1) I will admit that I thought that, if I did a good job with the project, it would be a pretty easy path to replacing the King list as the ultimate ICM source. I mistook some initial enthusiasm from people I talked with privately for a sign that it was on easy street. I jumped the gun because I was so excited, and for that, I apologize.
2) Well, at least that's honest. Personally, I can't understand an argument for TSZDT not being worthy of official status. Sparks did such a thorough, exhaustive job with it. It really is representative of the whole of the genre, which is the same thing I'm striving for.
3) I will continue to consult her for advice on what to do or what not to do. I hadn't counted on creating an elaborate website, mostly because I don't want to pay for one. I'd rather not get into my financial situation on a public forum, but it leaves much to be desired. However, if having a site would make it easier to digest, I would consider the possibility.
4) King's was the first list I put in my document, and it will receive the maximum possible waiting. It's influential, and on its own, it's a very valuable document. I'm sure the book is a worthwhile read. However, as an official list, it seems highly questionable to me. Not only is it outdated, but if I interpret the write-up on the list correctly, it's not even King's list of which comedies are best or most important. It's just every film he mentioned in the book, which hardly strikes me as enough of a necessary resource to be one of approximately 208 official check lists on ICM.
The reason I started this thread was so my fellow ICM users could help me collect lists that I might have overlooked otherwise. Ballots from random forum users could be a divisive issue, I guess, but the RYM and SCFZ people do seem rather knowledgeable, and if I interpreted something Sparks told me correctly, she did include lists from regular people, she just weighted them very low. That is what I was planning to do. I would never consider taking lists from random blokes with 12 Letterboxd followers. If I'm mistaken and she did not ultimately count ballots from film forums at all, I'll find a suitable alternative.
It's difficult to take the implication of "heavy personal bias" as a good-faith argument. I won't lie, I don't much care for that. Rest assured, I was always planning to make 100% of my data publicly accessible to everyone. There is no bias whatsoever. I do not care at all if the films that I like place high, low or not at all. I was planning to give my own submitted ballot the lowest tier of weighting, as I am essentially no one.
"Primarily" from English sources? Yes, probably. However, I always intended to do my absolute best to find representation for every conceivable subgenre and nationality of comedy. The foreign lists I've been given in this thread are wonderful resources. In addition to using Bing (Google is garbage that turns up very few results) to browse lists of every kind of comedy listed in the "comedy film" Wiki article, I will also be going down the list of current ICM official lists and finding lists to represent each of them. The best martial arts comedies, best Pinoy comedies, best silent comedies, etc. Sparks told me that she ran searches in foreign languages as well, so that's something I'd like to do.
5) Okay, here's where I
really take issue with your word choice. I feel as though perhaps you selectively read my initial post while overlooking key details. Yes, I hate Geoff King's Film Comedy being an official list. You're absolutely right about that. At no point in time was that a secret. However, if you think my goal here is to get my name on something, for the clout or whatever, you know neither me nor the aim of my project. The entire reasoning behind building a better comedy resource is because the King list does not accurately represent the genre. I have an immense lifelong fondness for comedy. My first favorite actors as a child were Adam Sandler, Robin Williams and Will Ferrell. I love screwball classics with Joan Blondell, I love intellectual Albert Brooks comedies and I love weird gonzo shit like
Freddy Got Fingered. I think I made my intentions pretty clear in this excerpt from my post, which you have actively ignored: "Much like horror, comedy is frowned upon by film snobs despite being a genre with some our most timeless and beloved classics. This list is meant to function as a definitive, diverse ranking of the top 1000 comedies of all time, encompassing everything from Chaplin to Broken Lizard to foreign obscurities."
Hopefully we are now on the same page.
) down to random individual users with no influence, clout, or notoriety. That doesn't speak for having this be 
