Love the interactive website, how does one make website like this? any pointers on tech used?
The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
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Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#32I 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…
Saturday Night Live peaked when you were in high school, and has been downhill ever since, with occasional flashes of brilliance.
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#33Love the interactive website, how does one make website like this? any pointers on tech used?
Here is the pudding's youtube channel where they show some of the process https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFuV9vMFVluW9CAOdS4Oluw/vid...
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#34I 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, Interestin…
Compression Progress = finding pattern.
It's the pattern (i.e. redundancy) to be found that makes it interesting. But pattern reduces information capacity - the greatest information is conveyed when there is no constraint of pattern or regularity, and is indistinguishable from pure randomness or white noise: maximum entropy.
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#35What framework did they use for the powerpoint?
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#36I 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, Interestin…
It’s model building isn’t it? Our world model is a compressed representation of the real world. The better the model the more effective the compression, given the same storage space. That’s why unexpected results excite us, because they allow us to improve our model. I’d wager the best comedy allows us to see the mundane (i.e. well within our model’s capability) from a novel perspective.
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#37I 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, Interestin…
This comment is the beautiful content that I come to HackerNews for.
I wonder if there is a proper theory of humor out there. For example, surprise is a big part of any joke - be it double meaning joke, a pun, something clever; the only common thing among almost every joke is surprise. So I wonder if there is a comprehensive theory of humor out there.
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#38Saying that some/all other standups "just [tell] 100 individual jokes" is a straw man. She demonstrates textbook Stand-Up Comedy: From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_comedy : "Bits (linked jokes) and chunks (linked bits) are an arrangement of interlinked thematic units from within the set or routine. [...] Stand-ups structure jokes, bits, and chunks to end on climactic laughter. [...] A callback is a referenc…
Are you familiar with Mitch Hedberg?
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#39I 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, Interestin…
As a practitioner of improv comedy (including a little clowncraft), I'd argue that you can produce laughs from essentially doing nothing, repeatedly. So, I'm not really convinced. Maybe that principle can explain some cases of beauty, novelty, .... jokes. Definitely not all.
I think your example fits the theory pretty well. If you flip a coin ten times and get mixed heads and tails, it's boring, but if you get ten heads in a row (so the theory goes), at some point your brain suddenly recognizes that you're dealing with an unexpected source of compressible data. Surprise!
Re: The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)
#40Theres no audio option