# AI Humor Generation: Cognitive, Social and Creative Skills for Effective Humor

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07981/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [HUMORCHAIN: Theory-Guided Multi-Stage Reasoning for Interpretable Multimodal Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21732/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Pun Generation: Datasets, Evaluations and Methodologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04793/) (2025)
- [Engagement Undermines Safety: How Stereotypes and Toxicity Shape Humor in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18454/) (2025)
- [OpenMic: A Multi-Agent-Based Stand-Up Comedy Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08288/) (2026)
- ["Not Human, Funnier": How Machine Identity Shapes Humor Perception in Online AI Stand-up Comedy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12763/) (2026)
- [HumorRank: A Tournament-Based Leaderboard for Evaluating Humor Generation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19786/) (2026)
- [Humor Style Drives Laughter, Topic Shapes Acceptability: Evaluating Bilingual Personal and Political Robot-Delivered AI Jokes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.13256/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humor is a social binding agent. It is an act of creativity that can provoke emotional reactions on a broad range of topics. Humor has long been thought to be "too human" for AI to generate. However, humans are complex, and humor requires our complex set of skills: cognitive reasoning, social understanding, a broad base of knowledge, creative thinking, and audience understanding. We explore whether giving AI such skills enables it to write humor. We target one audience: Gen Z humor fans. We ask people to rate meme caption humor from three sources: highly upvoted human captions, 2) basic LLMs, and 3) LLMs captions with humor skills. We find that users like LLMs captions with humor skills more than basic LLMs and almost on par with top-rated humor written by people. We discuss how giving AI human-like skills can help it generate communication that resonates with people.