Introduction and Hypothesis

I am an avid movie fan, as are a lot of people. Every Tuesday after Joel’s night class my friends and I make use of 5$ Tuesday movie tickets. We enjoy seeing all types of movies from the new Mario movie to “Cocaine Bear”. With all the movies I’ve seen my favorite genre or type of movie has to be comedy. However, in recent times I have found that new comedy movies are not the same or not nearly as popular. Sure “Cocaine Bear” can be classified as a comedy but there was not an underlying story line and it was full of extreme gore. I miss the days of “Happy Gilmore” or the “Other Guys”. With my analysis I scraped the IMDb webpage for the comedy movies ranked by ratings. My hypothesis is that the early 2000s adventure-comedy’s will have the best movies, some would say the golden era of comedy.

Visual 1

Here we can see the total ratings for every movie by year. Since the data set is the top 100 ranked movies we can see that movies in the early 2000s and middle 2000s are the most common aligning with higher and more ratings.

Visual 2

Comedy movies are typically paired with other genres. For example, “Knives Out” is listed as a comedy, drama, and crime movie. Here we will analyze how these other genres relate to comedy movies.

Here we can see how the many of each genre besides comedy is listed in the top 100 movies. Drama is the most common followed by adventure and romance. I was surprised that there were war movies listed with comedy, not too many things funny about war, but after further analysis it seems to be a parody of war or leaders. Also, animation has almost 20 instances, this is related to children movies like “Cocoa” listed in the data.

Visual 3

Different Rating Averages by Genre
Genre Median Mode Mean
Animation 8.10 8.1 8.14
Biography 8.20 8.2 8.30
Crime 8.10 8.1 8.10
Drama 8.10 8.1 8.18
Fantasy 8.10 8.1 8.10
Musical 8.25 8.3 8.25
Romance 8.10 8.0 8.18
Sci_Fi 8.10 8.5 8.20
Thriller 8.10 8.1 8.10
War 8.30 8.4 8.25

Implying what I stated previously, this table represents the average rating by for each genre type. There is not much discrepancy in rating average from genre to genre. Musical and War movies do have the highest averages but is due to smaller sampling.

Visual 4

My hypothesis is that movies will be higher ranked based off rating with adventure as a genre listed with comedy in the early 2000s. Here we can see my prediction is not all true. Movies that have adventure genre and are in early 2000s have lower average rank than those movies that do not have adventure listed.

Visual 5

Movie descriptions are listed within each of the movie. After combining emotion to words in movie descriptions we can see that negative and positive are the most common. Surprise and Disgust are the least common emotion as they do not relate to comedy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I do not think my hypothesis was necessarily true. However, I do think this is due to a number of factors. For one, comedy movies are typically rated poorly among movie critics and viewers, therefore popular comedy movies may not be rated highly. Also, the category of comedy is relatively vague. There were a decent amount of children’]s movies that were deemed comedy. In my opinion when I think of comedy I think inappropriate or dark humor, but that just me.