joining MGMT I have (almost) finished a large study on the common themes and functions of humor among hunter-gatherer peoples who live in conditions reminiscent of those in which humor originally evolved.

Research areas:

Cultural forms of expression: humour, jokes, storytelling

Culture and cognition: biocultural studies

Film theory: cognitive film theory

Text theory and analysis: cognitive literary studies, evolutionary literary studies

Video genres: comedy