{"id":80105,"date":"2025-12-03T18:40:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T18:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/80105\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T18:40:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T18:40:21","slug":"comedians-tap-ai-to-punch-up-performances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/80105\/","title":{"rendered":"Comedians tap AI to punch up performances"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio.<\/p>\n

\u201cWelcome to the talking baby podcast<\/a>,\u201d says the infant, wearing headphones and sounding like a deep-voiced radio broadcaster. \u201cOn today\u2019s episode, we\u2019ll be talking to the weird-looking person who lives at my house.\u201d<\/p>\n

So begins a series of humorous interactions between two characters animated by artificial intelligence that\u2019s attracted millions of views on social media. They\u2019re a nod to the 1989 movie \u201cLook Who\u2019s Talking\u201d but produced in a matter of hours and without a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget.<\/p>\n

AI helped do all of that, but it didn\u2019t craft the punch lines. It\u2019s a relief to comedian Jon Lajoie<\/a>, who made the videos, that AI chatbots just aren\u2019t \u201cinherently funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can\u2019t write comedy,\u201d said Lajoie. \u201cIt can\u2019t do any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now, at least, they won\u2019t take his job.<\/p>\n

Lajoie\u2019s viral videos have gained him attention as an AI-adopting entertainer that\u2019s he\u2019s not entirely comfortable with as he grapples with what all this means for the future of his very human craft of making people laugh.<\/p>\n

King Willonius<\/a> is not feeling so cautious. His first big hit was an AI-generated song called \u201cBBL Drizzy\u201d that made fun of rapper Drake during the height of his feud with Kendrick Lamar. He\u2019s since moved into making AI video parodies like \u201cI\u2019m McLovin It (Popeye\u2019s Diss Song)\u201d and \u201cI Want My Barrel Back (Cracker Barrel song).\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very similar to somebody who\u2019s writing for The Onion or SNL,\u201d Willonius said. \u201cI try to find out, OK, what\u2019s my comedic angle on this particular topic? And then I\u2019ll generate a video from that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He starts with writing his own notes on an idea, then refines it with a chatbot, and puts that language \u2014 known as a prompt \u2014 into AI tools that can generate imagery, video, music and voices. The key, he says, is to keep iterating.<\/p>\n

But he wouldn\u2019t just ask it for a joke \u2014 Willonius says most chatbot-generated comedy lacks the \u201cnuances or complexities that it takes for jokes to really land.\u201d<\/p>\n

A scholar of comedy, Michelle Robinson, said \u201ca lot of the stuff that I\u2019ve seen AI produce is corny as hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt does seem fluent in the basic grammar of jokes, but sometimes they\u2019re slightly off,\u201d said Robinson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. \u201cThey may be moderately funny, but I think they\u2019re really missing an important element of what makes us laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are they missing? She\u2019s not totally sure, except that most good jokes are a little edgy or dangerous and chatbots can\u2019t seem to calibrate \u201cwhatever provocation is in the joke to the moment that we\u2019re living in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caleb Warren, a professor who studies marketing and consumer psychology at the University of Arizona, said that leaves comedy writers with an opportunity to make use of tools that can\u2019t completely outsource their skills.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ideas that are driving the humor are coming from the human comedian,\u201d but the AI tools can help them execute and illustrate them, Warren said.<\/p>\n

Willonius was a struggling comedian and screenwriter who began experimenting with AI during Hollywood\u2019s actor and writer strikes in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cI leaned all the way into AI because I didn\u2019t know what else to do with my free time,\u201d he said. \u201cI was doing everything I could to try to break into Hollywood. And once the writers\u2019 strike happened, that kind of shut that down. I started to learn these AI tools and get really good at them and started to cultivate an audience.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Willonius saw an opening, the rise of generative AI has stoked division and posed challenges to other professional comedians.<\/p>\n

Sarah Silverman joined book authors in suing leading chatbot makers, alleging they infringed the copyright of her \u201cThe Bedwetter\u201d memoir. The daughter of the late Robin Williams called it \u201cgross\u201d and \u201cmaddening\u201d when users of OpenAI\u2019s AI video generator Sora conjured up realistic \u201cdeepfakes\u201d of the beloved actor to churn out what she described as \u201chorrible TikTok slop puppeteering.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re not making art, you\u2019re making disgusting, overprocessed hot dogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else\u2019s throat hoping they\u2019ll give you a little thumbs-up and like it,\u201d Zelda Williams wrote in October.<\/p>\n

And the estate of legendary comic George Carlin last year settled a lawsuit against podcasters who purportedly cloned his voice to make a fake hourslong comedy special.<\/p>\n

Comics have also relished mocking AI tools. A recent \u201cSouth Park\u201d episode called \u201cSora Not Sorry\u201d had a bumbling police detective investigate a scourge of fake videos. <\/p>\n

Lajoie, known for his work on the TV series \u201cThe League\u201d and comic songs on YouTube, tried to see what would happen if he asked ChatGPT to help craft a bizarre movie script idea. He said it gave him something \u201csuper boring\u201d about \u201cgrandma\u2019s dentures and a talking raccoon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat level of human creativity, it can\u2019t mimic \u2014 yet \u2014 or at least maybe I\u2019m not great at prompting,\u201d he said. Instead, he found it useful to cheaply animate ideas he would otherwise never have pursued \u2014 such as the talking baby<\/a>, birds wearing jeans, or a podcasting Jesus Christ interviewing an Easter Bunny who\u2019s never heard of him. <\/p>\n

The prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invited Lajoie and Willonius to exhibit their video creations this fall at a new AI gallery space in Manhattan, part of a promotion of AI creativity tool startups that the firm invests in. <\/p>\n

Willonius obliged. Lajoie ended up bowing out, after an interview with The Associated Press in which he voiced doubts about what he described as AI\u2019s \u201cNapster phase.\u201d The music-sharing website shuttered in the early 2000s after the record industry and rock band Metallica sued over copyright violations.<\/p>\n

The investment firm\u2019s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, has been bullish about AI\u2019s potential to bring new life into filmmaking and comedy. On a November podcast, he blamed Hollywood opposition to its adoption on \u201cwoke activists (who) have picked up AI as the new thing they\u2019re going to agitate about.\u201d He compared it to resistance to computer graphics in movies before they became commonplace.<\/p>\n

Lajoie said he shared his early AI video experiments with a few friends who are \u201canti-AI; real, real, anti-AI\u201d and they were surprised by how well the sketches retained Lajoie\u2019s own comedic voice.<\/p>\n

He insists he\u2019s no AI expert, just \u201ca creative person who can figure out how to make two characters talk to each other.\u201d But even editing the sketches requires understanding comedic timing, and he has no interest in ceding that part to a machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing with comedy is it\u2019s so related to performance, delivery and point of view,\u201d Lajoie said. \u201cDo AIs have a point of view? They can grab a few points of view from different people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when it does have a point of view, I think that\u2019s when we all should be afraid for all of the reasons that the Terminator has taught us,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Brien writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A baby and his family dog sit across from each other in a podcast studio. \u201cWelcome to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2007,45916,20977,4371,45917,2241,1743,29933,45915,48,52,51,45914,47,50,49,1406,1417,1816,5050,18120],"class_list":["post-80105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-ai","tag-ai-tool","tag-baby","tag-chatbot","tag-comedian","tag-comedy","tag-hollywood","tag-joke","tag-king-willonius","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lajoie","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-performance","tag-point","tag-university","tag-video","tag-view"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}