Can Computers Create Humor?

One obstacle to progress is the lack of a precise and detailed theory of how humor operates. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s, there have been a number of small programs that create simple verbal humor, and more recently there have been studies of the automatic classification of the humorous status of texts. In addition, there are a number of advocates of the practical uses of computational humor: in user interfaces, in education, and in advertising. Computer-generated humor is still quite basic, but it could be viewed as a form of exploratory creativity. For computational humor to improve, some hard problems in AI will have to be addressed.