Pep Rosenfeld penned one of the business books of the year: Work/Laugh Balance (published by A.W. Bruna). This follows his and Boom co-founder Andrew Moskos’ hysterical The 30 Most Important Years in Dutch History (published by Akashic Books). Read all the great stories in the words of Boom’s most famous alumni about our 30 years in Amsterdam!
Work/Laugh Balance: Why and how humor will make you and your team more successful
Learn how you can master humor to improve your workplace culture. How a well-timed laugh boosts creativity, strengthens teams, and turns stress into a superpower. Packed with real-world examples, data-driven insights, and methods to help you write jokes that (probably) will make everyone laugh. As you would expect from Pep, the book is straight up funny!
Will the book help you become a professional comedian? Probably not. Well actually… definitely not. But the book will teach you Pep’s methodology for finding what’s funny in the workplace (and personal life). It will also teach you how to use those observations to boost productivity and morale… and have more fun while you’re at it!
The 30 Most Important Years in Dutch History
Having risen roughly to the middle of Chicago’s cutthroat comedy scene, Andrew Moskos and Pep Rosenfeld decamped the Midwest for Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1993 to start their own improv comedy troupe, Boom Chicago. In a foreign land with zero tradition of English-language humor, Moskos and Rosenfeld unwittingly created the finishing school for some of today’s most groundbreaking comedic talents. They (along with coauthors Matt Diehl and Saskia Maas) document this journey in the definitive oral history Boom Chicago Presents the 30 Most Important Years in Dutch History.
From its stages, Boom Chicago went on to launch cultural game changers like Seth Meyers, Jordan Peele, Amber Ruffin, Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, Ike Barinholtz, Kay Cannon, and Tami Sagher (and that’s just a partial list). At Boom, these young upstarts honed their craft in front of unsuspecting foreign audiences and visiting dignitaries— all while navigating a world with legal weed and prostitution, annual holiday celebrations involving blackface, cookies with weird racist names, and football that has nothing to do with the NFL. From this culture shock, this collective created a more topical, inclusive, tech-savvy humor that would become the dominant comedy style of our time.
