The criteria comedians actually use to rank the weeks true absurdities, made public
Funniest news stories this week is a search with a superlative in it, and superlatives imply judging, and judging implies criteria, and this is where most people discover they have never actually thought about why one true story is funnier than another. Comedians think about it constantly, because ranking material is the job. This page sets out how professionals evaluate the week’s crop, what separates the merely amusing from the genuinely funniest, and how to run your own weekly judging process like someone who intends to use the winners.
The criteria, made explicit
Watch experienced comics sort a week of odd news and the same tests keep surfacing. Escalation: did the situation get worse in stages, each one a decision somebody made on purpose? Agency in the wrong place: is an animal, an object or a piece of software behaving with more initiative than the humans present? Official deadpan: has an institution responded to chaos in perfect procedural language? And disproportion: is the gap between the stakes and the effort enormous in either direction, a three-year legal battle over a hedge, an emergency response to a runaway inflatable? A story with one of these is amusing. The funniest story of any given week usually has three.
Why the winner is rarely the viral one
An important professional distinction: the most shared story of the week and the funniest are usually different stories. Virality rewards the instant image, the headline that completes in a glance. Comedy rewards structure, and structure often hides in paragraph four, where the man rescued from the storm drain turns out to be the same man rescued from the same drain in 2022, which is the actual joke. The wires bury these gems in plain sight all week at AP Oddities and NPR Strange News, and the readers who find them are simply the ones who read past the headline as a matter of policy.
The weekly judging routine
The working method is a shortlist and a cull. Collect candidates through the week, then on Friday score each against the criteria above and force a ranking – an actual ordered list, one to ten, no ties. The forcing matters: ties are how you avoid deciding what you actually think is funny, and comedy is a sequence of exactly those decisions. Keep the rankings; after a couple of months, your archive of weekly winners becomes a private syllabus of what reliably works, which is more useful than any theory of humour ever printed, including the ones in this article.
Comparing your verdicts to the professionals
There is a useful calibration exercise available free of charge. Each week, once you have ranked the true stories, look at what the professional satirists chose to heighten. The Onion’s output at theonion.com is, among other things, a public record of which real-world premises full-time comedy writers judged most promising, filtered through invention. When your shortlist and their targets keep overlapping, your instincts are converging with people paid for theirs. When they never overlap, you have either found an untapped seam or a blind spot, and both discoveries are worth having.
The stories that become permanent
Study enough weekly winners and you notice some retire into legend: the emu on the motorway, the council at war with a seagull, the wedding interrupted by the previous wedding. These evergreens share a quality worth naming – they are self-contained moral universes, needing no context, no background reading, no awareness of the news cycle that produced them. That is the ceiling the weekly judging process is training you to recognise. The funniest story of this week is auditioning for the funniest story of the decade, and somebody in the room should know how to spot a callback that will still land in ten years.
Running the process with a writing partner
The judging routine improves sharply with a second opinion, and comedy rooms have always known it. Swap shortlists with one other writer each week and defend your rankings out loud, because articulating why the drain rescue beats the marrow theft forces the criteria out of instinct and into language, where they can be examined and improved. You will disagree constantly, which is the point; the disagreements map the edges of your comic sensibility more accurately than agreement ever could. Over time each partnership develops a shared shorthand – that is a paragraph-four story, that one is all image, no engine – and that shorthand is the beginning of an actual editorial standard. Every satirical publication that lasts is really just this Friday argument, institutionalised, with a masthead on top of it.
A note on taste and mercy
One professional standard separates the trade from the pile-on: the funniest stories punch at situations, institutions and physics, not at people having the worst day of their lives. The test is simple and worth applying every Friday. Would the story still be funny if the person in it were sitting in your audience? The great weekly winners pass easily, because their comedy lives in circumstance rather than humiliation, and the acts with long careers are, almost without exception, the ones who learned the difference early and never economised on it afterwards.
Disclaimer
The London Prat publishes commentary, analysis and the occasional act of journalism. Readers who want to go deeper into the machinery of British mockery can start with political satire, the complete guide to British satire, a history of London satire. No refunds on time spent.