Last Friday was April Fool’s Day, a day to celebrate not only my son’s fifth birthday, but also to celebrate all things hilarious. As we were planning our next BPI, I got to thinking about comedians and who makes me laugh the hardest. There are so many funny people out there I found it hard to choose, so I pinged Jason Falls and asked my funny husband to see who they think are lighting up TV screens and viewers’ smiles these days.
The list started out way too big (and apparently included some unforgivable names – Jason Falls berated me for trying to add in Dane Cook), but we eventually narrowed it down to the kings of night-time talk show comedy: David Letterman, Jay Leno, Seth Meyers, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. On the rare occasion that I’m not burning the midnight oil for NetBase, I love taking a little break and tuning in to Comedy Central for some guaranteed laughs from Colbert and Stewart – and it looks like the social media world agrees with me.
In this graphic, the amount of chatter about a brand is indicated by the size of the bubble, while the placement of the bubble shows both the sentiment and passion intensity.
Colbert came out on top, generating a love score of 77, only three points ahead of his fellow Comedy Central comedian, Jon Stewart. Verbatim on Colbert revealed that online consumers find his eccentric approach to satire both funny and easy to relate to, watching him feels like hanging out with “friends.”
I just love Stephen Colbert…he’s as wacky as most of my friends
Stewart, a fellow New Jersey native who holds a place in my heart, was neck-and-neck with Colbert, generating a love score of 74 and 25% of the overall chatter on the six comedians. In looking at the verbatim on Stewart, I found that social media users, many of them on Facebook, find him to be not only consistently hilarious, but also politically inspiring.
Jon Stewart is hilarious, the Daily Show is the place to get your political news!
And as for the 6’4’’, flame-haired Conan – his bubble is as big as he is tall, generating 55% of the overall conversation. Having just seen an episode of his new show recently myself, featuring Ricky Gervais, I found that the verbatim overwhelmingly had to do with his new slot on the TBS “Very Funny” network.
Love this Conan promo for his new show
I am SO excited about Conan’s new show
So who cracked you up this April Fool’s? And does anyone else out there think that Dane Cook deserved a spot on the BPI? Stay tuned for our next installment…
Lisa Joy Rosner
The Brand Passion Index, other cool ConsumerBase insights, and thoughts on understanding the social media universe from Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase CMO.
No Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson? Late night ends at 1:37 am, or so I thought.
Interesting idea!
I’m guessing Colbert would prefer to be compared to Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and even Obama though
I’ve got some other ideas if you like
Tom
I would add the US Congress to your list of comedians. Would love to see an analysis of how your tool captures sentiment for the current political crisis to see how it supports all the opinion polls taking place right now.
Seth Meyers is a King of night-time talk shows? Interesting… Very interesting data and I think the sentiment toward Leno is something NBC should have listened to when they tried to retire him. I do like Larissa’s idea about US Congress, though I’m guessing none of them work at night.