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The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)

pudding.cool

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Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)

#18
I believe the humor and novelty and interestingness of this standup routine is related to the _density_ of information conveyance.

I read this paper a while back, it was so good I wanted to make it more sharable:

https://josh.works/driven-by-compression-progress-novelty-hu...

The title is:

Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes

And... it's really good. It argues that a common thread among many different domains (as listed in the title) is how much information can be compressed into the information stream, like the bit-rate. Higher bitrate, more interesting information.

Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)

#19

I have not seen a funny comic in such a long time. Maybe it my age, but I thought I had decent taste in comedy. I never thought Leno was funny. Seinfield was tedious. It just seems like the last two decades have been pitiful? I heard a convict being interviewed a few years ago. The interviewer asked him what he does all day. He said, "I try to figure out why Saturday Night Live is not funny, and ways to make it funny…

Humor is notoriously subjective and also dependent on mood.

The Goes Wrong Show is reliably funny for me; the premise is that a small-town serious theater troop has lucked into a time slot on a BBC channel, and they do their earnest utmost to do theatre well. But -- it all goes wrong. There's a stage version and two (UK) seasons of the show.

Whose Line Is It Anyway? typically manages a few howlingly good bits in any given show.

Key and Peele did five seasons and I get something hilarious out of basically every show, but I also think they fall flat several times per show.

Saturday Night Live has had good years and bad; they've always had a problem with knowing when to stop a sketch, but they're still worth watching, if not worth staying up for. There's a lot of survivorship bias with SNL: you can see the best bits of 45 years, and compared with that, how's this week's show going to rate?

Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)

#20

I have not seen a funny comic in such a long time. Maybe it my age, but I thought I had decent taste in comedy. I never thought Leno was funny. Seinfield was tedious. It just seems like the last two decades have been pitiful? I heard a convict being interviewed a few years ago. The interviewer asked him what he does all day. He said, "I try to figure out why Saturday Night Live is not funny, and ways to make it funny…

Ronny Chieng

Bill Burr

Nate Bargatze

Fortune Feimster

Gary Gulman

Just a few I was able to dig up who made me laugh a lot.

I guess it depends what you like, but the art form has been really sharpened over the last 10-20 years, to the point where, similar to film, the majority of the content out there conforms to a style that everyone seems to agree is good.

In comedy, that style is confessional, tagged storytelling with interwoven callbacks. If you don’t like that, yeah, you probably don’t like modern comedy.

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