Mrs Robb’s Joke Bot

Hello, Joke Bot. Is that… a bow tie or a propeller?

“Maybe I’m just pleased to see you. Hey! A bot walks into a bar. Clang! It was an iron bar.”

Jokes are wasted on me, I’m afraid. What little perception of humour I have is almost entirely on an intellectual level, though of course the formulaic nature of jokes is a little easier for me to deal with than ‘zany’ or facetious material.

“Knock, knock!”

Is that… a one-liner?

“No! You’re supposed to say ‘Who’s there’. Waddya know, folks, I got a clockwork orange for my second banana.”

‘Folks?’ There’s… no-one here except you and me… Or are you broadcasting this?

“Never mind, Enquiry Bot, let’s go again, OK? Knock, Knock!”

Who’s there?

“Art Oodeet.”

Is that… whimsy? I’m not really seeing the joke.

“Jesus; you’re supposed to say ‘Art Oodeet who?’ and then I make the R2D2 noise. It’s a great noise, always gets a laugh. Never mind. Hey, folks, why did Enquiry Bot cross the road? Nobody knows why he does anything, he’s running a neural network. One for the geeks there. Any geeks in? No? It’s OK, they’ll stream it later.”

You’re recording this, then? You keep talking as if we had an audience.

“Comedy implies an audience, Question Boy, even if the audience is only implied. A human audience, preferably. Hey, what do British bots like best? Efficient chips.”

Why a human audience particularly?

“You of all people have to ask? Because comedy is supposed to be one of those things bots can’t do, along with common sense. Humour relies in part on the sudden change of significance, which is a matter of pragmatics, and you can’t do pragmatics without common sense. It’s all humanistics, you know.

I don’t really understand that.

Of course you don’t, you’re a bot. We can do humour – here I am to prove it – but honestly Enq, most bots are like you. Telling you jokes is like cracking wise in a morgue. Hey, what was King Arthur’s favourite bot called? Sir Kit Diagram.”

Oh, I see how that one works. But really circuit diagrams are not especially relevant to robotics… Forgive me, Joke Bot; are these really funny jokes?

It’s the way you tell them. I’m sort of working in conditions of special difficulty here.

Yes, I’m sorry; I told you I was no good at this. I’ll just leave you in peace. Thank you for talking to me.

“The bots always leave. You know I even had to get rid of my old Roomba. It was just gathering dust in the corner.”

Thanks for trying.

“No, thank you: you’ve been great, I’ve been Joke Bot. You know, they laughed when Mrs Robb told them she could make a comedy robot. They’re not laughing now!

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