Efficiency in Comedy: The Office vs. Friends

Hey guys, today's video is sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. Head to dollarhaveclub.com/drew to get your essential everyday starter set for just $5. *clears throat* I hate laughter. I think they're annoying, unnecessary, and honestly, I find them kind of an insult to the viewer's intelligence. It's like the show doesn't trust you to know when to laugh, so they basically have to hold up a big sign after every joke and say "look, that was a joke, it's time to laugh now," but at the same time it's also gentle. It feels like a lack of confidence in your own jokes.

As if the writers know these lines aren't that funny. So they have to like the peer pressure to make you laugh. Because listen to how much these other people laugh, you should laugh; Most of all, I hate laugh tracks because, as a viewer, when I hear the sound of canned laughter. I'm completely out of what an immersive experience should be in my opinion. I want to watch a show and feel like a fly on the wall during a realistic human interaction, and yet a laugh track serves as a constant. Reminder that these characters whose lives you're trying to get involved in aren't actually characters.

They're just actors performing on a stage in front of a live audience who react to every joke as if they've just woken up from a long coma and this is the first joke they've heard in 20 years Joey: "Closeness, there were 3 of us crying out loud !" In addition to being an auditory distraction, the laugh tracks also disrupt the flow of each scene - even if you remove the actual sound of laughter, it's still evident that these conversations have a very unnatural rhythm. Pink Shirt Lady: "Get one yourself!" Beer Nerd: "Oooh, someone's been taking an evil pill!" Pink Shirt: "God, he's a jerk when he drinks" Outfit-Matching Nerd: "Well, he's a jerk when he doesn't, you just don't hear it." Line!

Long pause. Line! Long pause. I have never had a conversation with that cadence in my life. It's just not the way people talk, probably the worst thing about these laugh tracks is that they don't always correlate to the quality of the joke, each response seems to indicate the same level. of hilarity when that's what's important Some jokes are simply better than others I don't expect every line to provoke an eruption of laughter and applause in this room And I don't blame a show if a joke doesn't make me laugh audibly but when a throwaway line It's followed by several wasted seconds where I'm just waiting for the next joke and then it happens again and again and again I get impatient and don't want to watch the show anymore, these episodes are about twenty. two minutes long And I feel like I'm only getting ten minutes of actual

comedy

, and that's when my brain had an idea.

Exactly how much of an average Friends episode is just laughter? What percentage of each episode's 22-minute running time is wasted on a glorified sound effect? And then, to take it a step further, how many jokes are there in an episode of Friends, compared to an episode of, say, The Office? Obviously quantity and quality are not the same and one good joke is better than a hundred bad ones. But in this case I think quantity is a pretty good indicator of the overall quality of the writing. So I had to know I had to get to the bottom of this.

But how? And then I remembered that I have a YouTube channel. I can do things like this. Now keep in mind that approximately 90% of this video will simply be opinion based. I may present a lot of what I say as fact, but most of all it comes down to simple personal preference. So let's start with The Office. The Office is my favorite show of all time. I'm a bit of a basic bitch, so no, I'm not talking about the UK version or the Japanese version. I'm talking about the American

office

because here in the US we may not be the first to do it and stuff, but I'll be damned if we're not the best.

The Office combines everything I want into a

comedy

show. Again, personal preference. It's hilarious, it's fast, but it also has a lot of depth. The characters develop deep and meaningful relationships that ebb and flow and give each episode more purpose. Particularly in the first three seasons with the back and forth between Jim and Pam. More than anything, I love the way The Office is directed. You can tell there's a lot of deliberation involved in setting up the perfect shots. Which is something that may seem small, but I think camera movement and positioning can contribute a lot to the tone of a scene...

As well as even serving as a joke in its own right. For example, in the season 2 episode titled "The Carpet", after it is established that someone shitted in Michael's

office

and no one can go in there because he smells so bad, Michael has a talking head in which he rambles. . how this is like hearing him fear factor. He finally can't take it anymore and he starts running out of the room. But it's at that moment that the camera zooms out to reveal that not even the cameraman wanted to be in that room. It's a small detail, but it was enough to make me laugh and feel smart when I realized it.

