We explore automatically predicting which Wordle games Reddit users find amusing. We scrape approximately 80k reactions by Reddit users to Wordle games from Reddit, classify the reactions as expressing amusement or not using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 using few-shot prompting, and verify that GPT-3.5's labels roughly correspond to human labels. We then extract features from Wordle games that can predict user amusement. We demonstrate that the features indeed provide a (weak) signal that predicts user amusement as predicted by GPT-3.5. Our results indicate that user amusement at Wordle games can be predicted computationally to some extent. We explore which features of the game contribute to user amusement. We find that user amusement is predictable, indicating a measurable aspect of creativity infused into Wordle games through humor.

Computational humor detection systems rarely model the subjectivity of humor responses, or consider alternative reactions to humor - namely offense. We analyzed a large dataset of humor and offense ratings by male and female annotators of different age groups. We find that women link these two concepts more strongly than men, and they tend to give lower humor ratings and higher offense scores. We also find that the correlation between humor and offense increases with age. Although there were no gender or age differences in humor detection, women and older annotators signalled that they did not understand joke texts more often than men. We discuss implications for computational humor detection and downstream tasks.

Why is humor so difficult for machine learning and AI systems to understand? In light of recent studies in Psychology showing that individual words can be humorous Engelthaler & Hills (2017); Westbury et al. (2016), and in light of the fact that Word Embeddings (WEs) have been to shown to capture numerous properties of words (e.g., Mikolov et al., 2013), it is natural to study if and how WEs capture humor. First, we find that individual-word humor possesses many aspects of humor that have been discussed in general theories of humor, and that many of these aspects of humor are captured by WEs. To more deeply understand which features of humor WEs capture and to what extent, we draw on existing theories of humor to define a number of candidate features of word humor. Interestingly, many of these theories can be applied to word humor.