Comedy Analytics, Read Out Loud
Deep dives, methodology updates, fan-theory autopsies, and show-launch analyses — every post backed by the same data that powers the index.
16.8
HI gap at identical joke density
Fleabag and The Simpsons both average 3.46 jokes per minute — and sit 16.8 Humor Index points apart. Across our canonically-scored shows craft predicts 91% of the score, density 8%, and the two barely correlate. Volume is the cheap lever.
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The Archive
11 more dispatches — show launches, methodology audits, leaderboards, retractions, the lot.
77.8
Futurama Humor Index (#18)
June 14, 2026 · 4 min read
137 episodes, 1999–2025, 8,900 jokes. Futurama lands at 77.8 (#18 of 21) — and the Hulu revival nearly held its per-joke quality (craft 6.80 vs 6.85). It has the highest joke density on the board and still finishes lower-table, which tells you what the index actually rewards.
82.5
Season 6 — the peak season
June 9, 2026 · 7 min read
All 441 episodes and 28,170 jokes, scored. The golden age is statistically real — Season 6 peaks at 82.5 — but the post-classic decline is gentler than the memes: seasons 11–20 never drop below 77.6, and the single highest-scoring episode is from Season 16.
+0.30
Geoffrey's vs-castmates edge (best in cast)
June 7, 2026 · 8 min read
We scored all 148 episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Will Smith leads the cast in total Comedy WAR — but only because he says three times as many jokes as anyone else. Per joke, the funniest Banks-household voice is Geoffrey, the butler with under four lines an episode and the sharpest one in the room.
+3.1
S13–S17 vs S1–S7 (HI points)
May 31, 2026 · 8 min read
Fan consensus says peak Sunny is the original FX run. The Humor Index disagrees. We scored all 177 episodes across 17 seasons; the last five (S13–S17) outscore the first seven (S1–S7) by 3.1 points. Sunny didn't decline. It got meaner — and the dialogue craft followed.
69.1%
Schitt's character comedy share
May 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Across the 18 shows we've tagged by joke type, character_comedy is the most variable axis in our taxonomy — a 47-point spread. Schitt's Creek tells more character-driven jokes than Seinfeld. By a factor of nearly three.
ICC 0.28
Single-run reliability
April 17, 2026 · 9 min read
A test-retest study on 30 episodes. Show-identity bias is tiny (not significant). But the scorer is noisier than we thought — individual episode Humor Indexes are only 28% signal, 72% run-to-run variance. Here's what we're doing about it.
7.9%
Variance between shows
April 17, 2026 · 8 min read
A hierarchical Bayesian model of joke impact on 15,000 jokes. Format effect: indistinguishable from zero — which is why the multi-cam penalty is gone. 64% of joke-level variance is unexplained noise, and show identity explains only 7.9%.
r = +0.18
Within-show correlation
April 12, 2026 · 7 min read
We compared 2,649 episodes across all 21 scored shows against IMDb. Within-show correlation: r = +0.18 — audience ratings explain about 3% of the variance in comedy craft.
183
Episodes Analyzed
April 10, 2026 · 8 min read
We ran all 183 episodes of The Office through our AI comedy analyst. Season 4 averages 83.8 and "Dinner Party" tops the series at 98.0 — the fan consensus holds up.
5
Dimensions
April 10, 2026 · 6 min read
Peak density, effective craft, memorability bonus — here's the complete breakdown of how we turn thousands of joke scores into a single number.
Retracted
See update note in post
April 10, 2026 · 5 min read
Our original April 10 argument for a laugh-track penalty — and why we removed it a week later when a Bayesian audit showed the effect was indistinguishable from zero.