# Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [UR-FUNNY: A Multimodal Language Dataset for Understanding Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06618/) (2019)
- [Do Androids Laugh at Electric Sheep? Humor "Understanding" Benchmarks from The New Yorker Caption Contest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06293/) (2022)
- [Humor Detection: A Transformer Gets the Last Laugh](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00252/) (2019)
- [Pun Generation with Surprise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06828/) (2019)
- [AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01825/) (2022)
- [ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13513/) (2022)
- [TwistList: Resources and Baselines for Tongue Twister Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03457/) (2023)
- [The Iron(ic) Melting Pot: Reviewing Human Evaluation in Humour, Irony and Sarcasm Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05552/) (2023)
- ["Judge me by my size (noun), do you?'' YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.00578/) (2020)
- [Combining Humor and Sarcasm for Improving Political Parody Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03313/) (2022)
- [PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06275/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Drivel-ology: Challenging LLMs with Interpreting Nonsense with Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03867/) (2025)
- [Harm or Humor: A Multimodal, Multilingual Benchmark for Overt and Covert Harmful Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17759/) (2026)
- [One Joke to Rule them All? On the (Im)possibility of Generalizing Humor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19402/) (2025)
- [Phun-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Phonological Understanding in Chinese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07300/) (2026)
- [Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24082/) (2026)
- [Reading Between the Frames of Multimodal Drivelology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04939/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humour, as a complex language form, is derived from myriad aspects of life. Whilst existing work on computational humour has focussed almost exclusively on short pun-based jokes, we investigate whether the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to explain humour depends on the particular form. We compare models' joke explanation abilities from simple puns to complex topical humour that requires esoteric knowledge of real-world entities and events. To this end, we curate a dataset of 600 jokes across 4 joke types and manually write high-quality explanations. These jokes include heterographic and homographic puns, contemporary internet humour, and topical jokes. Using this dataset, we compare the zero-shot abilities of a range of LLMs to accurately and comprehensively explain jokes of different types, identifying key research gaps in the task of humour explanation. We find that none of the tested models (including reasoning models) are capable of reliably generating adequate explanations of all joke types, further highlighting the narrow focus of most existing works on overly simple joke forms.