@inproceedings{young-2026-brevity,
title = "Is Brevity the Soul of Wit? An Empirical Test Using 570,000 {R}eddit Jokes",
author = "Young, Robin",
editor = "Zhang, Yue and
Xu, Ruifeng and
Purwarianti, Ayu and
Rong, Tong and
Suzuki, Jun",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the {A}sia-Pacific Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = nov,
year = "2026",
address = "Hengqin, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-short.20/",
pages = "254--261",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-440-8",
abstract = "The assertion that ``brevity is the soul of wit'' has become proverbial in discussions of effective communication. We test this hypothesis using 570,634 jokes from Reddit{'}s r/Jokes community and a cross-platform comparison of 22.1 million posts across 10 subreddits. Longer posts receive more upvotes across all of Reddit, not just jokes, indicating the baseline length-score correlation reflects platform dynamics rather than humor-specific effects. However, we find a pattern unique to humor: the length-score correlation disappears entirely for top-performing jokes, while every non-humor subreddit retains a positive correlation for its best content. For genuine wit, length is irrelevant, which is a property that distinguishes humor from other content types tested. Temporal analysis reveals winner-take-all consolidation. As Reddit matured, long jokes' median scores dropped 71{\%} while mean scores increased 6.8$\times$, indicating most long jokes now fail while rare successes dominate."
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<abstract>The assertion that “brevity is the soul of wit” has become proverbial in discussions of effective communication. We test this hypothesis using 570,634 jokes from Reddit’s r/Jokes community and a cross-platform comparison of 22.1 million posts across 10 subreddits. Longer posts receive more upvotes across all of Reddit, not just jokes, indicating the baseline length-score correlation reflects platform dynamics rather than humor-specific effects. However, we find a pattern unique to humor: the length-score correlation disappears entirely for top-performing jokes, while every non-humor subreddit retains a positive correlation for its best content. For genuine wit, length is irrelevant, which is a property that distinguishes humor from other content types tested. Temporal analysis reveals winner-take-all consolidation. As Reddit matured, long jokes’ median scores dropped 71% while mean scores increased 6.8\times, indicating most long jokes now fail while rare successes dominate.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Is Brevity the Soul of Wit? An Empirical Test Using 570,000 Reddit Jokes
%A Young, Robin
%Y Zhang, Yue
%Y Xu, Ruifeng
%Y Purwarianti, Ayu
%Y Rong, Tong
%Y Suzuki, Jun
%S Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
%D 2026
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Hengqin, China
%@ 979-8-89176-440-8
%F young-2026-brevity
%X The assertion that “brevity is the soul of wit” has become proverbial in discussions of effective communication. We test this hypothesis using 570,634 jokes from Reddit’s r/Jokes community and a cross-platform comparison of 22.1 million posts across 10 subreddits. Longer posts receive more upvotes across all of Reddit, not just jokes, indicating the baseline length-score correlation reflects platform dynamics rather than humor-specific effects. However, we find a pattern unique to humor: the length-score correlation disappears entirely for top-performing jokes, while every non-humor subreddit retains a positive correlation for its best content. For genuine wit, length is irrelevant, which is a property that distinguishes humor from other content types tested. Temporal analysis reveals winner-take-all consolidation. As Reddit matured, long jokes’ median scores dropped 71% while mean scores increased 6.8\times, indicating most long jokes now fail while rare successes dominate.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-short.20/
%P 254-261
Markdown (Informal)
[Is Brevity the Soul of Wit? An Empirical Test Using 570,000 Reddit Jokes](https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-short.20/) (Young, AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
ACL
- Robin Young. 2026. Is Brevity the Soul of Wit? An Empirical Test Using 570,000 Reddit Jokes. In Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 254–261, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.