A computer walks into a bar ... no, hang on, why did the mainframe cross the road? Please, don’t heckle. IT humour doesn’t work very well. Computers don’t do jokes and the people who understand computers aren’t famous for being a bundle of laughs either. But Dr Kim Binsted, an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), plans to change that. If her project succeeds, your computer of the future could be swapping wisecracks with you faster than a New York cab driver. Her punning program is already helping children with severe speech problems.
She is one of the speakers on humour, art and the brain, at the Festival of Art and the Mind, in Winchester, Hants, today, along with the psychologist, Professor Richard Wiseman, who discovered the “most popular joke in the world” (see panel, facing page). Binsted will unveil a computer program called Wiscraic (Witty Idiomatic Sentence Creation Revealing Ambiguity in Context) which will regale the audience with its repertoire.
However, since examples include “The book thief was caught readhanded”, it’s obvious that Binsted’s cyber comedian would be unwise to give up its day job. But that is one reason why the project is so interesting. The fact that Wiscraic and his punning sidekick Jape (Joke Analysis Production Engine) find even basic humour so hard, despite access to vast language databases, is a vivid demonstration of what tricky stuff humour is.
They are certainly nowhere near answering the most fundamental question — why do human beings laugh and make jokes at all? Why is it that whenever two or three people are gathered together, we bare our teeth and emit a series of short vowel-like notes, each about 75 milliseconds long, repeated at regular intervals 210 milliseconds apart? One rather surprising answer is social dominance. When the laughter researcher Robert Provine, the professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, eavesdropped in clubs and bars to find exactly what happens when people laugh, he discovered that it is something women do in response to men. When talking to men, women will laugh 127 per cent more than their male audience, while men talking to a female audience will laugh 7 per cent less than their audience.
“Laughter, like many other social activities, is bound up with status and male display,” Provine says. “Top people don’t laugh; you laugh at what they say.” Both male and female listeners laugh more when a man is speaking, but in neither case do the jokes have to be any good.
But when we laugh at something funny, what goes on in our brains? Understanding this is the grail of neuroscience because while we can locate memories, speech and even religious experiences, jokes turn out to be even more complex. Neuroscientists have known for some years that if you have damage to your right brain, story-telling jokes of the “Man walks into a bar” variety are lost on you but slapstick is guaranteed a guffaw.
When subjects were put in an MRI scanner at the Institute of Neurology in London recently and told Wiseman’s world’s most popular joke, an area at the back of their frontal lobes was activated. But a rather different picture emerged when researchers at the institute told subjects either puns or what they called “semantic jokes” — “Why don’t sharks bite lawyers? Professional courtesy.” While both types tickled the brain’s medial ventral prefrontal cortex, which also deals with reward and control, they arrived there via different routes. The puns went through an area that controls speech (the Broca’s), while the “semantic” jokes went through the temporal lobes.
So it’s obvious that humour is, in fact, a serious matter, with a strong social dimension that needs a surprising amount of brain power and a willingness to break rules. Attempting to program such requirements into a computer sounds quixotic at best. “It’s true that in science fiction robots can usually do everything — except make jokes,” Binsted says, “but one of the aims of AI is to model what humans do and to replicate it.”
She defends Wiscraic’s playground gags by an analogy with computer-composed music. “It goes all the way from Beethoven down to jingles and right now we are still at the jingle end. But it’s a start. If computers are going to interact with humans via language, they are going to have to do humour.”
What’s intriguing is just how clunking the computer is: “The friendly gardener had thyme for the women” — compared with the real thing — Groucho Marx’s: “I have had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.” Why exactly one works perfectly and the others elicit a groan is the kind of question that keeps academics in work for decades.
But already Binsted’s joking computer has its fans in two places where use of language falls short of Marx’s sophistication. It is currently being used to teach English to Japanese students who can chat with a screen. The program makes a joke like the “friendly gardener” one and then deconstructs it to explain the idiomatic use of the word time. “We’ve found that students remember more and keep working longer when the screen throws up the occasional joke,” Binsted says.
Meanwhile, at the University of Edinburgh another program with a very long name — Standup (System To Augment Non-Speakers Dialogue Using Puns) — is under way. Children with severe language difficulties already use computers to help them to communicate but inevitably none of them develops a sense of linguistic humour. “Jokes are a vital part of language and of social development,” Binsted says. “The punning program Jape allows them to make puns about any word they choose. It kind of gives them a leg-up into the world of humour. Already the evidence suggests this improves their socialisation skills.”
Binsted’s analysis of the structure of humour is painstaking — she recently wrote an entire paper analysing “scalar” jokes, which exaggerate scale, such as: “Your bottom is so big, if you sat in the sea there would be a tidal wave” — and if her research yields results, we could all be sharing a joke with our computer. “Humour bonds people, it excuses errors and makes the offering of criticism smoother,” she says. “
Interacting with computers that can do all those things would make learning a new program a more enjoyable experience.” But even she admits that jokey error messages might be a mistake.
THE WORLD'S MOST POPULAR JOKE
Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, set up a website called Laughlab where you could submit jokes — 40,000 were offered — and rate other people’s. The joke that scored the most votes — it worked across many different countries and appealed to men and women, young and old alike — was the following:
- A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem to be breathing; his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his mobile and calls the emergency services.
He gasps to the operator: “My friend is dead. What can I do?” The operator in a calm, soothing voice says: “Just take it easy. I can help. First let’s make sure that he is dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says: “OK. Now what?”
