If you could somehow identify the posts that have significant flamewars or pun subthreads, I would find this the single most indispensable tool in the history of the internet.
That is a great suggestion...I think I can probably do at least some basic parsing to determine how many different people are commenting (vs. total comment count)...and I can probably do some basic keyword filtering counts too (checking for common flame/spam words and scoring on that)...worth playing with for sure! Thanks!