Wow! Now they're looking to apply AI to comedy? Good luck! They're going to need it. Making an audience laugh is very difficult.

It depends a lot on the cultures too, for what is funny to some people it is possibly considered rude, vulgar or even racist to others (or worst of all, incomprehensible).

Having a machine explain a joke to you will be the last straw XD

I still think AI isn't real, I don't think a machine will ever be conscious of itself (self-awareness? maybe in about 100,000 years), from my point of view the first step to becoming "intelligent"

AIs may be able to assess a range of knowledge and use probabilities in order to target where to build "funny" stories or jokes and make decisions.

But believing if they're actually aware that it's a joke, I don't think so. It's the same example of the machine translator, maybe you think it's very smart to be able to translate a language. But I'm sure the machine has no idea what it really translates into, in the sense of "knowing"

It's been a lot of fun! Thanks for sharing ^_^