Topic: Consumerism, Religion and Ted Talks
The BBC wanted to close the gap between their classic comedy and internet humour. Through a blend of WhatsApp diaries and a semiotics analysis of social media content we devised humour quadrants grafting semiotics onto humour psychology. This enabled a deeper and more robust taxonomy of humour types that we could correlate with generational cohorts. We were able to reveal the humour types that tend to go viral and plot BBC channels against them. We were able to show, via a humour map, how the BBC could close the gap and become funnier to a younger UK audience. This led to the BBC commissioning successful new podcast content and to changes in how they used humour in programming and data classification / tagging.