Abstract
Thematic jokes are central to stand-up comedy, sitcoms, and public speaking, where contexts and punchlines rely on fresh material—news, anecdotes, and cultural references that resonate with the audience. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled interactive joke generation through conversational interfaces. Although LLMs enable interactive joke generation, ordinary conversational interfaces seldom give creators enough agency, control, or timely access to such source material for constructing context and punchlines. We designed Jokeasy, a search-enabled prototype system that integrates a dual-role LLM agent acting as both a material scout and a prototype writer to support human–AI collaboration in thematic joke writing. Jokeasy provides a visual canvas in which retrieved web content is organized into editable inspiration blocks and developed through a multistage workflow. A qualitative study with 13 hobbyists and 5 expert participants (including professional comedians and HCI/AI specialists) showed that weaving real-time web material into this structured workflow enriches ideation and preserves author agency, while also revealing needs for finer search control, tighter chat–canvas integration, and more flexible visual editing. These insights refine our understanding of AI-assisted humour writing and guide future creative-writing tools.
Keywords
Human-AI Collaboration; LLM; Joke Writing; Humor Generation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.991
Citation
Ge, Y., Tian, L., Xu, C., Xu, L., Li, M., Hu, Y.,and Guo, W.(2025) Jokeasy: Exploring Human-AI Collaboration in Thematic Joke Generation, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.991
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 4 - Human-Centered AI
Jokeasy: Exploring Human-AI Collaboration in Thematic Joke Generation
Thematic jokes are central to stand-up comedy, sitcoms, and public speaking, where contexts and punchlines rely on fresh material—news, anecdotes, and cultural references that resonate with the audience. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled interactive joke generation through conversational interfaces. Although LLMs enable interactive joke generation, ordinary conversational interfaces seldom give creators enough agency, control, or timely access to such source material for constructing context and punchlines. We designed Jokeasy, a search-enabled prototype system that integrates a dual-role LLM agent acting as both a material scout and a prototype writer to support human–AI collaboration in thematic joke writing. Jokeasy provides a visual canvas in which retrieved web content is organized into editable inspiration blocks and developed through a multistage workflow. A qualitative study with 13 hobbyists and 5 expert participants (including professional comedians and HCI/AI specialists) showed that weaving real-time web material into this structured workflow enriches ideation and preserves author agency, while also revealing needs for finer search control, tighter chat–canvas integration, and more flexible visual editing. These insights refine our understanding of AI-assisted humour writing and guide future creative-writing tools.