Reddit is a unique social media platform that works on upvotes rather than likes and followers. Needless to say, jokes are very important contributors to Reddit's upvote economy. To add to this, most users use the platform anonymously and miss no opportunity to crack a dad joke whenever they can.
In a previous article , we analyzed and ranked country subreddits for humorous comments. The USA was one of the top countries in terms of the percentage of attempted jokes. In this article, we drill down further and repeat the same analysis across the states of the USA. For each state, we obtained all the comments from the top 50 threads of this year. Then we ran the top-level comments through AI (Mistral 7B) to classify them as "joke" or "not joke", with the thread topic in context.
Methods Used to Rank the funniest US States
Our dataset consisted of 2700 threads and we analyzed 209,806 top-level comments to find out how many were humorous. We ranked the states by this metric to present a leaderboard of humor for the states of the USA. The insights from our analysis are presented below. For a detailed description of the methods and code used in obtaining, analyzing, and visualizing the data, please refer to our previous article .
We skipped analyzing some comments for the following reasons:
- The comment is not a direct comment on the thread, but a response to one of the comments. In this case, it becomes difficult to place this in the context of the title. The Reddit API marks such comments with a “parent_id” starting with “t1_”.
- The comment was deleted, removed, or taken off for some other reason. This is usually indicated by the comment text starting and ending with a square bracket
- The comment has a link. In this case, there may be additional context that the LLM might not infer. Also, a commenter providing links indicates putting forth a serious point with backing. Jokes usually do not need links.
The Most Vocal States
Before looking into the percentage of humor in the comments, I first analyzed which states comment the most. For this, I calculated the average number of comments per thread for each state. The bar graph showing the distribution is below:
With this as a baseline, we can make sense of the humor percentages in the comments.
The Most Humorous States
Let's look at a map of the US states with the percentages of humorous comments below:
From the map, the only pattern we can observe is that humorous and not-so-humorous regions are somewhat contiguous. This could be a result of geographical factors such as mountains, rivers, and deserts which separate populations and give rise to different cultural attributes. In the case of the countries' ranking earlier, we saw that language could play a role. However within the US, almost all states speak English as the primary language. So, we get to see the role of other factors while the language is a constant.
With that let's look at a bar chart showing the rankings:
The list is topped by Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arkansas. The decrease in the percentage of attempted jokes is very gradual, except for the bottom 3: Hawaii, Maine, and the Virgin Islands. While Hawaii and the Virgin Islands were not very active in the top commenters list, Maine was the 3rd most active state. They seem to be having relatively serious discussions on Reddit.
