We're scheduling new performances, hackathons, and research sprints. Get notified when the next experiment is announced.
Midtown Show is a live audience perception lab. We test comedy and content against real rooms, instrument the results with Room Sense and other tools, and publish what we find. The goal: make audience interpretation visible, measurable, and useful.
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 with simulated audiences reduces on-stage failure rate, not by making material safer, but by exposing structural weaknesses the performer can fix.
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.
Callback effectiveness is a function of audience homogeneity. Mixed rooms need callbacks anchored to in-room events, not external references.
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.
Timing divergence reveals different interpretive entry points. Younger audiences laughed at subversion; older audiences laughed at recognition.
We're scheduling new performances, hackathons, and research sprints. Get notified when the next experiment is announced.
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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.