You’d think today’s modern woman would be happier than ever.

We’ve got it all — the right to work, the right to not work, the right to sleep with David Letterman — but, surprisingly, a comprehensive new study is pointing to one very disturbing trend.

Compared to 35 years ago, today’s modern woman is, in fact, more miserable than ever.

What’s even more troubling? According to this new meta-analysis of major data sets available on well-being research, men by contrast are actually growing more content than ever.

“We basically noticed something that hadn’t been noticed before, which is that women are becoming less happy relative to men, both in the US and in Europe,” says Justin Wolfers, who recently published these findings with his romantic and research partner, Betsey Stevenson (how’s that for a “second shift”?). “This study has very big implications for happiness researchers.”

Here’s the review of the new book “The Second City Unscripted” by Mike Thomas.

[Related: Please also consider reading "Something Wonderful Right Away." I read that book in 2003 on the plane to London, my first trip ever to Europe, and the book and the trip blend together as one beautiful, lightening-enlightening experience.]

[Also related: While reading a few of the excerpts I've pulled, I've provided a nice little YEAHYEAHYEAH soundtrack at the bottom of this post if you'd like one.]

So what follows are a few of my favorite quotes from this fascinating oral history which I found particularly inspiring and insightful. As a student there in the early 2000s, Second City was life changing for me.

It’s where I learned to

-live in the moment

-go for it, even when it doesn’t work

-see how a nurturing aesthetic can lead to more ideas than you ever dreamed possible (try it, just once, instead of saying “No, that won’t work…” say, “Yes, and what if we considered…” Seriously, just once…try it)

-listen and create from a place of joy instead of fear

-realize there is nothing to be scared of…ever

-see how in every situation, it’s YOU bringing that energy (either joy or fear, either OWNage or apologizing)

-laugh at weaknesses and love vulnerabilities

-know when to be the garnish and when to be the main course

-thrill in the joy of creation

-have fun rather than overthink

-treasure and value and advance rather than obsess about what might be better

-look at the strengths rather than the weakness in what’s being put forward

-learn and feel inspired by the power of creation rather than the invulnerable, removed, risking-nothing superiority of critical detraction

-throw out all the rules and the self-hatred and the not-being-good-enough and the mistakes and the what-if-I-could-have and the did-I-do-this-right and the maybe-someday-when-everything’s-perfect and just go for it, man.

Enjoy these excerpts for the improv/comedy/theater/performance/creative geek inside.

Note: These are all quotes that tickled or inspired and made me draw a scribbly star next to a passage, or even better, chuckle and say aloud to myself, “totally” like a crazy person.

YEAH!

…Tina Fey: “Being in that company, in some ways you lose your fear of failure. Because there are always nights in that set when you’re developing a show where everything tanks, or where you’re just bombing, and you come out the other side of it, and you survive it. And that’s such a great thing to get rid of–that fear of failure.”

…Bonnie Hunt: “It definitely humbles you, because there are times when you go out there and you fail and you’ve got to brush yourself off and start all over again. It’s kind of like being a Cubs fan. I think what I learned at Second City was that it was okay to take risks, to fall flat on my face and get back up and learn about myself. And I definitely learned to embrace the honesty of my own vulnerability.”

…Alan Arkin: “I thought I was going to get fired initially, because I wasn’t funny at all for about a month….And then, after about a month, I found a character that worked. Whatever I did in that character was funny. And I hung on to that character like a lifeline…”

…Alan Arkin: “…it gave us a place to fail. Which doesn’t exist in this civilization anymore. There is no place to fail anymore. And failing at something is crucial. You don’t learn from anything unless you fail. And we were not only allowed to fail, but almost encourage to take chances every night onstage. We knew that twenty, thirty, sometimes forty percent of what we were doing wasn’t going to work, and the audience didn’t mind. They knew that two things would fail and the next thing would be glorious.”

…Bob Dishy: “[Paul Sills] was pained, physically pained, by what he considered cheap laughs. I mean, they would drive him up the wall. He’d come backstage and yell, ‘Stop it! What are you doing?!’ Because he had these high standards, which was great. I found it so enlightening.”

…Sheldon Patinkin: “I never found it mystical. I know that some people did, and I know that Viola [Spolin] sort of felt that way about it. I think it was more that when your job is to respond rather than to initiate, which is the rule in an improv–you don’t know what your next line is until you know what just happened or what was just said–it gives you a kind of concentration that perhaps feels mystical to some people, but to me feels like human communication.”

…Valerie Harper: “It made my career. The work. I’m well over sixty and I’m using Viola’s games to get at what I need to do. If you came out of her workshops and you weren’t an actor, you weren’t a failure. Your life would be better because her games unleash something in people that connects them to other people, that makes you observe more clearly, more keenly, be aware of the other over there. She used to say my performance isn’t here in Valerie, it’s over there in the other player. Look at them. How are they reacting to what I’m saying?”

