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LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

danfabulich.medium.com

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Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#151

Post by ay »

IshKebab wrote: post #11

This sounds really convincing but I'm not sure it's actually correct. The author is conflating the surprise of punchlines with their likelihood. To put it another way, ask a professional comedian to complete a joke with a punchline. It's very likely that they'll give you a funny surprising answer. I think the real explanation is that good jokes are actually extremely difficult. I have young children (4 and 6). Even 6…

I found your example of a joke child made very interesting - me a good jokes is something that brings is unexpected perspective on things while highlighting some contradictions in one world models.

In the adult would model there is absolutely no contradiction about the joke you mention - it’s just a bit of cute nonsense.

But in a child’s world this joke might be capturing the apparent contradiction - the sky is “in the tree”, so it must have climbed it, to be there (as they would have to do), yet they also know that the sun is already in the sky, so it had absolutely no reason to do that. Also, “because it’s already there” - which is a tricky idea in itself.

We take planetary systems and algebra and other things we can’t really perceive as granted, but a child model of the world is made of concrete objects that mostly need a surface to be on, so the sun is a bit of a conundrum in itself! (Speaking of my own experience remembering a shift from arithmetics to algebra when I was ~8).

If not too much of a personal question - I would love to hear what your child would answer to a question why she finds that joke funny. And whether she agrees with my explanation why it must be funny :-)

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#152

Post by darajava »

I pasted the article into GPT-5 and asked it to come up with a joke based on the content. It came up with:

> Dan Fabulich walks into a bar and says,

> “LLMs can’t tell good jokes because they avoid surprises.”

>

> The bartender says,

> “Yeah, I figured you’d say that.”

I thought it was pretty good!

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#153

Post by addandsubtract »

darajava wrote: post #152

I pasted the article into GPT-5 and asked it to come up with a joke based on the content. It came up with: > Dan Fabulich walks into a bar and says, > “LLMs can’t tell good jokes because they avoid surprises.” > > The bartender says, > “Yeah, I figured you’d say that.” I thought it was pretty good!

I don't get it. It doesn't even follow the "walks into a bar " format.

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#154

Post by fallingfrog »

brookst wrote: post #60
ozgung wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why did the sun climb a tree?" Claude Opus 4.1: - To get to a higher branch of astronomy - Because it wanted to reach new heights - To see the dawn of a new day from a better view ChatGPT 5 Thinking: After thinking for 26 seconds: - To check on its solar panels—the leaves.

With more thorough prompting: > Complete the following joke. Think carefully and make it really funny! Think like a great comedian and find that perfect balance of simple, short, surprising, relevant, but most of all funny. Don’t use punchlines that are irrelevant, non sequiturs, or which could be applied to any other setup. Make something funny just for this one setup! Here goes: Why did the sun climb a tree? Claude…

Hmm this is a really tough one though. How about, depending on how the person responds you come back with "well that's not what your mom said last night!"

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#155

Post by [deleted] »

dfabulich wrote: post #132
boothby wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the weirdest conversation about a joke that is definitely making its target audience laugh -- as a comedian, I say that's the only honest measure of a joke. But allow me to analyze the shit out of this, because the only thing funnier than a groaner is meticulously explaining the groaner. It's at least as funny as "why did the chicken cross the road," which is only a joke inasmuch the punchline is merely a sta…

OP author here. A number of commenters here have argued that "Why did the chicken cross the road" is a subtle allusion to the chicken's death, but I don't think that's why it's a classic joke. We traditionally start kids off with antijokes, jokes where the "surprise factor" is that there's nothing surprising at all, where the punchline is completely predictable in hindsight. It's more than a mere "groaner." Another c…

[deleted]

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#156

Post by dfabulich »

ajuc wrote: post #148

So there's 2 thesis in this article. 1. joke quality is how much sense the punchline makes as a completion of the setup minus the probability of finding the punchline given just the setup 2. jokes are subjective, people disagree wildly about how good a joke is, so if you aggregate preferences you get mediocre jokes at best. I think 1 is the important part. If it was just 2 - comedians with widespread appeal wouldn't…

Author here. I think the term "widespread appeal" may be misleading.

There are comedians who can attract a very large audience, large enough to make them major celebrities, but that doesn't mean that aggregating preferences doesn't produce mediocre jokes.

Instead, comedians build an audience of like-minded people, and get to know that audience very well. It's a little bit like the process of finding product-market fit for startups. You can achieve great success by catering to the needs of a very large market, even if you can't cater to everyone's needs.

