The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Structure of a Stand-Up Comedy (2018)

pudding.cool

156 pointsBrajeshwar39 comments

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.

> 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.

Piet Mondrian, Philip Glass, Andy Kaufman would provide trivial counter-arguments to the idea that high-density = "better" (more interesting, funnier, etc.).

I only know of Andy Kaufman from your examples.

Wasn’t some of his work very much reliant on what he didn’t say directly? An argument one could make would be that the information density is still high in terms of what is perceived or experienced. That would still be a kind of compression but it involves the context and audience to a very high degree. I think he sometimes made his performances so intense, that it would be unbearable not to engage with them.

You might argue that work like Mondrian's implies additional information, in the form of implied commentary on centuries of art history (arguably necessary for his work to be considered interesting or "good"). You might then argue that this makes up for the lower explicit information density.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Bollocks. The stand-up I will never forget is Stewart Lee, keeping two thousand punters in stitches while he spins a single joke out over ten minutes.

It's not a stupid theory but it misses masterful simplicity.

Norm Macdonald was good at that too.

This is impressive. But, those poor frogs.

Snark aside, it also doesn't say that much; Ali Wong's biggest laugh comes in large part from the fact that all her bits are arranged to build up to it. Ok!

If you're interested in this stuff, a good listen is Mike Birbiglia's "Working It Out" podcast, which is a little bit like Marc Maron's "WTF", but with an emphasis on workshopping bits in progress. Part of what makes it interested in this context is that Birbiglia is working out his next special (something that apparently takes years, which I guess shouldn't surprise me), and so talks a lot about the themes he's building jokes around and what he's trying to say overall.

> Part of what makes it interested in this context is that Birbiglia is working out his next special (something that apparently takes years, which I guess shouldn't surprise me)

Comedians try out a lot material (and variations of the material) on tour: I attended my first live show expecting special-level of polish and was disappointed. The bits I remembered, that did end up in the special had much better delivery, after much tweaking to see what worked and what didn't, I'm guessing.

If you like this, definitely go down a https://pudding.cool rabbit hole. There's some really amazing visualizations they've built out.

I loved the presentation of this

Yeah, that was fantastic

It did not work for me on mobile. Multiple clicks with no response, threw me back to the first page once, I gave up a few pages into it.

I hated it and stopped after about 3 prompts/clicks

Saying 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 reference to a previous thing that was experienced by the audience during that set, designed to create an inside joke."

Are you familiar with Mitch Hedberg?

Story time.

My mates went to Stewart Lee one year. I turned it down. Lee did a bit about animal rescue and called the audience for baby animals, partly so he could scorn the shitty audience suggestions.

My mate called back to an earlier bit about Benedictine monks.

So Stewart Lee was doing the animal rescue shelter routine about nursing a sickly baby Benedictine monk back to health. Obviously my mate was super proud, and reprised the entire scene for my benefit later.

The next year, we all went again to Stewart Lee. All the material was new except, to my utter delight, he repeated the animal rescue sketch. And asked the audience for a baby animal.

After the expected unfunny offerings ("badger!", "giraffe!"), I shouted "premier league footballer". Which was, again, a callback to a bit earlier in that night's show.

So the animal shelter routine was Stewart nursing a little orphan baby premier league footballer.

That's a one-year callback. Also the start and end of my career in comedy.

Related (but with not nearly as creative a presentation), here's an analysis of James Acaster's Repertoire series on Netflix (with a brief reference to Ali Wong's special): [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP3Gr-ZV0Tw

Guess I'm old because there is nothing funny about what she does. Just awkward and embarrassing.

You saw her special? Everything else I’ve seen of hers was cringey, but baby cobra was solid work. If you don’t like it you likely don’t like most “good” stand up comedy these days. Awkward and embarrassing is a pretty good description of the art form.

The Nerdwriter made a similar analysis of Louis CK, realy worth watching: https://youtu.be/ufdvYrTeTuU

Love 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...

[Meta] Looks like the article is from 2018, perhaps it would help to reflect that in the title?

Another really cool Pudding project was the "How bad is your Spotify?" [0]

[0] https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/

What framework did they use for the powerpoint?

Theres no audio option

Terrible presentation format. Exceedingly annoying on mobile.

I respectfully disagree. I found it nice, engaging, and easy to follow.

Likely it was not optimized for your browser. I had a lot of trouble navigating this site, multiple presses with no response, and I gave up a few pages through it.

I didn't completely hate the abuse of JavaScript in this. But still it's not as enjoyable as a simple responsive page of static HTML and images you could scroll.

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 again." The lady looked at him like he was crazy, but I kinda understood what he was getting at.

I think about some of my favorite comedians over the years, and they all had two things in common: were poor, or low middle class, griping up. And did a fair amount of drugs.

Drugs that would get you fired these days.

I'm not equating drugs with good comedy. I just don't know the reason. It couldn't be that all the material has alwready been said?

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?

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.

Most cities have comedy clubs; don't go to those. Go to the bars that do weekly standup, those are the places the comedy show folks go to try out new material, or where newer folks try to break into the scene. You get exposed to a lot of things that would never be allowed on any sort of broadcast medium, and are often uproariously funny.

Saturday Night Live peaked when you were in high school, and has been downhill ever since, with occasional flashes of brilliance.

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