
How Aziz Ansari Tests Jokes With Analytics - mankins
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3013485/
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adventured
I would say that comedians have always been among the top professional A/B
testers (long before the buzz around A/B testing). Their entire professional
success or failure depends on constant small and large adjustments to their
routines based on testing and feedback. And when it comes to being funny and
staying funny, comedy is brutal and completely unforgiving.

Here's a great 50 minute segment, with Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky
Gervais and Louis CK, in which they discuss various aspects of their material
and how they work with it (adding / discarding / making adjustments and so
on):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAxoRh06XM4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAxoRh06XM4)

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corin_
Where do you draw the line between "A/B testing" and "learning and improving",
which nearly everyone does. Homeless people will figure out how to get better
results from begging, chefs will learn how to cook food that tastes better,
and these things have been going on for a long time - what sets comedians
apart?

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adventured
The extreme majority of homeless people don't do homelessness as a profession,
they do it out of desperation. It's not a reasonable comparison (particularly
given I referenced professional A/B testing).

Your typical homeless person does a form of A/B testing in trying out various
schemes to stay alive (whether it comes to food, begging, shelter, etc).

A/B testing is applying a scientific method to learning, so I don't regard
that you have to draw any distinctions there.

A good chef is absolutely a top notch A/B tester, but then I wasn't implying
otherwise. It's not like comedians being good at it excludes chefs from being
good at it.

I would say that there are a lot of working average and mediocre chefs in the
world, given the number of restaurants of every type. There are radically
fewer comedians earning a living at it. I would say that comedy is even less
forgiving than food (and food is very unforgiving professionally compared to
most things, as people are extremely picky about food).

You can get by being a bad chef, we have 600,000 restaurants in the US, and a
huge number of them likely prove that every day. You cannot get by being a bad
comedian for long. You're either funny or you're not. With food there is a
_huge_ lower and middle ground - people eat mediocre mass food all the time,
and go back for more (see: McDonalds or Denny's). People will tolerate eating
mediocre food to survive; they won't willingly pay to go see what they know to
be terrible comedians.

If we're talking challenging A/B systems, I would argue it's radically harder
to succeed like a comedian, than to beg for change or flip a burger at
Denny's. To make it a little more similar, a chef would need to make food
surrounded by all the day's customers, while getting real time feedback with
every burger flip.

Comedians have one of the fastest feedback systems available: instantaneous
mass customer response, that they absorb and gauge in real time. Customers
either laugh at a joke or they don't.

An average chef that gets no compliments can keep working. An average comedian
that gets no laughs generally cannot. I think comedy requires positive
feedback, whereas cooking does not _require_ it (it's ideal, but doesn't have
to exist, just OK will do for most meals in America).

Your average chef at an average restaurant - nobody knows who you are, the
customer never sees you, they're not going to attach your name to bad cooking,
and the customers don't come to the restaurant because your name is on the
board. This is often true even at nice restaurants. As a comedian, people know
who you are, and they specifically will remember that (good or bad).

If you're Louis CK, you're competing with yourself every night, the audience
likely knows your past material. If you're a high level chef, typically you
don't throw out all of your best recipes and have to replace the entire menu
every year. You can't go on YouTube and taste every recipe by Gordon Ramsay.

~~~
corin_
If begging is the way somebody earns enough money to live on, is that not
pretty much the same thing - I know people with normal jobs who do it "out of
desperation", not because they love the job but because they need money and
can't find any other job.

But that's besides the point; I took two random examples not to highlight them
but along the logic that everyone does this in all walks of life. Without
putting any scientific thought into it, I have, whether purposefully or not,
tried and improved my methods for cooking, for playing sports, for smoking
cigarettes... anything.

> _I would say that comedians have always been among the top professional A /B
> testers_

The logic behind this statement, in your later reply to me, being that it's
much easier to be a mediocre chef than a mediocre comic, but that says nothing
about the quality of the testing, all it says is that there is a much longer
tail on the graph of quality in cooking. The fact that it is easier to be a
mediocre chef than it is to be a mediocre comic really only speaks to the
demand of both services, not how much testing they do or how good it is.

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georgemcbay
I have no idea if this is at all related to the topic (and I realize this
reads like typical HN smarter/hipper-than-thou criticism, so I apologize in
advance) but while I find Aziz Ansari to be hilarious in roles (Parks & Rec,
his small role in Flight of the Conchords, etc), I've seen a few of his
standup shows and didn't find his own material to be particularly funny at
all.

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eieio
That's too bad, I'm a huge(huuuuuge) Parks and Rec fan, but I happen to also
really enjoy some parts of his standup. I think some of his jokes suck, but
some of them just crack me up. I watch a lot of standup and while I wouldn't
put him at the top of my list, I definitely enjoy him.

Also he has mentioned on one of his AMA's that he loves standup more than
acting/anything else so it's too bad that some folks don't like his standup.
Oh well, to each their own!

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noonespecial
There's a ton more to being a good comedian than just A/B testing a few jokes.
(Good jokes are required but not sufficient?)

A good stand-up (like a good DJ) "feels the energy" in a room and subtly
alters his delivery as well as the content to work the crowd.

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TDL
Steve Martin talked about his process making his comedy routine in his
autobiography. His process was essentially A/B testing, although not as
precise as this approach can be today.

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pbsdp
Getting statistically useful data out of this will be difficult. A/B tests can
tell you which of a set if options performs better for a measurable metric,
but not _why_ , and without no visibility into 'metrics' you _can 't_ easily
measure -- of which there are a lot.

