I'm sure there is a guy in OpenAI working on the theory of humor and how to make LLMs be comedians. Must be an interesting job.

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josephg 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have no doubt plenty of smart engineers at tech companies would rather reinvent the wheel than read a book on theatre. But if anyone’s interested, there are plenty of great books talking about the philosophy of comedy, and why some things work on stage and some don’t. I highly recommend Keith Johnstone’s “Impro”. He’s the guy who invented modern improv comedy and theatre sports.

He says things are funny if they’re obvious. But not just any obvious. They have to be something in the cloud of expectation of the audience. Like, something they kinda already thought but hadn’t named. If you have a scene where someone’s talking to a frog about love, it’s not funny for the talking frog to suddenly go to space. But it might be funny to ask the frog why it can talk. Or ask about gossip in the royal palace. Or say “if you’re such a catch, how’d you end up as a frog?”.

If good comedy is obvious, you’d think LLMs would be good at it. Honestly I think LLMs fall down by not being specific enough in detail. They don’t have ideas and commit to them. They’re too bland. Maybe their obvious just isn’t the same as ours.

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4gotunameagain 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Maybe their obvious just isn’t the same as ours.

Of maybe they're just stochastic parrots and are devoid of intelligence, a necessity to make other intelligent beings laugh with novel jokes ;)

	▲	josephg 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> devoid of intelligence, a necessity to make other intelligent beings laugh with novel jokes ;) I don't think you need to be that smart to make people laugh. Study actual comedy. Keith Johnstone is right. The funniest things are almost never the cleverest things. We have this idea of jokes in the west as being the height of intelligence. But I think the genius of great improvisers and comedians isn't in their cleverness. Its how they're more in tune with their inner "stochastic parrot" than the rest of us. Billy Connolly used to play banjo on stage before he became a standup comedian. In one show, he'd just come on. He's in a crowded auditorium and he was just about to play his first song. He strums the very first note on his banjo and the string snaped! There's silence in the room. Billy looks down at the banjo. He thinks for a minute. And then he looks up at the audience and says "Well thats just gone and F-ed it, hasn't it?". And the crowd erupted in laughter. I don't know if it translates in text, but that story gets a laugh even in the retelling. I had a couple people ask if I thought it was planned. (As if!) Why is that funny? Its certainly not funny because that was a clever line. Or because he's highly intelligent. He just said the obvious thing! And he said it slowly enough we could watch him think in real time. If you watch basically any comedy, you'll find almost everything that gets a laugh is the same. I don't think that kind of humour is beyond the grasp of chatgpt. Far from it. With the right training data, I think LLMs could be better comedians than almost anyone. Most people are far too nervous and clever to let ourselves react honestly and obviously. Thats why most people aren't as good as Billy Connolly.

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bhickey 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the pre-LLM days a friend's lab worked on a joke detector for The New Yorker. One measure they used was trigram surprise. Roughly P(AB) + P(BC) >> P(ABC).

For example, "alleged killer" and "killer whale" are both common, but "alleged killer whale" is surprising.

	▲	Fade_Dance 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		That reminds me of a joke I liked from Tim Heidecker when he was ribbing Maynard Keenan about his wine making: "The blood of Christ is essentially wine, correct?" Yes. "Who are you to put that in a bottle?" So a logical spoke can be inferred as well, blood->wine wine->bottle blood->bottle. That uses their own logical inferences against them as a "trick" which is another funny element for people. Using that to vault straight to the punch line makes the joke better, but you have to be sure the audience is on board, which is why there is a bit of reinforcement at the beginning of the joke to force them onboard.

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5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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jvm___ 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you do for a living?

I teach math how to be funny.