According to this story some scientists have created a formula for deciding whether a sitcom is funny. Here it is:

Using this formula, Only Fools And Horses scored highest with 696 points, while Orrible scored 6.5

To get to these results, apparently, the grandeur of the main character is multiplied by their delusions of grandeur and added to the verbal wit of the script. The whole lot is multiplied by the number of times somebody fell over. Somewhere along the line the difference in social status between the highest and lowest ranking characters and the success of any scheme in the show are also part of the calculation.

Well it fills up a few column inches in the newspapers, but I can’t help wondering how someone managed to get paid to come up with this, and what the point is.

Its not even really science is it? By having an equation the implication is that there is some objective, rational method of working out how funny something is, but most if not all of the building blocks of the equation are derived subjectively. (What is the international standard of measurement unit for measuring delusions of grandeur for example?)

And as for ‘standard of wit’… how do you measure that? Our kids think the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is witty, my wife thinks Harry Hill has no wit at all. The entire result will be skewed by the biases of whoever calculates the values of the operands.

I like to think that many aspects of the world can be reduced to theory and rationalised by some scientific method, but in this case I think the correct way to approach it would be by the purely empirical method of playing the video and measuring the laughter.