The Honeymooners

You can’t quantify levels of comedy of course … or can you? A poll ran by Vanity Fair/60 Minutes has attempted to, all so it can give out a gong (we’re not sure if anyone will get an actual physical gong) to its winner of the best TV sitcom of all time.

According to the New York Daily News, the poll took on a pretty standard structure of getting Joe Public to vote on a load of sitcoms and totting up all the answers to find out which had received the most votes. Now, there was a slight problem with this, given that voters were given a choice of just seven sitcoms to choose from (and imagine our disappointment when we found Joey hadn’t made the cut). This suggests that the top seven are already pretty much objectively the best, which is nonsense, so we’re not taking this too seriously. And the seven? Arrested Development, Cheers, Friends, The Honeymooners, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld and 30 Rock. So no Frasier either. Like we said, nonsense.

The winner of all this, then, was Seinfeld! It took 22% of the vote to just edge The Honeymooners, which sat pretty on 20%. Friends was back in third on 16%, Cheers fourth with 14%, Arrested Development fifth with 7%, The Mary Tyler Moore show sixth with 6% and 30 Rock propping them all up with just 5%. There were some other polls ran too, but frankly we’ve lost heart in reporting them after realizing how narrow the choice was for this one. Jay Leno was the chat show host most likely to make us laugh, whilst men were apparently more funnier than women. We bet there wasn’t enough choice in that one either.

Continue reading: Is Seinfeld The Greatest Sitcom Of All Time?