[ed. See also: Google's Robot Army.]
The stage presence is a little stilted. The tone of voice befits a dry delivery, but there are hints of Henny Youngman. “I once dated a MacBook,” the joke runs. “It didn’t work, because she was all ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that.” The comedian keeps a straight face by design, because he is a robot. “O.K., I will now try to relate to you with more human jokes,” RoboThespian offers. “I understand you like it when humans complain. You know what really pushes my buttons? That guy that’s in control of me.” Watching the performance on YouTube later, Iliza Shlesinger, a winner of the TV show “Last Comic Standing,” thought, Threatened? No.The audience was understanding, even brightened by his stiffness. People laughed, if not at wit or silliness then at least at the cheap gag of a robot seeking affirmation in such a human way: telling jokes to strangers. Between a microphone and a brick wall, novelty may be no less effective than toilet humor. (...)
His latest turn, as a standup, is an attempt to make him more human, Jackson said, by “building people’s empathy with the machine. People anthropomorphize machines. We’re interested in pushing the boundaries of that, and seeing how much people buy a lump of metal as a personality.” They started the project last year, when a graduate student named Kleomenis Katevas arrived from Queen Mary University of London. Katevas’s doctoral thesis addresses the mathematical attributes of comedy; after RoboThespian’s standup début, he said, “It’s clear already that even relatively small changes in the timing of delivery make a big difference to audience response.”
Katevas developed an algorithm for comic timing: tell a joke, wait two seconds to measure audio feedback from the crowd, and pause for laughter, holding for no more than five seconds. If the audience responds positively, encourage them; if not, RoboThespian might say “Hmm” or “Take your time.” (...)
Comedy is an art of precision. “The difference between an amateur and a professional is that it feels off the cuff, but it’s something I’ve worked very hard on,” the comedian Rob Delaney, the author of an eponymous new book, told me. “I have a narrative arc that I want to adhere to. Sure, I’ll make changes, but it’ll be eighty-per-cent similar.” He added, “I do a thing that a robot could do, which is: I listen to the room. That, I think, could be learned.”
by Betsy Morais, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg/Getty
