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Standing-Up and the Body Politic

Exploring the evolution of stand-up comedy by examining the connections between the body language and spoken words.

Research

Research project

This project, conducted in collaboration with the École Nationale des Chartes and NYU, explores recent transformations in stand-up comedy through an original approach to identifying links between body language and spoken words. As the crucial moment in comedy, the punchline is analyzed as embodied text using computer vision and natural language processing tools. The performative nature of humor is studied using the Netflix “comedy special” corpus, a series of shows recorded live and subsequently edited to be made available as “specials” to Netflix subscribers.

The project resulted in a master’s thesis in computational social sciences and is currently continuing at Columbia University’s Department of Communication.

Project funding

Transatlantic Research Program

Project partners

École Nationale des Chartes, New York University