Prof Leslie Carr: the Web's a funny old thing

The Web's a Funny Old Thing

I have a research curiosity about the role that the online world plays in the comedy industry. The Edinburgh Fringe has slowly built up its online infrastructure, and performers have gradually incorporated Twitter and Facebook in their marketing, to the extent that "bucket speeches" often request social-media likes as much as cash! COVID and lockdown have forced comedians and promoters to move towards online perfomances - and many have discovered that they don't entirely hate it as much as they thought. Received wisdom about "being in the room" and the necessity of intimate responses to a live audience no longer seem to tell the whole story about standup performance.

Comedy itself is evolving, as performers find new online audiences via Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and Tiktok, and the adaptation of the craft to new kinds of performance on these new online platforms has been accelerated by the new necessities of the pandemic.

Siri-ously Funny a standup comedy show about Responsible AI that is currently in development (summer 2024) and is being previewed in Brighton, Southampton and London.
Carr Crash a standup comedy show about the Web and AI that is being performed at festivals, theatres and universities across the UK from 2022-24 .
- AI DIY - a podcast to accompany the show - a light-hearted look at the future of AI with guest researchers and comedians.
A map of female standup comedians in the UK, as derived from Twitter. I made it as a response to the provocation "what can you do to promote female comedy talent?"
A study of how jokes travel on Twitter

This work started off as a personal lockdown Christmas project, with the aim of (a) experimenting with some of the social media data collection tools that he had developed, (b) designing a usable visualisation for a dataset with a large number of categorical dimensions, (c) developing an interesting narrative that encourages exploration of a large dataset - one where the visualisation is the start of a process of investigation and understanding rather than the endpoint of a process of publishing. This work builds on the Data Stories EPSRC project, which researched how to tell compelling stories about data-rich topics.
- A case study of how Edinburgh Fringe one-liners are shared on Twitter.
- An exploration of how to visualise joke telling on Twitter.
- A list of the most popular one-liners from the Edinburgh Fringe.
- An interactive explorer of joke-telling on Twitter.
- A set of ad hoc research questions about Dave's jokes
How many politicians does it take to change a lightbulb joke? An informal study of the shift in lightbulb joke punchlines between 2015 and 2020 that took a look at the question of how joke telling reflects larger societal concerns e.g. US political crises, Brexit?
A list of favourite comedy performers online