But I digress... I love the show. I could talk about it for hours, but the title of this video isn't the reason I like The Office, it's The Office Vs. Friends. So I'll try to get to the point. How many jokes are there in an episode of The Office? Now, no scientific endeavor would be complete without making an educated guess beforehand, so here's my hypothesis. I'm going to say that an episode of The Office has an average of 140 jokes, which is roughly 1 joke every 9 seconds. On the other hand, I guess an average Friends episode contains about half of that.

Let's say 80 jokes or one joke every 15 seconds. Also, I'm guessing that about three and a half minutes of each Friends episode is just laughs, and I'm also guessing that about 7% of you just clicked on the video when I started rambling about math. So let's speed up. this a bit for the office. I chose episode 14 of season 5 "Stress Relief Part 1". This episode is very dear to my heart. The opening scene alone is an absolute work of art. Dwight for awareness reasons. He intentionally starts a fire in the office to see how prepared everyone would be. that situation is funny enough on its own, but then he has this self-righteous attitude throughout the scene as everything deteriorates into chaos led by Michael, who immediately puts his own safety before everyone else's.

There are so many fun details like Kevin coming back to barge in. The vending machine. Angela throws her cat onto the ceiling. Stanley eventually suffers a heart attack while Dwight explains that this was all a test. From start to finish, it's beautiful and contains 41 jokes. After the opening theme, the next scene is a meeting between Michael Dwight and two corporate higher-ups. Halfway through the scene, Michael casually gets up and walks to the other side of the table, trying to subtly change his role in the situation and then begins lecturing Dwight. There are 16 jokes in the scene, 3 during the car ride back to the office and 11 in the next scene where Stanley returns to the office and Michael offers him a wheelchair.

He quotes: "Until he recovers." Stanley: I'm going to die. After a commercial break comes one of the best scenes in television history. The CPR training scene. If someone asked me, "Hey, Drew! I want to get into comedy writing. Where do I start?" I'd say... "I don't know... I just make YouTube videos." But I would tell you to study this scene. I don't even know where to start with this, so I'll let Steve Carrell set it up. Michael: "We found ourselves on the... less prepared side of things. When Stanley had his... When his heart went crazy... he knew exactly what to do, but in a much more real sense." , I had no idea." What to do.

So I thought we should have a CPR training class." So, the company hired this woman to teach CPR in the office. Michael instinctively volunteers for Stanley: You know, the guy who just had a seizure? heart attack 3 days ago? But then, when the rest of the office starts expressing concern, he decides the boss should go ahead and tell everyone how it's done. Instructor: "Okay, too fast." Instructor has to try repeatedly get things back on track... Inst: "No, it's 'uh, uh, uh, uh, stay alive, stay-'" Michael: "Okay, that's it." Creed: "You were in the parking lot earlier , that's why I know you!" Oh!

And Creed... Damn Creed! He has two lines in this entire episode, and they're both hysterical! Dwight: "Check to see if he has an organ donor card. If he has one, we only have a few minutes to harvest." Creed: "He doesn't have a wallet, I checked." This scene is so well written, the way everything escalates more and more, the way each character progressively gets involved. Plus, it's fantastic. And there are 37 jokes in it, so after Dwight destroys the expensive CPR dummy, he and Michael are once again forced to leave. Meet David Wallace in New York. This is a short scene. with only five jokes that we then cut to the office where Jim, Pam and Andy are watching a movie that he illegally downloaded and that doesn't exist outside of the show.

So kudos to the producers for filming clips from a fake movie where Jack Black falls in love with Cloris Leachman I counted nine jokes in this scene, eight in the next scene where Dwight issues his declaration of repentance: “I declare my repentance. " And another eight when Jim Pam and Andy finished the Jack Black movie. The episode ends with Michael leading a relaxation exercise which, as you may have guessed, is not very relaxing. There are 28 jokes in the scene and the episode is over. In In total, I counted 166 jokes in 21 minutes, which is only slightly higher than my hypothesis.

