USA- Google, owner of YouTube, wants to know what makes a video funny. What makes us “like” these videos and watch them repeatedly One of the most popular videos is “David after the Dentist.” (http://www.youtube.com/watchv=txqiwrbYGrs) This video has been viewed over 100 million times on YouTube, and features 7-year old David’s trip home from the dentist and his recovery from the anesthesia he was given. He asks his father a series of humorous questions and also has funny responses when his father questions him about the dentist and other topics.
But what makes YouTube videos so funny What draws us to them Possibly because they can reflect everyday life such as a child visiting the dentist and after being given a large dose of pain medicine may stammer and say things that are out of the norm.
How does YouTube rate funny videos What’s funnier, a dog riding a bicycle or a man who thinks he can fly by attaching a few balloons to himself and jumping off a roof Google says we can start counting the LOL’s (laugh out loud) to rate the popularity. Google also use speech-recognition technology lets it scan videos for cues such as laughter. There are also key words that are used to describe the video such as silly, hilarious, funny, etc.
People worldwide can also type “Ha! Ha! Ha!” or the equivalent in their own language. By having a large number of “lol’s,” the video can gain immense popularity and can obtain extra credits.
Sanketh Shetty stated on a research blog, "We noticed a few audiovisual patterns across comedy videos on YouTube, such as shaky camera motion or audible laughter, which we can automatically detect."While content-based features worked well for music, identifying humor based on just such features is Al-Complete. Humor preference is subjective, perhaps even more so than musical taste." Shetty also states "We then trained a passive-aggressive ranking algorithm using human-annotated pair wise ground truth and a combination of text and audiovisual features."
Finally comes one of the most important part- the worldwide viewers’ opinion. The highest ranked videos featured on YouTube are called the “Comedy Slam.” Viewers can see two videos and click on the video which they think is funnier. Once the “slam” is complete we will soon know if “David After the Dentist” is the funniest video on YouTube.
