I want to be a comedian when I grow up, so I’m trying to write many jokes. But it’s hard! It’s a bit demotivating because I don’t have a concrete metric to measure if I’m getting better or not.
So I was thinking of ways to measure how funny my jokes are. I could:
- Tell the joke in front of friends and measure how loud they laugh (in decibels).
- Measure how loud I laughed when I first thought of the joke.
- Since jokes get boring the more you work with it
- Outsource people to score jokes on a scale of:
- (0) not funny
- (1) almost funny
- (2) funny
- (3) hilarious
- Create an algorithm factoring comedic laws:
- The number of syllables in the joke
- If it avoids cliches
- How close to the end is the punchline
- If it targets the comfortable rather than the afflicted
- The number of funny filters it uses (more = funnier):
- Irony
- Character
- Reference
- Shock
- Hyperbole
- Parody
- Wordplay
- Analogy
- Madcap
- Meta humour
- Misplaced Focus
- etc.
I think the simplest way is to put my writing out there and see if it gains traction, but I’m too scared to do that yet.
I guess the main reason why I want to create a quantitative metric is that I want to build a deterministic long-term system to write jokes. And this metric will help guide me to make such a system, just like how Google uses a metric to determine how good their search results are.
Anyway, the path for me to improve is to put in the hours, so I promise to make you laugh next week. Until then, I hope you have a great week.
- Curtis
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