Brendan Sudol
April 2016

Can computers be funny?

Machine intelligence has been on a roll lately: beating the world’s best Go player, autonomously driving cars, even Making America Great Again.

But can a computer be funny? Equipped with a deep learning model open sourced by a Stanford researcher (with an amazing accompanying article), I tried to find out.

To start, I compiled every Conan O’Brien monologue joke over the last ~5 years (results here). These jokes served as the input for a recurrent neural network (RNN) character-level language model. The model learns the patterns and style of the text and is then able to generate new text, one character a time, that is similar in style but still unique (code and additional details on GitHub).

Some of the better results are below. A few of the set-ups are hilariously fresh and I love the attempted quotations. All in all, they’re not exactly ha-ha funny, but definitely quite amusing. At least for now, comedy writers’ jobs are safe :)

A new study says that a second wife is coming out with a new song “Seattle Starbucks.” The study was conducted by the presidential candidates and said, “That’s not the most popular story.”

Donald Trump has been invited to have sex with the check of single of her wife. In fact, the most popular campaign slogan is “I have a hotel.”

In a new interview, Mitt Romney is coming out of the room for a sex tape in the money.

In a new interview, Bill Clinton said he was honded to be from the controversy. It’s called “Watching his female problems.”

It was reported today that Donald Trump said that he would make a protest back for the police of the state of the US and the third year of store. The new store is pregnant.

A new study found that sex with a salary state of the Kanye West party to be the first time ever. The man is called “50 Shades of Grey” and “The Day to Facebook.”

Donald Trump has a new slogan, “I don’t want to be a lot of men.”

In a new interview, Mitt Romney has announced that they are a storm to be a prostitute. It’s the first time a start with the streets at the state of “The Real Housewives of The Republican Presidential Candidate.”

In a new interview, Kim Kardashian said he was arrested for probably sexual harassment. The show is going to be a break from the first time ever to say he was a string of contract than the Pope said, “I am also the one who was sent out of the world.”

In a new interview, Mitt Romney is in trouble for a new book for the first time in the world. The study was conducted by a show with the movie “The American American American Idol.”