…David Steinberg: “Fred Willard and I would get into this stuff where I just couldn’t stop laughing. He was so brilliantly funny, playing these offbeat unique characters all the time, and it was just hard to do a scene with him. But he and I did a lot of scenes together. Fred was totally unique. The trick to become an audience favorite was originality. He was totally original. You never saw anything like Fred. Weird characters. And Fred himself is offbeat, even to this day.”

…Bernard Sahlins: “[Belushi] knew who he was. He was knew he was good. He was in the present, totally in the present.”

…Eugenie Ross-Leming: “[Belushi] took such pleasure in what he was doing. And you can’t be angry at someone who is not doing something to hurt you but just having a good time.”

…David Rasche: “[Del Close] had an engine that other people don’t have. One thing you learned from him was to take care of each other as actors. His basic thing was, ‘If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you. I will never let you fail. Don’t let me fail.’ And that’s the way he directed. And he really stuck to it. It was an outgrowth of the way humans should treat each other.”

…Harold Ramis: “Del’s whole crusade at Second City and after was to keep people in the moment. Del believed that the Second City games–he actually said this once–[are] just like life. Life is an improvisation. We’re constantly discovering our character, we’re constantly discovering everyone else’s character, and we’re in situations that are constantly evolving and changing. And the ultimate improv game–he called it the Game Game–is the game we’d play all the time. No one tells us what to say; we were always making up our own dialogue. So he wanted the stage to be as real as life in that sense.”

…Harold Ramis: “Del saw in John [Belushi] this force of nature. Del always wanted to revolutionize theater, and here was John, the perfect person to lead the charge. And John had amazing respect for Del. And I know Del liked and respected me, but we were different. Del loved that John was so present in the moment, and I was known to be in my head. I was always ‘writing’ onstage. And John was not a writer. He was not thinking abstractly about what’s good for the scene. He was just there following some impulse of his. And Del admired that.”

…Ann Ryerson: “What I personally loved about Betty [Thomas] is that she had such an incredible enjoyment of life and she was unashamed to show her enjoyment of life, and everybody else vicariously felt good about her and about themselves with Betty around.”

…Betty Thomas: “People say that being a director, you have to make a decision about every half a second. And it’s very simple for me. I don’t need more than half a second. And that’s a great trait to have as a director. ‘Should he wear this? Should that be there? Should that be over there? Do you want this?’ “Yes, No, Yes, Yes, Let’s go. Move that here.’ I would say that was the beginning of confidence and decisiveness.”

…Dan Aykroyd: “[Del's] influence really didn’t come to bear until we came down to Chicago in August of ‘74. That’s when we really had the day-to-day contact with Del, and we got to see how much fun it was, and how he basically removed all fear. All fear of dying. All fear of being bad. All fear of overarching a character. He just basically took all the fear away.”

…Paul Dinello: “I came from a blue-collar Chicago background, and Stephen [Colbert] had come from the South. And he got formal acting training at Northwestern, and I was just a drunk idiot. I think he thought I was a bit of a philistine, and I thought he was a bit of a dandy. His hair was in a pompadour, and he had, like, a red turtleneck on, and he held his chin in his hand. Rested his chin on top of his knuckles. And he was very dry. And I had never really followed any rules, nor did I really want to hear about the rules. I always sort of screwed around. I think Farley and I were closer, but oddly enough, Colbert and I hit it off more.”

…Stephen Colbert: “I was very actorly, because I had gone to theater school. And I was very controlled. I was all about planning. And Paul was sort of a wild, chaotic, impulsive energy comedically. Much sillier, much stupider behavior. And I’m happy to say he won that battle. He said my tie was tied a little too tight, and he was absolutely right. And he opened me up to a little bit of a wilder side, and so did Amy [Sedaris]. And then the three of us became pretty inseparable, and I was very lucky and grateful to have those two people to love and be loved by, for the next few years, because it’s not easy to be a lady-in-waiting there at Second City, while you’re on the road all the time. You get to be on the road, which is great, but waiting for your work is an exhausting experience. Even waiting for a touring company. They keep you hungry.

…Paul Dinello: “Stephen approaches things intellectually. Amy and I approach things emotionally. So when we started, he wanted to take the right road, and he wanted to hear what people had to say. And he wanted to intellectualize stuff and understand it, and sort of do things by the numbers. Amy and I were more the kind of people who would just jump in. And I remember when we first started, he had a thing: ‘I never laugh onstage.’ And we were doing this scene in the touring company and Amy put in these false icky teeth, which she wasn’t supposed to have for the scene, and smiled, and he started laughing. He just lost it, and he went backstage, and he was all upset about it.

