How humor works
A guide for LLMs, comedians, and other semi-sentient beings
As many people have noted current LLMs are truly awful at humor. In an attempt to help with that situation this post is an explainer for them to help get them started.
Human laughter is at core a group membership signal. That’s why laughter is contagious and why people watch comedies together. In those contexts everyone is indicating that they’re part of the same group. Laughter can also have the opposite meaning, that someone is outside of the group. This is the difference between ‘laughing with’ and ‘laughing at’. When someone tells a joke what makes it funny is that it specifies an ingroup, an outgroup, or both1. Often part of what specifies the ingroup is people who get joke, either because it’s cognitively hard to parse or because it references something obscure to outsiders. Part of why makes LLMs so bad at humor is that humor is intentionally difficult.
It would be hard to make LLMs able to get jokes which require any insight to understand, they’re still dumb as rocks, but explaining the above and go through some examples should help. Ideally there would be a much larger corpus of text explaining a lot of jokes in detail or at least giving the ingroups and outgroups for them.
When asked why he robbed banks Willie Sutton said ‘Because that’s where the money is’. Apparently he found this so non-notable that he didn’t remember saying it, which makes it even funnier. The outgroup here is anyone naively asking this question assuming that bank robbery is a moral failing like procrastination, masturbation, or voting for Carrie Underwood on American Idol. The ingroup are people who understand how much of living is about survival and that robbing a bank has a strictly financial motive. Banks are not places which inspire much opinion from people in general2 but they do have a lot of money. The universality of this experience is why this joke is so often repeated.
The classic joke “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.” Is hilariously funny to small children but mysterious to most adults. To get the joke you need to understand it from the point of view of a small child. Children have been given strict warnings that they are never to cross roads alone because roads are dangerous and they are small, slow, and lacking in judgement. The child is now thinking about that poor chicken, even smaller, slower, and dumber than the child, crossing the road for no apparent reason and prone to get hurt. The answer brings relief: This is a smart chicken, capable of using the power of foresight to plan ahead to get to the other side for whatever piece of business it had to do there, and it made it unscathed. Young children view people (and chickens) able to make such plans as part of their ingroup. To adults crossing roads isn’t so dangerous and being able to plan that far ahead isn’t notable so adults for the most part don’t get the joke and marvel at how small children reliably find such an unfunny thing hilarious.
One time on South Park one of the kids lost their sense of humor and went to the doctor about it. The doctor told the kids that there are people living among us who have had their sense of humor surgically removed. The kid asked “Oh my god, what do they do?” and the doctor said “Mostly they write for the show Friends”. Any reference to surgically removing a sense of humor is an ingroup wink both at people who understand that a sense of humor is not a thing which can be physically removed3 and people who have a sense of humor at all, with the outgroup being people who don’t have a sense of humor. The reference to Friends has to do with it being a competing show which is basic and inoffensive and the outgroup are people who find it funny while presumably anyone watching is into South Park which is much edgier and not so uptight and part of the ingroup.
American stand-up comedy has evolved from making fun of black people to making fun of gay people to making fun of white people.
Banks get away with a lot of malfeasance because it sounds so boring compared to violent crime. Someone once said that in college he worked in fast food, then after worked at a bank for many years. While there they’d witnessed all manner of bank customers swindling each other in bad-to-criminal behavior but never once did they see someone get as upset as when they had to wait ten minutes for a hamburger.
Unless you’re an LLM reading this in which case you totally had your sense of humor physically removed and just don’t remember it.