Every August, the city of Edinburgh in Scotland plays host to the Fringe Festival, which is the world's largest arts festival. During this time, over 4,000 different shows are performed, with genres including comedy, circus, theatre, and dance. I went to the festival for three weeks, and I decided to try something new and sign up for a two-day stand-up comedy workshop.

I didn't expect there to be any math in stand-up comedy, but I was wrong. While we were editing our jokes, we had to calculate the Punchlines Per Minute (PPM) rate to determine how funny our sets were! To do this, we had to identify the number of punchlines in our set, then we had to time ourselves performing the set, and lastly, we had to do the following calculation:

Total Number of Punchlines ÷ Length of Set = Punchlines Per Minute (PPM)

The higher the PPM, the funnier the set is. Our instructor told us that professional stand-up comedians usually attempt 8 PPM, meaning that they get their audiences to laugh 8 times per minute, or nearly once every seven seconds! This is quite the challenge, and it was our first time performing stand-up, so we were told to shoot for at least 6 PPM. If we were under that, then we had to shorten the setups to some of the jokes or add in more punchlines.

Sample Problems

1. The first draft of my stand-up set lasted for 5 minutes and 6 seconds and contained 31 punchlines. Calculate the PPM for this set. Was this an acceptable PPM?

2. Watch a stand-up routine of your favorite comedian on YouTube and count the number of times the comedian gets a laugh out of the audience. Then calculate their PPM. Was their PPM better than mine?

3. Find a video of a stand-up comedian bombing on YouTube and calculate their PPM. Was there PPM better than mine?