In this episode, we dive into the science behind what makes us laugh, using one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time—Friends. Have you ever wondered why you laugh at certain moments in the show? It’s not just the jokes themselves, but also the prerecorded laughter that signals humor. We’ll explore a fascinating study that developed an AI model to automatically detect humor in Friends by analyzing both the dialog and the laughter that follows. This model can identify when a joke is made with 78% accuracy and even predict how long the audience’s laughter should last! Join us as we break down how AI can understand humor, the role of laugh tracks in comedy, and what this research reveals about how we experience entertainment. Whether you're a Friends fan or just curious about AI, this episode is full of insights and fun!

Original paper:

Khalid Alnajjar, Mika Hämäläinen, Jörg Tiedemann, Jorma Laaksonen, and Mikko Kurimo. 2022. When to Laugh and How Hard? A Multimodal Approach to Detecting Humor and Its Intensity. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.598/