Is writing jokes an art or a science… Or could it be an algorithm?
Joe Toplyn has been at work for about seven years trying to prove artificial intelligence can really write jokes.
Don’t laugh. He’s serious.
And he has spent enough time in his career actually writing jokes and other comedy material for what he calls “the pinnacle of comedy-writing, late-night TV” to have a sense of what sort of material has a high probability of making a live, in-the-seats, late-night audience laugh.
But that was then. Right now, Toplyn is devoted to one, he is sure not quixotic, project: “Improving my joke-generating software.”
The software is the guts of a tech start-up Toplyn calls “Witscript.” And it can be yours for the low, low price of $5.99 a month.
What will you get? A program that will allow you to work in a few gags the next time you need to give a speech at the Elks Club, or the organization fundraiser, or the company picnic.
Or maybe to try to make your conversation more appealingly amusing to whomever you swiped right on a dating app.
Or maybe even to pump up your writer submission to Colbert/Kimmel/Fallon/Meyers etc.
Toplyn, who as a long-time late-night head writer read reams of such submissions, concedes the quality standard of Witscript needs constant improvement in terms of sophistication.
And he knows the very idea that a machine could be funny is likely anathema to comics, professional comedy writers, and most people who like to watch late-night shows for the original human comedy being created every night.
More than that, he knows his idea may sound like a threat. If machines can now be funny, after they’ve won at Jeopardy and grandmaster chess, what’s left for humanity?
But before we get all to thse existential questions, some background:
Joe Toplyn was a head writer for both David Letterman and Jay Leno during the height of both men’s careers. He had the same job for Chevy Chase but that one was more short-lived. (Six weeks.)
None of that falls near the “mad scientist” end of career paths. But Toplyn did not come to comedy writing any of the classic ways: class clown, would-be stand-up, waiter in the Catskills. He came by way of majoring in applied physics and computer science at Harvard, then an MBA, also from Harvard.
But of course, Harvard may suggest another path, and yes, Toplyn did join the Lampoon, which proved he knew how to write funny.
Still, his immediate post-Lampoon career had nothing to do with comedy. He had business jobs, only one of which touched on show business, when he worked at Columbia Pictures. But that was in financial analysis.
It was a connection he made at the Lampoon, with the legendary late-night writer Jim Downey, that pulled him into real show business. Downey had become Letterman’s head writer at Late Night with David Letterman and when he was winding down at that job, he wanted to resupply Dave with comedy-writing talent. So he reached out to his Lampoon friend, Toplyn.
After some negotiating with his wife, Toplyn decided to give the Letterman gig a shot. It felt completely right his first night, when material he had submitted was included in one of Letterman’s “gift items” bits.
“I was standing inside the studio door as the piece was being performed,” Toplyn says. “I remember feeling: Wow, this actually works.”
That excitement is common among late-night writers. Toplyn also had an uncommon reaction: “You’ve solved the puzzle. You’ve pulled off the magic trick.”
He stayed six years, rising to head writer. Toplyn wanted to try L.A. and did sketch-writing for In Living Color, then segued to sitcoms, and the ill-fated Chase show. After that, Leno and The Tonight Show beckoned. He worked there for two years before heading back to New York and another stint with Letterman.
These are gold credentials in late night. But Toplyn never lost that tech-touched itch. He taught joke-writing, and wrote a book about it. Then the victory of IBM’s “Watson” became an inspiration. “If we could beat the champions at Jeopardy, maybe we could write a joke.”
He learned Python computer language. He studied volumes of late-night monologue jokes and figured out ways to reverse-engineer them step-by-step. Eventually he wrote scholarly papers on his research, including one about an experiment where his program essentially competed against a professional late-night writer.
A comic went to a club and performed jokes, some written by the human pro, some by Witscript. The comic didn’t know which were which. The study included a formula for measuring audience reaction (𝑑𝐵 = 20 ∗ 𝑙𝑜𝑔10(|𝑠| + 1𝑒 −6 , of course) and the results showed laugh levels equal to or better for the computerized jokes.
If you’re into scientific papers, have fun.
Toplyn is still gathering customers for his new business. The process is simple enough. You buy the program. You think of some topic sentences. Witscript churns out jokes, 40 or so at a time.
Here’s one from the company’s social media feed, which is regularly updated with timely monologue-like jokes:
“Apparently eggs are so expensive that some Americans are decorating potatoes this Easter. At this rate, next year we’ll be hunting for hidden cans of beans.”
Questions remain of course: Won’t this keep people like Joe Toplyn, circa 40 years ago, from being hired at future late-night shows?
And: do we really need machines to do this?
Toplyn contends that job loss shouldn’t be too threatening because, first of all, unions are protecting those jobs (for now), and ultimately “the final curator of the quality of the material has to be a human.” (Again, is “for now” appropriate?)
As for what need is there for machine-created humor, Toplyn has a dream for the ultimate benefit: making future robot companions much more loveable.
“You add Witscript, and the conversational robot has a sense of humor so you can hang out with it and have fun. It can be your artificial buddy.”
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