Characterizing the Internet's Sense of Humor

In this paper, we report some results from the first internet content-based investigation of the underlying causes of humor. For this purpose, we developed a methodology for extracting semantic distance from tags associated with YouTube videos manually identified as humorous or not by their existing community of users. We found that a novel quantification of episodic incongruity, operationalized via our technique, proves to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for the existence of humor-inducing stimuli in associated videos. Our results represent the first internet-based validation of incongruity-based characterizations of humor, and open up exciting new theoretical and applied possibilities in the use of social computing to discover intrinsic factors responsible for human behaviors like humor, interest and engagement.