Timing In stand-up Comedy: Text, Audio, Laughter, Kinesics (TIC-TALK): Pipeline and Database for the Multimodal Study of Comedic Timing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21803v1
• Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:46:15 GMT
• Title: Timing In stand-up Comedy: Text, Audio, Laughter, Kinesics (TIC-TALK): Pipeline and Database for the Multimodal Study of Comedic Timing
• Abstract summary: TIC-TALK is a multimodal resource with 5,400+ temporally aligned topic segments capturing language, gesture, and audience response.<n>The pipeline combines BERTopic for 60 s thematic segmentation with dense sentence embeddings, Whisper-AT for 0.8 s laughter detection, and YOLOv8s-pose for raw keypoint extraction at 1 fps.
• Score: 0.07777489763207261
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Stand-up comedy, and humor in general, are often studied through their verbal content. Yet live performance relies just as much on embodied presence and audience feedback. We introduce TIC-TALK, a multimodal resource with 5,400+ temporally aligned topic segments capturing language, gesture, and audience response across 90 professionally filmed stand-up comedy specials (2015-2024). The pipeline combines BERTopic for 60 s thematic segmentation with dense sentence embeddings, Whisper-AT for 0.8 s laughter detection, a fine-tuned YOLOv8-cls shot classifier, and YOLOv8s-pose for raw keypoint extraction at 1 fps. Raw 17-joint skeletal coordinates are retained without prior clustering, enabling the computation of continuous kinematic signals-arm spread, kinetic energy, and trunk lean-that serve as proxies for performance dynamics. All streams are aligned by hierarchical temporal containment without resampling, and each topic segment stores its sentence-BERT embedding for downstream similarity and clustering tasks. As a concrete use case, we study laughter dynamics across 24 thematic topics: kinetic energy negatively predicts audience laughter rate (r = -0.75, N = 24), consistent with a stillness-before-punchline pattern; personal and bodily content elicits more laughter than geopolitical themes; and shot close-up proportion correlates positively with laughter (r = +0.28), consistent with reactive montage.

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