We're scheduling new performances, hackathons, and research sprints. Get notified when the next experiment is announced.
We test comedy and content against real rooms, measure how different audiences interpret the same material, and publish what the room reveals. Messages either land or they don't. We show you why, before you ship.
The lab's primary instrument. Room Sense Live lets comedians test jokes with a live AI audience that laughs, reacts, and shows how different crowds interpret the same material.
Comedians workshopped material against AI audience personas before performing live. Sets tested in Room Sense first had 40% fewer flat segments on stage.
Pre-testing against simulated audiences cuts on-stage failure rate by 40%. Not by making material safer, but by exposing weaknesses the performer can fix before the room sees them.
We ran the same 5-minute set for three audience configurations and tracked where callbacks landed. Audiences with shared cultural context caught callbacks 3x more often.
Callbacks fail in mixed rooms. They need to anchor to something the whole audience witnessed together, not a reference half the room missed. Ignore this and your structure collapses.
Using Laugh Spikes, we mapped laughter timing across age-segmented audiences for identical material. Peak laugh moments diverged by up to 12 seconds between groups.
Younger audiences laughed at subversion. Older audiences laughed at recognition. Same set, different shows. Any message meant to land across demographics has to carry both entry points or pick one.
We're scheduling new performances, hackathons, and research sprints. Get notified when the next experiment is announced.
You're on the list. We'll let you know when the next experiment is announced.
The Humor Hackathon brings together builders, researchers, and performers to create tools that observe, measure, and design for audience interpretation. Each hackathon focuses on one or more research themes from the Humor Genome program. Participants build working prototypes in 48 hours, tested against live audiences before the weekend ends.
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Midtown Show is the live lab for Humor Genome, a research program on audience-dependent meaning. Findings from the lab become systems that ship on sound.fan, where builders and partners take them further.