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For the past five years, Joe Toplyn has been trying to build a robot that’s as funny as he is. It’s challenging, in part, because he’s a pretty funny guy. The Harvard Lampoon alum worked for years as the head writer for the likes of David Letterman and Jay Leno, garnering a small collection of Emmys along the way, and even went on to write and produce for the show Monk. Years later, he wrote a book about what he learned in show business called Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV and taught the craft of writing jokes to aspiring comedy writers in New York City.
Then one day, he tuned into the game show Jeopardy where he watched IBM’s Watson clean house against human contestants. Having studied engineering when he went to Harvard, Toplyn’s curiosity was piqued.
“I read some research papers about how Watson worked and looked at its flowcharts,” Toplyn told The Daily Beast. He learned that the way Watson worked to dominate the quiz show was a lot like the way a joke is formed. It analyzes the prompt, breaks it down into its key elements, and eventually synthesizes what it “knows” about those elements into an answer.
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