Does AI Have A Sense of Humour? (The Naked City)

Does AI Have A Sense Of Humour is the latest column (September 1, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City – exclusive to City Hub.

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel ‘Brave New World’, first published in 1932, he forecast a society in which technology is employed to engineer stability and happiness. It’s a cautionary tale of course and Huxley predicts a world in which human beings are no longer allowed to think free or act for themselves. Had Huxley been alive today I’m sure he would have realised many of his writings as prophetic but blown away by the implications of the onslaught of artificial intelligence.

AI and the debate around it is only in its infancy but already we are weighing up both the good and the very bad. The latter includes the manipulation of images of children to create vile pornography and the good the acceleration of much needed areas of medical research. And then there’s the environmental cost where the increasing number of data centres eat up huge amounts of electricity as well as megalitres of water for cooling.

These days the average punter can call on AI to answer a myriad of questions, fudge a high school or university essay, post a Facebook meme of Donald Trump semi-naked in a tutu or animate snaps from your old family photo album. There are new AI generators appearing every day and not surprisingly you can now create your own tailored jokes with just a few words at sites like Leiizy, Easy Peasy and ChatGPT.

I thought it would be interesting to put AI to the test and see if it really did have a genuinely funny sense of humour. Of course, you can go to YouTube and see totally animated comics spruiking AI generated jokes, but most of them are horribly contrived and not worth a chuckle. What I was looking for was the kind of deep, quick witted, out there, absurdist sense of humour associated with some of the world’s greatest comics like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Joan Rivers and Wanda Sykes.

I began by asking ChatGPT to conjure a few jokes about Snoop Dog at the coming AFL Grand Final. It trotted out:

“And when the umpire throws the ball into the air for the bounce, Snoop’s confused: “Hold up… y’all seriously just legalized weed, and THIS is how you pass it around?”

and

“By halftime, he doesn’t even care who’s winning. He’s just in the stands with a meat pie, yelling, “Go whichever team’s wearing the tightest shorts!”

Hilarious – no! Not exactly the kind of gags that would have you rolling on the floor, so I switched to something a little more current – Bob Katter’s extraordinary outburst when his Lebanese ancestry was brought up by a Channel 9 reporter.

I typed Katter and kebab into a joke generator and it served up:

“Now listen here, folks, I walked into this Lebanese joint… and I saw shawarma spinning on the stick. I tell you what — back in my day, the only thing spinning in the outback was me, after too much Bundy Rum!”

Oh dear, you would need to have skulled a whole bottle of Bundy to laugh at that rather sad attempt. Meanwhile on Facebook there was a whole swag of ‘human’ generated reader comments, which were a helluva more funny – like:

“Maybe he cracked it because he thought the journo was asking about his Albanese heritage? His hearing must be getting iffy by now.”

What if you were to ask AI to give you a Trump joke in the style of social critic and satirist Lenny Bruce. Here’s what they came up with:

“Trump running for president again is like a guy getting kicked out of a restaurant… then coming back five minutes later with a fake moustache, saying, “Table for two, tremendous service last time.”

I hope you didn’t laugh because one internet blogger came up with a much funnier gag you could well hear the hipster Lenny uttering:

“So here’s the deal, cats — Donald Trump, he’s not a president. He’s a walking setup with a built-in punchline. He’s like if a golden toilet ran for office and won. ‘Make America Flush Again!’”

If you think that AI has a mind of its own, a bit like HAL (the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer) in ‘2001 A Space Odyssey’, then think again. Some subjects have been programmed as entirely taboo like the really sordid side of Trump’s past sex life.

So what conclusion did I reach as to AI’s ability to be funny and generate the odd chortle. I hate to disappoint the tech boffins and the passionate supporters – I’ve had better laughs with the jokes on the back of Laffy Taffy wrapper. AI is humourless because humour is generated by real humanity, not an electronically synthesised version of the same.

There may well be standup comics in the future that rely heavily on AI to generate their patter, but they will never rise to the heights of a Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce – and not even an Ugly Dave Gray. AI is about to influence and ‘generate’ many aspects of your life but it can keep its crummy jokes to itself.