Most communication models treat meaning as something a sender encodes and a receiver decodes. When a message fails, the explanation is usually noise, ambiguity, or poor targeting. But the pattern we keep seeing is different: the same message, delivered identically, produces structurally different interpretations across audiences. Not random noise. Predictable divergence.
Humor Genome starts from that observation. We treat interpretation not as a property of a message, but as a function of the relationship between a message and its audience. The same joke kills in one room and dies in another, not because one room "got it" and the other didn't, but because each room brought a different interpretive frame to the same material.
The research program maps these frames. We identify the structural features of messages that make them flexible (landing across many audiences) or brittle (only working for one). We model the audience variables that predict divergence: shared references, status dynamics, emotional priors, cultural context. And we build instruments that make these patterns visible in real time.
Comedy is the proof surface because laughter is the fastest, most measurable signal of interpretation we have. A laugh is a binary, involuntary event. Silence is equally legible. This makes live comedy the highest-bandwidth environment for studying how meaning shifts across listeners.