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Social roboticist, Heather Knight, sees robots and entertainment a research-rich coupling. So she programmed a charming humanoid robot named DATA with jokes, and equipped it with sensors and algorithmic capabilities to help with timing and gauging a crowd. Then Knight and DATA hit the road on an international robot stand-up comedy tour. Their act landed stage time at a TED conference and Knight was profiled in Forbes 30 Under 30. Watching Data perform is much like watching an amateur stand-up comedian cutting her/his chops at an open mic night doing light comedy with a sweet but wooden delivery.
Knight’s goal is specific:
To make robots not fail around people. Because generally robots just fail,” says Knight. “They don't understand social rules. They can be rude. They can be confusing.”
Comedians couldn’t be better role models for bumbling robots in terms of channeling social failing into comedy gold. Comedy is one of the most challenging and sophisticated of all social interactions.
Punching down. Self-deprecating humor.
Touring with her robot client (she refers to herself as DATA’s agent) taught Knight a number of things about robotics, artificial intelligence and humor.
Some of the research questions for the robot comedy work last year were about whether it's more entertaining for a robot to tell robot-derived stories. One of the big things I learned in the six years of performing comedy rather than trying to do it as a research engineer–but actually just being onstage, or having the robot on stage and watching audiences respond to it–is that sometimes the things that they really laugh at are much more about the robot kind of making fun of itself. And it turns out that self-deprecation for a robot comedian often involves making fun of technology, and its limitations. That's actually kind of refreshing. I think a lot of people are used to being bossed around by things like software updates. Even traffic signals tell you what to do. So we're just used to being bossed around by systems that aren't actually that smart. It can be kind of refreshing for a machine to acknowledge that it has limitations, or even make fun of them.”
Puns, crowd work and scripted bits.
Artificial intelligence is still a long way from generating set-ups and punchlines worthy of an HBO comedy special. So far, the most powerful chatbots rely on large databases of stored human interaction. “The farthest the algorithms have really gotten in comedy have been in puns. They're pretty good puns,” says Knight, who sees no reason why a robot comedian shouldn’t have human writers. “There's no reason to automate people out of a robot.”
The blending of comedy and robotics is an ambitious undertaking and Knight is still working out the details. Like how do you program a robot to make scripted material seem spontaneous? How do you program a machine to deal with interruptions during its set? How do you program a robot with options for spontaneous responses that lead back to the scripted act?
Something that's really interesting about stand-up comedy as a general art form, is a lot of it is pre-scripted,” says Knight. “This is something that's really helpful for robots, this idea that you can have something that's mostly pre-scripted but then, for example, someone drops a tray in the audience and the comedian has to be like, 'I mean, my joke wasn't that funny.' Somehow bringing it back to the performance.”
Crowd work.
Stand-up comedians frequently have to deal with hecklers and other interruptions to redirect attention back to their stand-up routine. Another form of comic-audience interaction is when a comedian intentionally and extemporaneously engages the audience. This is the art (and sometimes folly) of crowd work. A computer scientist programming a robot comedian has to deal with many of the classic performance challenges. “How much of crowd work really needs to be real? Can we simulate it? Can you go 'so, where you all from?' If you're in a particular state, you can make some assumptions about what is going to be said,” says Knight.
While Robin Williams could famously pull comedic gems out of thin air, many professional comedians make rough mental calculations based on available data, methodically weaving pre-scripted material with unrehearsed exchanges and anticipating where audience responses will lead. Professionals make crowd work and dealing with hecklers all seem spontaneous, natural and unusually clever. “It's interesting to me as a roboticist to think about what is most important for people. We're calling it ‘liveness.’ What makes the performance seem like it's live?” asks Knight. “I've talked to comedians who basically have three set responses that they practice when there's a heckler. They practice those just like the rest of their comedy. And that's the kind of thing that robots are good at. They can definitely try out five different strategies and see which ones work best and tend to use the top three or something. That's very numerical. That aspect of stand-up comedy could be very inspiring even to non-comedian robots.”
