Researching Comedy: A Practical Guide for Students and Scholars

If you want to research comedy, whether for an undergraduate essay, a PhD, a computational project or a book, the good news is that there is a real scholarly community, with societies, journals, conferences and archives, ready to help. The bad news is that the sources are scattered across disciplines and countries. This page gathers the practical starting points in one place. For an overview of what the field has actually discovered, read our companion piece on comedy research.

A note on what this page is not: AltComedy.com is an independent editorial site. We don't run a research programme, offer funding or broker partnerships. Everything below is an outside organisation or resource you can approach directly.

Scholarly organisations to join

• International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS). The main international body for humour researchers across disciplines. It publishes HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research and holds an annual conference that moves between countries. Student membership is the easiest way into the field's network.
• Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN). An active regional network with an annual conference and a strong mix of academics and practitioners.
• American Humor Studies Association (AHSA). Focused on American literary and cultural humour; publishes Studies in American Humor.
• Centre for Comedy Studies Research (CCSR), Brunel University London. A research centre focused on comedy in society, media and culture, which has organised events and publications on stand-up and British comedy.

Journals to read and publish in

Mainstream journals in psychology, linguistics, media studies and theatre also publish humour work regularly. Searching Google Scholar for a theory name ("benign violation", "script opposition", "humor styles") and following the citations is often faster than browsing journals.

Archives and collections

Comedy is badly preserved. Live shows vanish, club records get thrown out, early television was wiped. These collections are the exceptions.

• British Stand-Up Comedy Archive, University of Kent. Comedians' papers, recordings, posters and notebooks, with a particular strength in British alternative and circuit comedy. Essential for anyone working on the history in our British alt comedy guide.
• National Comedy Center, Jamestown, New York. Opened in 2018. A museum with research archives, including the George Carlin archive.
• The Paley Center for Media (New York and Los Angeles). A large collection of television and radio, including comedy, viewable on site.
• BFI National Archive (UK). Film and television, with viewing access arranged through the BFI.
• BBC Written Archives Centre (Caversham, near Reading). Scripts, production files and correspondence for BBC radio and television comedy. Access is by appointment.
• British Library Sound and Moving Image collections. Comedy records, radio recordings and oral histories.
• University special collections. Many comedians' and writers' papers sit in university libraries. Search ArchivesHub (UK) or ArchiveGrid (US) by name.

Datasets for computational work

Computational humour research has grown quickly with natural language processing. Useful public data includes:

• SemEval shared tasks. SemEval-2017 ran tasks on #HashtagWars (ranking funny tweets) and on pun detection; SemEval-2020 Task 7 used Humicroedit, a dataset of news headlines edited to be funny; SemEval-2021 Task 7, HaHackathon, covered humour and offence ratings together.
• The New Yorker caption contest. Cartoon and caption data has been used in several papers, notably Hessel and colleagues' 2023 benchmark "Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep?".
• Joke collections. Datasets scraped from Reddit and joke websites are widely used for humour detection. Quality varies, offensive content is common, and you should check licensing and platform terms before relying on them.
• Your own transcripts. For stand-up research, many scholars build a corpus by transcribing specials. Transcribing for analysis is generally fine; republishing full transcripts is a copyright problem.

Our article on AI and comedy covers what these models can and can't do.

Methods that work

Watching comedy as data

Treat a special or set as a text. Log structure (premises, tags, callbacks), timing, audience response and persona shifts. A simple spreadsheet with timestamps goes a long way. Our guide to comedy criticism has a framework for this kind of close watching.

Fieldwork

Open mics, club nights and festivals are fieldwork sites. Ethnographers of comedy typically attend repeatedly, take notes after shows rather than during them, and build relationships with performers before asking for interviews. If you are at a university, your ethics board will need to approve any work with human participants, including interviews and audience surveys.

Interviewing comedians

• Get informed consent in writing and say clearly how quotes will be used.
• Comedians are performers; interviews can become performance. Ask about process and specific shows rather than general opinions.
• Offer to let them check quotes for accuracy (not to rewrite them).
• Many comedians have unstable incomes and limited time. Be efficient and, if you can, compensate them.

Experiments and surveys

If you're testing responses to jokes, use validated measures where possible (the Humor Styles Questionnaire, standard funniness ratings), pre-test your stimuli, and remember that jokes in a lab are less funny than jokes in a room full of people.

Copyright and quoting

Academic fair use (or fair dealing in the UK) allows short quotations for criticism and analysis. It does not cover reproducing whole routines or long clips. Describe bits in your own words and quote only what your argument needs.

Degrees and courses

Comedy is mostly taught inside other subjects, but a few institutions offer dedicated programmes. Examples as of 2026 include Emerson College's BFA in Comedic Arts (Boston), Columbia College Chicago's comedy writing and performance programme, and Humber Polytechnic's comedy programme in Toronto. In the UK, stand-up has been taught within drama degrees, most notably at the University of Kent, where Oliver Double has taught it for many years. Programmes change, so check current prospectuses. Our comedy education guide covers classes and training outside universities.

Under-researched questions in alternative comedy

If you're looking for a topic, these areas have far less scholarship than they deserve:

• The economics of small rooms: how independent shows in bars, bookshops and back rooms pay (or don't pay) performers. See our piece on micro-venues.
• The American alternative scene of the 1990s, from Los Angeles rooms like Largo and the UnCabaret to New York's Luna Lounge, which survives mostly in memoirs and interviews.
• Comedy podcasts as a form, and how they changed the economics of stand-up.
• Comedy outside the English-speaking world, which most English-language scholarship ignores.
• How short-form video platforms have changed joke structure.

Starting a project: a checklist

1. Read the overview. Start with Noël Carroll's Humour: A Very Short Introduction and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on humour, then our research overview.
2. Pick a discipline's toolkit. A psychology project and a performance-history project need very different methods.
3. Narrow the question. "Alternative comedy" is too big. "How did London alternative clubs advertise between 1979 and 1985?" is a project.
4. Find your sources early. Archives have waiting times; comedians have tours.
5. Join the conversation. Present at an ISHS or AHSN conference, or email a researcher whose work you admire. The field is small and generally welcoming.

For background reading on alternative comedy itself, see our list of essential alt comedy books.

Frequently asked questions

Can you study comedy at university?

Yes. Comedy is studied within drama, film, media, psychology, linguistics and philosophy departments, and a few institutions offer dedicated programmes, such as Emerson College's Comedic Arts degree in Boston, Columbia College Chicago's comedy writing and performance programme, and Humber Polytechnic's comedy programme in Toronto.

Where are comedy archives?

Major collections include the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive at the University of Kent, the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York, the Paley Center for Media, the BFI National Archive and the BBC Written Archives Centre. Many comedians' papers are also held by university special collections.

What datasets exist for humour research?

Public options include the SemEval shared-task datasets on humour (for example #HashtagWars in 2017, Humicroedit headlines in 2020 and HaHackathon in 2021), New Yorker cartoon caption contest data used in several papers, and joke collections scraped from Reddit and other sites. Check each dataset's licence before use.

Does AltComedy.com fund or partner on research?

No. We don't run a research programme or offer partnerships. This page points to the real organisations, archives and journals that support comedy research.