How Humour Propagates Through Twitter— Dave's Most Popular Edinburgh Fringe Jokes
August 2021
Every year, comedians write material, develop shows and perform their work to audiences on Twitter, in comedy clubs and at festivals. The Edinburgh Fringe is the biggest of those annual festivals, with 3 million tickets being sold to almost 4000 shows. Each year, Dave (the UK TV comedy channel) lists the best jokes at the Edinburgh Fringe which is taken up and published by national newspapers. People retell jokes that they like. Those who heard these jokes at a perfomance, or read them in newspapers or on Twitter, or heard them repeated by their friends, may go on to tell them later. So a joke, written and performed by one person, will go on to appear many times, and in different forms as people adapt the joke to their purposes (or mangle it, according to their joke-telling skills!) Twitter gives us an insight into this process. We may see a comedian share an early version of the joke with their online followers, and then different version of the joke win them a place on the Dave shortlist, and for that joke to be retold and retweeted by hundreds of people over the following months.
Ivo Graham is an Eton and Oxford alumnus who started stand-up in 2009 at the age of 18, and bases much of his comedy on his privileged family background. He told a joke about his family advent calender on Twitter in December 2018…
…which he went on to perform (in a different version) 8 months later in his 2019 Edinburgh show "The Game of Life" where it achieved a place on the Dave shortlist…
…and as a result was retold by lots of Twitter users in a variety of versions thereafter.
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In the two years since that joke debuted on Twitter, it (or something like it) have been independently tweeted 170 times by 149 accounts and received almost 80,000 replies, likes and retweets. Exactly half of those tweets (85) explicitly acknowledge the comedian's authorship, 23 acknowledge the source of the joke (another person, or a web article) or indicated that it was not their own words (by surrounding the joke in quotation marks). The remaining 63 gave no indication that their Tweet was not original (one of those tweets was written by the comedian themselves).
*Looks intently at audience* I know this looks like a bunch of dorky statistics. And to some extent, OK that's a fair cop because I'm a professor of web science and making dorky data summaries is part of my profession. But this is so much more than just dorky statistics, this is investigating acts of creativity. Before 11:02am on Dec 2nd 2018, no-one in the whole world had ever in the history of time, taken the two concepts of "the intergenerational operation of economic privilege" and "advent calendars" and put them together publicly in a single sentence before. And since that moment, we can see one man unleashing that idea on the world, and 169 other people (so far) running with it and taking it to an audience of tens of thousands. It's amazing that we can observe individual acts of creativity and the responses that they evoke through the microscope of Twitter.
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The two periods when the joke received a lot of attention were (a) the end of the Edinburgh Festival when the Dave shortlist was announced, and (b) Christmas 2020 (a time when the joke is thematically relevant). The joke's overall popularity (ie the total response in terms of the replies, likes and retweets) is very high almost exclusively due to a single retelling of the joke in December 2020 which recieved 67,600 likes and 8,600 retweets. This is the most popular tweet of both the tweet author and the comedian's accounts in the previous 12 months. For context, the tweet author has 1/4 the number of twitter followers that the comedian has, so the tweet popularity is not down to the its promotion by a more significant influencer.
This joke was searched for using the terms "advent calender doors opened contacts" which (by trial and error) allowed multiple joke variants to be collected without also including non-jokes about advent calendars. All of these jokes combine the two unrelated ideas of "advent calendars" and "in-group privilege" via the concept of "door opening". The joke is best told in the passive voice ("doors are opened by") because the (unexpected) identity of the door-opener can become the last phrase in the sentence (the punch line). Before the joke's 2018 debut by Ivo Graham, no-one had put those concepts together in a tweet. Since then it has been retold with Eton, Harrow, Harvard, Belvedere College, Boris Johnson and the Irish Government taking the role as the privileged in-group. Overwhelmingly the door openers are (my/your) Dad's (Daddy's, father's, Dad's friends') contacts (and once, Dad's contacts butlers), but some equal-opportunity nepoitsm is admitted with parents' (Mum & Dad's, my family's) contacts (and friends) and political party contacts.