The One With Too Many Jokes
The history and neuroscience behind perfectly pacing a sitcom
For over fifty years, comedy shows have been a staple of television. While the style and feel has changed from early American comedies such as I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island, through the golden era of Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, and Frasier, to the more recent Veep and Ted Lasso, television sitcoms have been consistently popular by making their audiences laugh.
It would not be absurd to assume then that the best comedies should be the ones that make their audiences laugh the most, or cram the most number of jokes per minute (JPM) or per episode into their show. But does that play out in the data?
An informal study conducted by The Atlantic counted the number of jokes in some of the most popular sitcoms and found that the most popular shows in terms of viewership, as well as the highest rated and critically acclaimed shows were actually in a “Goldilocks zone” in the middle of the pack — The Office clocked in at 6.65 JPM, Friends at 6.06, and The Big Bang Theory had 5.80. Similarly, Ken Jennings found that while the JPM increased initially, from less than 3 in the 50s to over 7 for some shows in the 2000s, it has mostly flattened out and stabilized, with variations across different shows and styles. Finally, a New York Times article from 2015 highlighted the trend towards more involved plotlines and less focus on joke counts among newer shows.
While none of these studies are particularly scientific, they do highlight an important truth — that there is an upper limit to the number of jokes that can be appreciated by audience. While there have been several innovations both in writing style and production style, comedy may have reached its peak joke count — and the new innovations may start pushing the number back down.
And now for something completely different
Two major changes drove a rapid increase in the joke count over the 1990s and 2000s — the switch to a single-camera format, and the elimination of the laugh track.
Most older comedies are filmed in a multi-camera format, which uses multiple cameras to film a single location, and cuts between the different cameras through the scene. This style was well-suited to sitcoms that are primarily set in a single location — like Central Perk and the protagonists’ apartments in Friends, or Monk’s cafe and the protagonists’ apartments in Seinfeld. This changed around the turn of the millennium, with The Office, 30 Rock, Modern Family and most other recent shows switching to a single-camera format, that focuses more on the characters.
In conjunction, the laugh track started disappearing — partly due to the elimination of the live studio audience, and partly due to the ability of the single-camera format to feature characters’ reactions to highlight a joke and guide the audience without a background of laughter (witness Dunder Mifflin employees’ reactions to Michael Scott’s cringeworthy statements, for example — their eye-rolls, awkward glances, or shocked looks highlight the joke better than a laugh track could).
These two changes cleared up a lot more time — dialogues could now be overlapping, without the need for a pesky gap due to a laugh track; reactions and cutaways could add to the humour; and context-setting by breaking the fourth wall saves time for more jokes. It’s no surprise that 30 Rock clocked in the highest JPM in the analyzed set, at 7.44.
Another major factor that causes variability in the JPM is the style of comedy. Shows that focus more on dialogue-driven comedy tend to have higher joke counts, while those that focus more on slapstick farce tend to have fewer as they build up to the physical comedy elements of the joke. Consequently, shows like 30 Rock tend to have higher joke counts, especially as compared to Frasier, or even older shows like Gilligan’s Island.
While these trends and innovations pushed joke counts up, two new trends are in favour of slowing down joke counts.
First, shows have shifted from a weekly release format that was suited to cable television, to a multi-episode drop on a streaming service that allows for more bingeing. As a consequence, plots can be, and often are, more nuanced — the objective of the writer has changed to keeping the viewer engaged across a season and encourage bingeing, which is better delivered through an engaging plot as opposed to repetitive situations such as in the 90s heyday of Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, Frasier and more. The continuity offered through simultaneous release of multiple episodes has also reduced the dependence on viewers’ memories for complex plot points. This has led to shows focusing on dramatic elements of the plot over a pure-play joke count — perhaps most visibly in Ted Lasso.
Second, the growth of stand-up comedy has clearly highlighted benchmarks and enabled a better understanding of joke counts. The best stand-up comics aim for 4–6 jokes per minute — and this is without the need for a plot, or without involving multiple characters and locations. Absurdly high joke counts would seem artificial and reduce the audience’s appreciation of the humour.
A joke walks into a brain
Appreciating humour involves complex neurological processes that are as yet being understood — several recent scientific and philosophical studies have attempted to understand what makes us laugh. One of the most popular theories is the Incongruity Theory, which states that the human brain finds a joke funny due to a perceived inconsistency or incongruity that surprises us. Consequently, the setup of the joke involves two phases — the first phase sets the context and lays the groundwork to misdirect our brain, and the second phase (or the punchline) lands the surprise and completes the misdirection. Similarly, the appreciation of the joke on encountering this incongruity is in two phases, with the brain first encountering and reconciling this incongruity, and then determining the level of amusement, deriving from how unpredictable the surprise was. The more unpredictable, the more we are likely to be amused — but also the longer it will take our brains to reconcile the incongruity and appreciate it.
Consequently, better quality jokes would also need to leave time in for the audience to react to them and appreciate the incongruity. This again leads to a natural cap, deriving both from the time to set up a quality joke, and the time needed from viewers to appreciate it. This appears to correlate with, while adding an important caveat to, the finding at the start of this article — that there is a Goldilocks zone in terms of number of quality jokes per minute in popular and critically-acclaimed shows.
While writers continue to innovate, it appears we may have reached, and passed, peak comedy. The data and trends suggest that there is bound to be a shrinkage in the number of jokes — not that there is anything wrong with that!