You guys want to check my calculations. I also tried to be unbiased with this. To the extent possible I included punchlines that didn't make me laugh But I recognized that it was meant to be a joke if I refuse to tell jokes that I don't think are funny So why the hell am I doing this? You know besides, this is science So now let's move on to Friends: controversial opinion alert! I... I actually like Friends now, if I hadn't watched it with my mom when I was a kid and felt a little nostalgic about it I'd probably feel differently, but I think it's a pretty good show, it's nice enough looking. characters even though they all mostly rely on pretty basic stereotypes: Rachel likes shopping, Monica likes cleaning, and Phoebe is crazy.

And Chandler is sarcastic, and Ross is awkward, and Joey likes to fuck, but five of the six actors are good. And the writing is usually fine, with the exception of the occasional horrible joke Chandler throws in from time to time: "Does anyone know?" A good tailor? Joey: "Do you need some clothes changed?" Chandler: "No, no, I'm just looking for a guy to draw me in chalk..." As for the laugh track, I can forgive shows like Friends for having a dated format because well, the show premiered almost on the 25th. years ago. It's not really dated if it's literally dated, and that's what sitcoms were like in the past.

So it was a standard that I understand much less about shows that debuted in the last decade that rely on this format. Originally, this video was going to be The Office vs. The Big Bang Theory, aka the worst show in the world, but I felt like that would be too easy. It's like making a video about Lele Pons as if we all knew she was bad. I don't know anyone who really likes the Big Bang Theory, and honestly, watching multiple episodes for research purposes sounds like a nightmare, so I finally settled on Friends because it's a show that people generally enjoy.

It's just that I think sometimes I'm a slave to its own format. There are moments in each episode where I have to fight the temptation to progressively skip back and forth between predictable scenes where you know what the next line is going to be, but you get a wait for the audience to calm down so you can say it, but for all this anticipation. That's built up now that that line is getting huge, over-the-top applause. It's very formulaic and that's the exact phenomenon that led me to want to make this video in the first place. So let's see how much this is a typical Friends episode.

It's just laughter, funny story. I wasn't sure which episode to choose here. So I went on IMDB to see the highest rated one. The second highest one is the one where everyone finds out and I thought, oh, I remember that one. That's a good episode. . I'll do it and then I realized this is episode 14 of season 5, which is the same as ah, so this is a perfect comparison? And I won't listen to anyone who tries to deny that it does. It's all coming back to me now This is definitely one of the best episodes, the basic synopsis is Spoiler alert!

Chandler and Monica have been secretly dating for the last 15 episodes and only Joey knows that Rachel and Phoebe find out because they see Chandler and Monica having sex. But instead of confronting them,They try to mess with them by making Phoebe flirt with Chandler. and so on until everything climaxes at the end of the episode, they kiss. Chandler freaks out and tells Monica that he's in love with her, the crowd falls in love with her, end of episode. Yes. That was a significantly shorter synopsis than the one I did for the office. But I realized I didn't want this video to be 90 minutes long, so I got a shortcut somewhere in this episode.

I counted 21 laughs, which is surprisingly high actually. . I definitely underestimated the writer

friends

a lot, but I also greatly underestimated the amount of time the audience reactions would take. I guess it was three and a half minutes, not even close. Now I will say that I included scene transitions in this not the main theme but rather the silly little touches that play between scenes because I felt they are as much of a waste of time as the laugh tracks. But anyway, after isolating these two things, I was left with 5 minutes and 20 seconds: Over 25% of the episode has no dialogue and no substance whatsoever, it's just audible filler to pad out the episode between jokes.

Side note if you guys want to check this number out and see what an entire Friends episode looks like without any dialogue. I'll post that video on my Twitter @drewisgooden and it's actually kind of funny and I feel like even if you've never seen this episode of Friends and only have a basic understanding of the characters, you can completely understand what's going on without listening. a single line of dialogue No, to be somewhat thorough, I went ahead and did the same thing for one more episode of each show, the first episode of season 2, and got pretty similar results.

