If you asked me the question from the title of this article yesterday, I would say that computers will never be able to come up with jokes that would make anyone laugh. I myself always thought that this is an impossible task for anything else but an advanced artificial intelligence, but as it seems, I was wrong. Computers are capable of coming up with jokes today and the strange thing is that at least one of these jokes is actually quite funny.
And I am almost ashamed to admit that this has been proven quite some time ago when a study was conducted by an organization known as the Laugh Lab which had people submit their favorite jokes and which had a huge survey done in order to see which jokes have been deemed the funniest of all times. Of course, the study only involved jokes in English language which is an inherent fault, but an understandable one.
Some of the entries were submitted by a team from Edinburgh University who were looking into the capabilities of a computer to come up with jokes. As you would expect, the jokes relied on word play as this is the simplest form of humor that can be generated mechanically. Also as you would expect, most of the jokes fell flat to say the least. However, there was one joke that did very well, in fact ranking among the most popular third of the jokes submitted. It goes like this:
“What kind of murderer has moral fiber? A cereal killer”
I think we can all agree that it is an actually funny joke that involves very clever word play which works on a number of levels. This has prompted a number of theories being put forward that tried to explain the success of this joke and predictions whether computers could be made to come up with jokes that are even better. These days, it seems, computers are limited to hit and miss attempts at word-play jokes as they lack the ability of advanced thinking that is involved in coming up with jokes. I guess that for something like that we will have to wait for artificial intelligence to be developed.