Parks and Recreation 6.97

The Office 6.65

Brooklyn Nine-Nine 6.59

Friends 6.06

The Big Bang Theory 5.80

Modern Family 5.68

Family Guy 5.20

South Park 5.03

Frasier 4.09

Curb Your Enthusiasm 3.41

The traditional multi-camera sitcom, based around a group of family or friends—in this sample, Friends and The Big Bang Theory—sits right in the middle in terms of the joke count. You could call these shows the Baby Bear of comedy: The pacing is not too fast and not too slow.

But TV comedy of late has evolved to a more film-evocative, single-camera system, without a laughing track, and the shows in this category produced a very high joke count, from the zany 30 Rock in first place to the budding Brooklyn Nine-Nine in fifth. Modern Family is a single-camera show and so is arguably an anomaly here, but it also sits comfortably with the family sitcom, even if not in the traditional sense. On the other end of the scale, we have animated series in the form of Family Guy and South Park—and with the slowest pace of all, the only 30-minute HBO comedy in our sample group, the heavily improvised Curb Your Enthusiasm.

If we delve even deeper into the concept of genre, we find that there are certainly patterns between the jokes per minute and the types of jokes that each comedy favors. The new, single-camera comedy, with generally high laugh counts, is very dialogue-driven, and doesn’t shy away from repeating a single joke several times (perhaps the best example of this, not mentioned here, is Arrested Development). At its best, New Girl’s dialogue is off-the-cuff, often overlapping, and incites reactions from different members of the group, so it’s not uncommon to count five or six jokes from a single line. Parks and Recreation works in much the same way, sprouting multiple jokes in one, such as when Andy is suggesting code names for the group.

The wacky 30 Rock takes it to a whole new level still: Every line warrants—and gets—a reaction, whether verbal (muttered under Liz Lemon’s breath) or visual (the melodramatic expressions of Tracy, Kenneth or really any other character). And we can’t forget the show that helped pave the way for all these aforementioned comedies. The Office relied on never-ending, cringe-worthy speeches courtesy of Michael Scott (often including several jokes in one chunk of dialogue), followed by tell-all visual responses from other office members, and verbal summations in front of the documentary film crew.

On the other end of the scale, shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Frasier keep the audience waiting for the joke that they know is coming. Curb dwells on points for long periods (Larry certainly doesn’t swiftly move on when he should), and often introduces a somewhat irrelevant piece of information that will come full circle only at the very end, when the joke is finally played out. Frasier’s strength was always farce, especially in its most popular episodes such as “The Ski Lodge”, where mistaken identities and confusion form the basis of most of the comedy. The show was sophisticated and subtle, and hence rarely wasted laughs on “lazy” jokes like Friends unfortunately did during its weaker seasons. Friends often felt it had to do this to keep the pacing steady—crucial for an ensemble comedy with a laughing track, like today’s The Big Bang Theory—whereas Frasier seemed more concerned with the complexity of the episode as a whole.