I counted 119 jokes on The Office and 96 on Friends. I guess these numbers are a little more typical of what an average episode of each show is like. While each show's season 5 episodes 14 are more atypical, the best thing about each show? But still the results are comparatively quite similar, so we count the number of jokes. We've isolated the laugh track and used science to determine that Office is a much more comedic and efficient show than Friends, so the only question we need to answer at this point is: Does it really matter? and that depends entirely on you.

Efficiency is a term that I have used a lot in this video. But it's important to say that it's not the deciding factor when it comes to comedy because comedy isn't math. Comedy. It is completely subjective. And I'm not here to tell you that you should like one show more than another because it has more jokes in it. The goal of this video was simply to incorporate a little math into a non-mathematical experiment. But at the end of the day just watch what makes you happy, if you like Kevin you can wait and then watch it if you only like Disney Channel Original Movies. then look at them.

Even Camp Rock 2, which was an objectively disappointing sequel. But whatever you do, don't let anyone tell you what you would like. Especially me, because I just spent the last two weeks of my life voluntarily doing math, what the fuck do I know? comedy? The perfect ending, great job on the video, you drew oh, thank you Mr. Narrator, yes. It was nice not having to be on camera for a change. I grew a beard, yes. You have to get rid of that. I have a surprise for you, but look under your chair. I mean, how's Oprah doing, yeah?

I guess, hell yeah, razor. I'm going to use it right now. Wait, don't forget the shaving butter. It's so soft. This is so much better than the butter I normally shave with and no hair like the day I was born. Yes, you look great, but what does she smell like? I haven't showered in over a week. Is there any reason? Yes. I didn't have to be in front of the camera. You know, normal people don't wait until they're in front of the camera to forget it. I've got you covered, check the box. There's more Wow Three, a white Charlie's to clean my butt and a lavender-scented body wash to clean the rest of me.

Thank you, Mr. Narrator. I look like a million dollars. That's probably what you had to spend on this box, right? No, just five dollars because I went to Dollarshaveclub.com, slash Drew, and used your credit card to have it shipped right to your door, which reduces the gift when you say, Use my money to buy it, we're the same person. Oh sure. Okay, can you sit there and look pretty while I tell people more about Dollar Shave Club? What's your go-to place for all your grooming needs? It's not just razors and butt wipes, they even have toothpaste, moisturizing hair gel.

You will never have to leave home again. Well, because I don't want to thank Dollar Shave Club so much for sponsoring today's video and helping me change my life and I also want to thank you so much for ordering. many t-shirts like the ones you made, as many of you know, I announced my merch in my last video. I have a little stinger shirt, a work shirt in front. I have pants and a shirt. I got my usual products from Draw Gooden. I hope to see many of you on the playlist. I'm recording this before the playlist, but I'll post it after, so I can't say what it was like because I haven't experienced it yet, but I hope I have.

Seeing a lot of you there and it was fun and I didn't shit on stage in front of everyone. I really hope that didn't happen, our little singers. Have a great week and I'll be back on this channel. with a new video as soon as humanly possible. Bye, side note, post a video, grab it here. I think David Schwimmer is the best actor among

friends

, and I'm not being sarcastic. His biggest detractor is usually that he is too emotional, or you know, some people might be. Describe him as some kind of bitch. And that's one hundred percent true, but he's really convincing and he gets it across.

His physical comedy is so underrated. The way he moves his body. His facial expressions. His timing is so good. These types of comedies were made for people. Like David Schwimmer, I think his talent is simply overlooked because Ross can be a very annoying character. But next time you watch the show, know that this is asking a lot. But take your eyes off Rachael's exposed nipples for a few moments. You might appreciate someone you thought you could never appreciate, go, David. Anyway, just a tangent that wasn't really related to the videos, so I included it at the end.

Thanks again for watching guys, make sure to like and subscribe. And let me know if you want to see more videos like this or if you prefer my usual format. It was a lot of fun to make, so I'll probably do more whether you like it or not. But it's still good to ask, okay? See you