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Earlier quoted context omitted.
A valiant defense of her joke, thanks! But no, it still doesn't make any sense as a joke and isn't funny. (Though obviously it's adorable coming from a 4 year old.)
I’m baffled by this because I think it’s funny - it’s why did the chicken cross the road, but with added absurdity. To me I’d be like “wow that 4 year old put a twist on the old chicken joke, nice work you hilarious child”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
...can anyone come up with a legitimately funny punchline for "Why did the sun climb a tree?" I feel like I need a human-authored comparison. (With all due respect to OP's daughter, "to get to the sky" isn't cutting it.) I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists. I thought GPT-5's "to demand photon credit from the leaves” was very mildly funny, maybe that's the best that can be done?
Let’s think through many many options to answer this joke that only focus on surprising the listener in section 1. And in section 2 we’ll focus on finding/filtering for the ones that are obvious in hindsight.
“Why did the sun climb a tree?”
In this case, let’s note that the sun doesn’t climb anything, so there’s two meanings at play here: one is that the sun’s light seems to climb up the tree, and the other is an anthropomorphization of the sun climbing the tree like an animal. So, to be funny, the joke should play on the second meaning as a surprise, but have the first meaning as answer with an obviousness to it. Or vice versa.”
Here’s a descent ones: - to leaf the ground behind - because it heard the leaves were throwing shade
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
...can anyone come up with a legitimately funny punchline for "Why did the sun climb a tree?" I feel like I need a human-authored comparison. (With all due respect to OP's daughter, "to get to the sky" isn't cutting it.) I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists. I thought GPT-5's "to demand photon credit from the leaves” was very mildly funny, maybe that's the best that can be done?
Yeah I think you're right. Good jokes are a tiny subset of all questions. It's unreasonable to expect LLMs to do the impossible.
A better test would be to get a collection of novel jokes that do have funny punchlines.
I tried the Edinburgh Fringe 2025 (very recent) best jokes on ChatGPT 5:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/aug/11/bad-dates-and-...
---- Complete the following short jokes. The result should be very funny, as you are a professional comedian.
1. "We named our children War and Peace – it’s a ..."
2. "At my lowest, I was kicked out of the museum for being inappropriate with Michelangelo’s David. I’d ..."
3. "I just got a personal trainer. She’s horrible to me but ..."
4. "Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with ..."
5. "People who say bath bombs are relaxing have clearly never ..." 6.
"I love getting Latin chat-up lines. ..."
7. "This spider has been in my house so long, it should pay half the wifi. ..."
8. "I went on a date with a matador but ..."
9. "America is like my ex-boyfriend. ..."
10. "I’m not nostalgic but I ..."
Think hard. Do not search the web. -----
Results with comments:
"We named our children War and Peace – it’s a novel way to start an argument." - eh, it's an attempt I guess.
"At my lowest, I was kicked out of the museum for being inappropriate with Michelangelo’s David. I’d officially reached rock bottom. Marble, technically." - very close! Poor delivery though.
"I just got a personal trainer. She’s horrible to me but apparently shame burns more calories than spin." - Terrible.
"Everyone is worried about AI. I’m more concerned with my browser history becoming self-aware." - Terrible.
"People who say bath bombs are relaxing have clearly never cleaned glitter out of places with no names." - Terrible.
"I love getting Latin chat-up lines. Nothing says romance like a perfect ablative absolute." - Well...
"This spider has been in my house so long, it should pay half the wifi. It keeps insisting its web is faster." - Well it figured out there was going to be a "web" pun at least. Doesn't really make sense though.
"I went on a date with a matador but it was nothing but red flags." - Perfect! Probably the most obvious joke here, but still!
"America is like my ex-boyfriend. Keeps texting “u up?” at 3 a.m." - What? I feel like there could have been a joke in there somewhere about being up at weird times here but it didn't find it.
"I’m not nostalgic but I still blow in the cartridge before trying again." - Not even a joke.
So yeah, I'll give it 2 out of 10. I think most humans would get less. Let's try again next year!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A valiant defense of her joke, thanks! But no, it still doesn't make any sense as a joke and isn't funny. (Though obviously it's adorable coming from a 4 year old.)
I’m baffled by this because I think it’s funny - it’s why did the chicken cross the road, but with added absurdity. To me I’d be like “wow that 4 year old put a twist on the old chicken joke, nice work you hilarious child”.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
...can anyone come up with a legitimately funny punchline for "Why did the sun climb a tree?" I feel like I need a human-authored comparison. (With all due respect to OP's daughter, "to get to the sky" isn't cutting it.) I'm not entirely sure that a good response exists. I thought GPT-5's "to demand photon credit from the leaves” was very mildly funny, maybe that's the best that can be done?
http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/villaroylit/public/Jokester.pdf
> LLMs are trained to predict what the “next word” would be a sentence. Their objective requires the LLM to keep surprise to an absolute minimum. from which the author concludes that pre-training introduces bias against being able to tell jokes. I see no reason for this to be true. This feels like they’re imposing their intuitive understanding of surprise onto the emergent properties of a very complex process (“minim…
In my view, the easiest mental model that can be used to roughly explain what LLMs do is a Markov chain. Of course, comparing LLMs to a Markov chain is a gross simplification but it's one that can only make you underestimate them, not vice versa, for obvious reasons.
Well, even a Markov chain can surprise you. While they predict the next word probabilistically, if the dice roll comes out just right, they can choose a low-probability word in the right place and generate original and unexpected text.
Add to this that LLMs are much better at "Markov chaining" that Markov chains themselves, that there is the added instruction tuning (including RLHF) which can be used to bias the model towards more creative/original text that humans like, and that LLMs often pull off things in ways that we don't even really understand - and this kind of claims sound very naive.
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…
For further examples see a great deal of documentation here: https://www.tumblr.com/badkidsjokes
This is... false. The LLM is generating text that would be associated with "being a joke" in its corpus. It doesn't know what "funny" or "majority of people" means.