AI Circus / Artificial Intelligence Madness
Jokes in video are generated by GPT-3 NLP Artificial Intelligence algorithm that is currently in beta stage as of 20th of July, 2020.
Example of text generation with GPT-2 algorithm can be read below. Do you see the improvement?
GPT-2 example text when prompted: “What is comedy?”
Both are well-trodden ground. But comedy is about making fun of people, and about making fun of ourselves, and each other. Comedic expression is a political act: it is not up to us as a culture to go around and decide what a comedy is. People who make jokes are not more intelligent than others, and they are not more clever than others. They’re just people, trying to express themselves. And we have a responsibility to look at that process.
Look at Humor and the Comedy of Insults: Mark Kram’s analysis of why humor is a political act.
What is my first responsibility in comedy, I think, if I were to be judged on my comedic creations? Let me speak for myself: I want my audiences to be thinking and feeling things. And I try to be consistent and to work within the boundaries of my experience. But even in a set that is consistent, even though the idea is to be consistent, because we have this responsibility, we have to be aware of the context, and we have to make decisions about the context so that we don’t get stuck in not seeing things that aren’t there.
One way of working with irony is in acts of subversion. Many of the jokes in this past year seemed to require satire to make sense.
Yes. [laughs] They were asking absurd questions, and then in the process of asking absurd questions, we were presented with absurd answers. And we were trying to figure out what it was that the people were answering, but when you do that there’s a sense of danger. We didn’t realize how dangerous satire can be. We didn’t realize what a different way of talking about life we were creating.
I was thinking about another one of your shows from 2006. You said to you that the guest comic who came on was doing some of your earlier material, not this work in progress that you do now. But it really is something you are working on now, is it not?
Yes, it is a sort of heavy thing we have decided that we are going to dedicate ourselves to.
And are you working through your comedy with this?
Oh, we’re working through it.
[laughs] What’s that like for you?
It’s very different. We all have different personalities, and we’re all different people. But there’s a process that we’re working through, just like we’re working through our lives.
Do you feel that you’re pulling in different groups of people?
You’re talking about younger people, and more sensitive and more humor-based. I’m thinking of Alan Hochman and Joe Gatto, who both did this earlier stuff in a completely different way. In fact, their work is in a lot of ways the opposite of mine and Phil’s. It’s always been a people-like kind of style, as opposed to mine, which is this idea that it can be funny and frightening at the same time.
Is this the original kind of The Boondocks that it was?
You have to remember that it was originally called Black Jesus, because I thought it sounded like a black Christ figure, and the whole thing was a Jesus story. So it was Black Jesus Black Jesus Black Jesus Black Jesus. But after a while, we decided we wanted something different. We had done a series called Dragonfly in the Sea, where there was a mysterious ship named Dragonfly, and we thought we should have a nice name. We had someone think up a Chinese folk song, and it was just perfect. I heard it at an album signing in 1981, and I was just totally into it.
Photo by PoPville flickr user uncleslemp
Do you feel like The Boondocks is more relevant now than it was even in the 90s?
I’m sure it is, but I also think that because we’re an alternative comedy channel, people pay attention to what we say more than what they might have the chance to see in the mainstream. It was popular in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but we’re lucky that we didn’t get the blowback that I’m sure some other shows did.
What are some of the most prevalent trends you’re hearing about from your audience, especially around Atlanta?
Oh man, there are just so many different kinds of people: upper-middle-class white girls, black girls, middle-class white guys, suburban white kids, people from all over, so there’s a huge spectrum of people who watch The Boondocks. I mean, it’s just fun to see the range of people that are interested in that.
That’s pretty interesting. When you decided to do a gang show with The Boondocks, were you thinking that a gang show would be seen as sort of offensive or sexist?
Yeah, definitely, because we’ve never been viewed as a legitimate comedy show. We’re kind of an everyman show and a political joke show. People come to our show to laugh and have a good time and say “woo hoo” and something like that.
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