Sometimes in order to celebrate comedy, you have to kill it. Nothing defeats the purpose of humor like examining why something is funny. Funny is just funny and it wouldn’t be funny if you had to explain it. Having said that: some comedies deserve to be examined. Some comedies put in the extra work and demand that you tear apart their structure looking for hidden brilliance and parse apart every joke into every component piece so you can marvel at them all the better.

Veep is one of those comedies. Creator Armando Iannucci didn’t create a half-hour TV comedy, he created a Blitzkrieg-ing comedic tank tearing apart the pay-cable countryside. It’s astonishing how quickly and effortlessly the jokes come in Veep. The White House is the perfect atmosphere for Iannucci’s styling and his cast’s talents. * It’s a fast-paced, stressful world that is the perfect Petri dish for the quick wit and rapid-fire insults from Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and company.

*It’s probably not a coincidence that after tackling The West Wing Aaron Sorkin wanted to go behind the scenes of a SNL-style variety show. 30 Rock was probably the king of fast-paced variety before Veep, so The White House and variety show settings must be similar in terms of franticness and stress-based humor.

Veep crams more jokes into a half hour than any other show currently on television and perhaps more than most actual Presidential administrations likely can cover in two terms. With that in mind, we decided to see if we could calculate just what Veep’s Joke Per Minute total (or JPM) is.