There’s a new study out, which set out to determine America’s funniest stand-up comedians . . . using SCIENCE. Sort of.
First, they gave 2,722 comedy fans a long list of comedians, and asked them to select their favorites. They used that feedback to cut the list to a Top 20, and then had 120 volunteers watch a stand-up special by each one.
The participants’ audio responses were recorded and analyzed by a program that registered “laughter” at 60 decibels and higher. Then, they ranked the comedians by how much laughter they could generate per hour.
In the end, ROBIN WILLIAMS was #1 . . . totaling 4 minutes and 51 seconds of condensed laughter per hour.
Here’s the full ranking:
1. Robin Williams . . . 4 minutes, 51 seconds
2. Eddie Murphy . . . 4 minutes, 47 seconds
3. Redd Foxx . . . 4 minutes, 11 seconds
4. Jim Carrey . . . 3 minutes, 56 seconds
5. Bernie Mac . . . 3 minutes, 40 seconds
6. Joan Rivers . . . 3 minutes, 33 seconds
7. Dave Chappelle . . . 3 minutes, 17 seconds
8. Bill Hicks . . . 3 minutes, 12 seconds
9. Don Rickles . . . 3 minutes, 6 seconds
10. Richard Pryor . . . 3 minutes, 2 seconds
11. Kevin Hart . . . 2 minutes, 57 seconds
12. Steven Wright . . . 2 minutes, 55 seconds
13. Lewis Black . . . 2 minutes, 51 seconds
14. Jim Gaffigan . . . 2 minutes, 39 seconds
15. Chris Rock . . . 2 minutes, 36 seconds
16. Tig Notaro . . . 2 minutes, 28 seconds
17. Mitch Hedberg . . . 2 minutes, 19 seconds
18. Tiffany Haddish . . . 2 minutes, 15 seconds
19. Bill Burr . . . 2 minutes, 7 seconds
20. Sebastian Maniscalco . . . 2 minutes, 3 seconds
It’s great that objective data was used . . . but to be fair, a sample size of 120 volunteers is small, and they only monitored fairly loud laughter. But these are the comedians that had those participants ROLLIN’.