> It would be interesting to compare how well LLMs can estimate how funny a joke is vs how good they are at generating jokes.

Academic psychologists have not found a quantitative measure of "how funny a joke is." If there were such a measure, LLMs could try to optimize for it.

But there isn't such a measure, and, if my argument is right, there couldn't possibly be a measure like that, because jokes have to be surprising but inevitable in hindsight, and different jokes will be surprising/inevitable to different people.

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#157

Post by moomin »

dfabulich wrote: post #125
moomin wrote: post #88

I know it’s not the point of the article but OP is dead wrong about what makes a good proof. Yes, they inevitably include a surprising concept but that’s just because all the obvious ones are already taken. A proof that only contains obvious steps is, for the most part, already proven. If someone proves the Reimann Hypothesis tomorrow, it’ll be a great achievement regardless of the fact that pretty much everyone alre…

Author here. That's exactly what I said in the article. > Surprising proofs reach conclusions that the mathematical community assumed were wrong, or prove theorems in ways that we thought wouldn’t work, or prove conjectures that we thought might be impossible to prove. Many smart people have tried for more than 150 years to prove the Reimann Hypothesis; it might be impossible to prove. If it's proved tomorrow, I'll b…

I’m guessing optimising for passing the Olympiad might be a bad idea…

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#159

Post by brookst »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #135
brookst wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean, when I sit in a train I don’t spend half the ride saying “oh my god this is incredible, big thanks to whoever invented the wheel. So smooth!” Two thoughts: - In that context, neither do you expect people to be invested in why the train is nothing special, it’s basically a horse cart, etc, etc - And maybe here’s where I’m weird: I often am overcome by the miracle of thousands of tons of metal hurtling along…

Louis CK did a bit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U :) My point isn’t that other people shouldn’t be amazed, it’s that I see this recurring assumption they aren’t. How do you know the people holding LLMs to higher standards aren’t also the same people who herald the dawn of a new AI era? Emphasis in the text you quoted: “saying”, not “thinking”.

My point was more that there is a subset of technical people who delight in the “they’re not perfect, because / therefore they are just glorified spellcheck” fallacy. Search this thread for “spell” or “parrot” to see examples.

So I don’t think it’s the same people, because the tone is not “they’re amazing but have farther to go”; there is a substantial group who at least claims to believe there’s no qualitative difference between Opus 4.1 and the spellcheck in Word ‘95.

Not trying to be argumentative here; I appreciate the conversation and you’ve helped me sharpen my point, which I appreciate.

Re: LLMs tell bad jokes because they avoid surprises

#160

Post by josephg »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #150
josephg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no doubt plenty of smart engineers at tech companies would rather reinvent the wheel than read a book on theatre. But if anyone’s interested, there are plenty of great books talking about the philosophy of comedy, and why some things work on stage and some don’t. I highly recommend Keith Johnstone’s “Impro”. He’s the guy who invented modern improv comedy and theatre sports. He says things are funny if they’re…

> Maybe their obvious just isn’t the same as ours. Of maybe they're just stochastic parrots and are devoid of intelligence, a necessity to make other intelligent beings laugh with novel jokes ;)

> devoid of intelligence, a necessity to make other intelligent beings laugh with novel jokes ;)

I don't think you need to be that smart to make people laugh. Study actual comedy. Keith Johnstone is right. The funniest things are almost never the cleverest things. We have this idea of jokes in the west as being the height of intelligence. But I think the genius of great improvisers and comedians isn't in their cleverness. Its how they're more in tune with their inner "stochastic parrot" than the rest of us.

Billy Connolly used to play banjo on stage before he became a standup comedian. In one show, he'd just come on. He's in a crowded auditorium and he was just about to play his first song. He strums the very first note on his banjo and the string snaped! There's silence in the room. Billy looks down at the banjo. He thinks for a minute. And then he looks up at the audience and says "Well thats just gone and F-ed it, hasn't it?". And the crowd erupted in laughter.

I don't know if it translates in text, but that story gets a laugh even in the retelling. I had a couple people ask if I thought it was planned. (As if!)

Why is that funny?

Its certainly not funny because that was a clever line. Or because he's highly intelligent. He just said the obvious thing! And he said it slowly enough we could watch him think in real time. If you watch basically any comedy, you'll find almost everything that gets a laugh is the same.

I don't think that kind of humour is beyond the grasp of chatgpt. Far from it. With the right training data, I think LLMs could be better comedians than almost anyone. Most people are far too nervous and clever to let ourselves react honestly and obviously. Thats why most people aren't as good as Billy Connolly.

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