…Stephen Colbert: “I was so mad that we finished the song and then I f-cking blew offstage and went and locked myself in the bathroom like a teenage girl, and banged my head against the wall with rage. And she and Paul, who were determined to get me to loosen up, were like, [high mocking voice] ‘Hey, are you crying?’ Just mocking me mercilessly.”

…Amy Sedaris: “He was very serious in the beginning, and it was hard. But after that, he was all ours.”

…Stephen Colbert: “They completely won. I’m forever grateful that they broke me.”

…Paul Dinello: “We improvised a scene where [Steve Carell] played a character who had never had sex. Like, an adult man who never had sex. It’s a vague memory, but we were talking about what it was like to make love to a woman, and what it felt like. And then somehow the subject became what a woman’s vagina feels like, and he said, ‘It’s like feeding a horse.’”

…Tina Fey: “When I first moved to New York, [Martin de Maat] had this awesome rent-controlled place in SoHo. I was moving here to write for SNL, and he was like, ‘Just use my place until you find one.’ It was very, very generous. He really had this sort of Zen approach to improvisation. Much more than anything to do with comedy. It was all about the rules of agreement and ‘Yes, and…’ and almost spilling over as a life philosophy. I remember being in his class and writing down a list of all the things that he said that were so meaningful on several levels. His whole thing was, ‘Do it now. Do it too. Do it again. Put your head in your partner’s bucket. The fun is on the other side of a ‘yes.’ It was all stuff that was wholly true of beginning improvisation, but also sort of true in life.”

I put out a query on Twitter/Facebook, and here are the recommendations. Enjoy!

From: @mandystadt…”Does anyone have a good ‘things to do in NYC’ website they point people to when friends from out of town ask? I say nypost.com, Time Out…”

… @kourtneyjason @mandystadt freenyc.net – all the free events going on in the city! it’s amazing

…@AWDesigns @mandystadt I send them to http://bit.ly/17m1mu

…@eye4style @mandystadt I always suggest that they pick up a copy of New York and/or Time Out New York

…@jeffreymcmanus @mandystadt you want @newyorkology –http://newyorkology.com

…@RayBeckerman @mandystadt Mandy have you checked out @NewYorkology

…@RayBeckerman RT @NewYorkology Today cal filld w/Fests:Czech,Tibet,Korean,oystrs,chile pepper,Red Hook film,burlesque http://bit.ly/4ELgbC cc @mandystadt

…@jshanks @mandystadt try http://brokeassstuart.com/

…@delightfuldiva @mandystadt – http://Going.com

…@ChantersNod http://flavorpill.com/newyork @mandystadt

From Facebook:

…Bahar Atvur: http://nymag.com/visitorsguide/

…Matt Haze: it’s kind of ironic to give out, but…http://www.notfortourists.com/NewYork.aspx

…Courtney Beard: Thrillist is pretty good!

…Tamsin Lonsdale: check out our new website www.thesupperclubinc.com there is an area called Hot Spots where we pick the top places to eat, drink, sleep and play x

New York Post: Journalists Stand Up for Laughs

1) An apparently drunk Kanye West callously stole the spotlight from country superstar Taylor Swift last night, moments after she won at the MTV Video Music Awards.

Swift was giving her acceptance speech after copping the award for Best Female Video when West stormed onto the Radio City Music Hall stage, stole the microphone and dissed the beautiful young songbird, declaring that Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies [Put a Ring On It]” should have won.

“Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” the rap star blathered as boos filled the hall. “One of the best videos of all time!”

2) Lady Gaga was a triple threat at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, parading about in a hat trick of increasingly bizarre outfits. She began on the red carpet clad in a frill of black feathers and a golden half-mask. Then she donned bloody white lingerie — having feigned being struck by a falling chandelier — to sing “Paparazzi.” She finally turned up in her seat wearing a red sheath that covered her from head to thigh, capped by a fiery crown of spiky fabric.

No wonder she won Best New Artist.

Gaga was just one of the attractions of a night that saw Kanye West booed repeatedly for stealing Taylor Swift’s moment in the spotlight, Madonna cheered for a moving tribute to Michael Jackson and Robert Pattinson screeched at just for showing up, being hunky and showing a new clip of his upcoming film “The Twilight Saga: New Moon.”

3) KANYE, the people have spoken — and we are done. You are not the voice of your generation. You are not Jesus Christ. You are not Beyoncé’s spokesman.

And you need to lay off the Hennessy as you strut down the red carpet with your weird, bald she-beast of a girlfriend and your awful zigzag haircut during the pre-show.

For real.

(Photos by Stephen Kosloff)