Joel Warner

Joel Warner is an American author and journalist. He is the co-author of The Humor Code, a former staff writer for Westword, Denver's alternative newsweekly, and has also written for Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Boston Globe, Slate, Grantland, and other publications.

Most recently, he was a staff writer for International Business Times covering the marijuana and enterprise beats, where his work won a 2015 Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

During his five-year stint as a staff writer at Denver's Westword newspaper, Warner's work was honored by the likes of the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, the Casey Medals for Meritorious Journalism, the National Awards for Education Reporting and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ AltWeekly Awards.

Starting in 2011, along with Peter McGraw, Warner started "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.

Warner has been a featured speaker at SXSW Interactive, Chicago Ideas Week, and the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, and he has discussed his work on venues ranging from CBS This Morning to On The Media to the WTF with Marc Maron podcast. He also serves as a writing instructor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.