One day soon the robots will replace us in all things, whether we like it or not. They’ll be doctors and engineers and even artists and, though we may still prefer human expressions of creativity in this gleaming future, it won’t matter because the robots will probably have us living in rows of vats, sucking out our precious nutrients for their robot fuel, and we won’t have much of a say about it.
With this exciting prospect in mind, it’s for the best that the machines might tell us some halfway decent jokes while we suffer under their dispassionate rule.
As detailed in a Motherboard article, the bots are already coming for the world of stand-up in the form of The Headlinertron, a Twitter bot created and managed by comedian CJ Hernandez. Fed by over 30,000 words of stand-up comedy transcripts taken from shows by Dave Chapelle, Sarah Silverman, John Mulaney, and more, Headlinertron’s jokes are formed by inputting this data to a predictive text generator, after which Hernandez adds punctuation.
The results, bizarre as they may be, are actually pretty funny.
Like any good stand-up, Headlinertron has some good bits on sex:
And, of course, some political humor for these turbulent times:
Folks, he’s even got some chestnuts from the “complain about your wife” file:
If outdoing Kevin James with a single tweet isn’t impressive enough, scroll through some more of its neverending Twitter set to see what else the Headlinertron is packing. It’s good stuff: lacking in a real stand-up special’s pacing and cohesion, sure, but with the right delivery, a lot of these would work.
Twitter bots are already whipping our soft, fleshy, human asses at writing video game erotica, generating TV captions, brainstorming new proper nouns for fantasy books, naming romance novels, and romancing guys on dating apps. Though Headlinertron is getting a helping hand from its carbon-based creator, it’s success is just another sign of our approaching obsolescence. Still, we may as well thank Headlinertron. At least it shows we may still get to laugh now and then when the machines rule the earth.
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