Barbara Lippert's Critique: Promo Mojo

We’d all like to think we’re hugely talented media connoisseurs, if not superior but undiscovered comedians, with our own woulda-coulda stories: We were much funnier than Ray Romano in high school; Jerry Seinfeld stole “the pick” from your friend; your sister wrote a song similar to Phoebe’s dumbest one in third grade, yada yada.

Given this sea of sadly misplaced or about-to-burst talent, what if there were an 800 number to call, where a team of experts, aided by their patented software systems, would scientifically assess whether an idea or phrase is certifiably funny? (And, in turn, spit out gradations of funny, like the colors in our terror-alert system?) Moreover, what if hundreds of these comedy surveyors all sat in a giant, futuristic white room with undulating curves (a humorsphere?), like a souped-up PBS pledge drive crossed with a NASA control room, looking at their wafer-thin screens while plugging in...