Robotic stand-up comedy: State-of-the-art

Abstract

Humanoid and social robots have to perform in socially acceptable ways. They interact with humans and support humans in their needs and their activities. Stand-up comedy is an extreme form of human-human and human-audience interaction. It can be mild, but often it goes beyond what is socially accepted in verbal and nonverbal behavior and expressed opinions. But it makes people laugh and we can ask whether this can be done by robots and what we can learn from it for other ways of robot-human or robot audience interaction. In this paper we confine ourselves to a survey of developments in robotic stand-up comedy. We hope that this survey helps to stimulate research in this area and identify topics of more general interest in robot-human interaction.