Jamie Brew, head writer at the A.V. Club’s sister site ClickHole, can generate convincing Strokes lyrics or passable X-Files scripts seemingly at will. Presidential debate soundbites, Craigslist ads, and Anthony Bourdain soliloquies are no problem for Brew either. Examples of these and other bits of text-based comedy are routinely posted to his consistently hilarious Twitter account. To some observers, it would seem that Brew has gotten internet comedy down to a science, and that turns out to be true. As a novice coder with only one college course under his belt and a working knowledge of Python, he has developed what he calls a “predictive text imitator” that he uses to create his fictional quotes. That name may not sound terribly funny, but what Brew has managed to do with it is often comically devastating. Jay Hathaway sheds some light on Brew’s unique working methods in a piece for The Daily Dot called “How An Internet Comedy Legend Coded A Program To Make Humans Laugh.”
That’s a sinister-sounding headline, perhaps suggesting some warped, Pavlovian thought experiment, but Brew’s motives are quite benign: He just wants to make people laugh. At the most basic level, Brew feeds some real-world transcripts into his text emulator and then pieces something funny out of the results. The writer seems to thrive in the uncanny valley. His text creations are realistic but not too realistic. They’re still noticeably robotic in nature. The key seems to be very selective editing. “With the longer pieces,” Brew says, “I almost always rearrange the completed sentences.” He may have done his job a little too well, leading to some skepticism that his program was real. But Brew silenced his critics by posting the source code on GitHub, along with “a detailed explanation of how it works.” The predictive text imitator is real, and it’s spectacular. Non-geeks probably won’t even worry about the technical details. They’ll be too busy simply enjoying the fruits of Brew’s odd labors. Like this little beauty, for instance: