Silicon-based comedy

By Miu Toyota

 

In her lecture, Silicon-based comedy, she showed Mr. Data, a robot comedian, to the audiences.

 

She has been trying to connect robots to entertainments because she thought that she should pay attention to comedians who are making ‘made-feelings’ and ‘made-characters’ on stages to make robots have powers of expression and concern themselves in society. She also thinks that to create new technologies for artworks can make people be interested in sciences or technologies.

 

Then, he showed some jokes. For example:

“Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says “Calm down. I can help. First, let’s make sure he’s dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says “OK, now what?””

 

Mr. Data, the robot which she introduced in this lecture, has a lot of databases of jokes and each joke is classified into many small groups such as lengths, subjects and actions of the joke. The most surprising point of Mr. Data is the fact that he can see the reactions of audiences and reflect the reactions for next action. In addition, he learns execution of jokes from his audiences. Although it is a long term project, she said Mr. Data will be able to show best performances for people who belong to different communities. So, the other way, people can learn about different cultures or different life styles from this robot. This is the goal of her.

(Heather Knight, Silicon-based comedy, Retrieved by http://www.ted.com/talks/heather_knight_silicon_based_comedy.html)

 

 

Why I chose this lecture because I just love comedies. However, I noticed that we have a lot of kinds of ‘comedies’ in the world. I do not know about Arabic, Korean or Chinese comedy styles but Japanese comedy style is totally different from American comedy style. Japanese people have some styles of the arts of making people laugh but when we are talking about ‘comedy show’, people usually think about ‘Manzai’. Usually it is combination and one is playing the fool and another is the straight man. (Although, today sometimes it is a trio, and sometimes both of them are playing the fool and the straight man because comedians want to try new styles, almost everything is based on this style). However when I watch American comedian videos, usually one comedian says some funny things. It is interesting. I prefer Japanese comedian style though. So, when I watch this lecture, I felt excited but to tell the truth, I do not think this robot will be popular in Japan.

Anyway, it is a very interesting technology and I think that it can be a good communication robot in the future.