Welcome to Kelly Corrigan Wonders.

I'm Kelly Corrigan, and today I'm wondering what happens when a school district decides that making people laugh is a worthy intellectual pursuit.

My guest is Beth Stelling, and this is the fifth episode in our Wired

to Create series. I want to tell you something about Beth Stelling before we get to the conversation,

which was, as you'll hear, wonderful. Beth grew up the youngest of three girls in Dayton, Ohio.

Single mom, dad in Orlando, chasing a dream that mostly involved

dressing as black beard and a miniature golf course. And somewhere in the middle of all that,

Beth discovered that she could make people laugh. First, her sisters, then her mom, then eventually

the state of Ohio, which gave her a championship in humorous interpretation in 2003,

which is a real category and one I wish existed when I was in high school.

She went on to get a theater degree, magna cum laude, interned at Steppenwolf, studied improv at

the Annoyance Theater in Chicago, and built one of the most respected careers in American comedy.

The New York Times called her first one-hour special, Virtuosic.

Conan O'Brien produced it.

She's written for Rick and Morty, crashing, Sarah Silverman's show,

and about a dozen other things that you've watched without knowing her name was attached to them.

And in Los Angeles, where she lives, she runs something called The Punch Up Mike. She invites

early stage comedians to come to a short set, and then she tries to give them a better tag,

a better punchline, whatever she can offer to help them move to the next

stage. But let me back up because I think it's common not to give that much credit to what comedy

actually is, what it requires, what it does to a brain and what it teaches. Researchers at the

University of New Mexico found that humor production, the ability to generate something funny, not just appreciated, is strongly correlated with general intelligence and particularly with verbal and abstract reasoning.

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