Today’s topic was suggested by my wife (hello, honey!). For the longer story as to how this topic came up, see the epilogue at the end of the article.

For now, I’ll focus on what she suggested I research: Are romantic comedies shorter (and do they receive poorer reviews) than non-comedic romance movies?

I built a dataset of all movies which grossed at least $1 in US cinemas between 1980 and 2017 (13,159 movies) to try to discover the answer.

Let’s start by having a look at how the romance genre compares to other genres.  For each movie I gathered three pieces of information (where available):

• Length, measured in minutes, from IMDb.
• Metascore, which is the average score of all major critics, out of 100.
• IMDb user …

Today, I’m sharing my most recent collaboration with Bruce Nash for the American Film Market.

This time, we investigated the common factors behind successful comedies.

To understand how to make a comedy successful, we first looked at who watches them. We used data from UK cinema audience surveys by Pearl and Dean from the past twenty years to compare comedy films to those of other genres.

Let’s start with gender. At 54%, comedy had the second-highest percentage of women in their audiences, when compared all major genres, behind only romance (which stood at 59%). The other basic demographic category is age. To analyse this, we sub-divided the audience data by MPAA certificate to see how audiences differ between types of comedy.

As …