Stand-up Comedy and Humor by Robots

Abstract

In this paper we survey and comment on research that deals with humor as it can be generated and understood by physical social robots. Ultimately we want to investigate whether humanoid robots can play the role of a standup comedian. Such a robot uses humor in its interaction with the audience, rather than in face-to-face communication in a humorous or joke-telling context with an individual. Clearly, we can expect that telling jokes and have humorous interactions with an audience requires knowledge (or intuition) of how to present humor in verbal and nonverbal ways, whether it is in face-to-face interaction or with an audience that provides more global and collaborative feedback. We have notes on robots that have appeared in science-fiction movies. Robots also appeared in TV shows and usually made an audience laugh because of taking things literally and acting in extreme ‘mechanical’ ways. There have been stage plays and TV shows that involved humans acting as robots, there have been many movies where humanoid robots or otherwise embodied artificial intelligence (AI) systems display humor. We survey attempts to design social robots that know how to tell jokes. Unfortunately all that behavior is scripted, there is no knowledge of the interaction context and there is no spontaneous humor behavior involved. Digital technology, including drones and robots, has been used in one-man show performances. And theer are examples of robots acting as stand-up comedian as well, as will be discussed in the final part of this paper.