Measuring sarcasm

I was asked today in a private message how to measure sarcasm.

The idea of sarcasm is that what a person says in plain text is different to what they actually mean, and certain parts of the audience are supposed to understand it, possibly find a humourous twist in the juxtaposition of what you said and what you meant, while the person or people who is the butt of the sarcasm ideally should remain confused by it and publicly shown up as stupid.

There are two ways of measuring sarcasm in a remark, one is the effectiveness of the sarcasm in doing the above job, while the other measurement refers to the pithiness, as sarcasm is particularly appreciated by connoisseurs if it has a “pithy” quality. The thing is, sarcasm is seen as “the lowest form of wit”, while brevity is called “the soul of wit”, and souls like to rise up, so therefore sarcasm which is both pithy and also very sarcastic sarcasm has forces in it moving up and down at the same time creating internal circulating flows like a storm cloud or a galaxy and draws into itself the energy and attention of the audience. A much-appreciated sarcastic comment then needs to have two measurements, a pithiness score and a score for sarcasm effectiveness.

As explained above, effective sarcasm is all about the intended listeners understanding the hidden meaning or it being lost on them, depending on the intention of the remark issuer (RI). Therefore, the formula for sarcasm effectiveness (FSE) is (n/e)+(u/i)*100%, where n = number of those not understanding the comment from those who were not supposed (by the RI) to understand it, e = number of those who were not supposed to understand it, u = number of those who were supposed to understand it and did understand it and i = number of those who were supposed to understand it.

I hope you understood that.

This is separate to the measure of sarcasm pithiness. An ideally pithy sarcastic remark is supposed to have five words in it. The pithiness score is therefore 5 minus the actual variance from 5 words, plus or minus. So a one word sarcastic remark as well as a nine word answer achieves a pithiness score of 1. This only applies to the final sentence if we are referring to multi-sentence pieces of sarcasm.

Hope that answers your question.