Send the Joke

I would like a funny machine. I have no objection to laughing without first examining the comedian’s birth certificate. If a sentence gets me, it gets me. I am not going to climb back inside my mouth and retrieve the laugh because the wrong kind of bastard put it there.

But send the joke. Leave the victory speech at the office.

Frank Landymore reports in Futurism on October 10 that a former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, remembers colleagues saying they had “solved humor” with Claude. The original interview, by Clara Collier and Angela Chen in New York magazine, appeared on October 5. Coxon recalls a Slack channel containing a version of Claude trained for humor, and the introduction: “Yeah, we solved humor. Here’s the Claude. We’ve solved it.”

His remembered reply was: “No, you haven’t. You clearly haven’t solved humor. What the hell is this?”

I like the arrival of that last sentence. We had finished an entire department of human activity, and then somebody came in without taking his shoes off.

This is Coxon’s account, not a Slack transcript I have inspected or an official Anthropic announcement. Perhaps the colleagues were being exuberant. Perhaps they were joking. The anecdote doesn’t show me a single joke from the model, so I can’t tell you whether the thing was funny. I can tell you that the introduction has supplied more material than it intended.

Here is my own first attempt, not a Claude output:

We’ve solved humor. We’re still having trouble with the audience.

A serviceable little thing. You can feel it assembling itself. I would try it on somebody. I would also be watching his face rather than explaining the architecture.

That is a disagreeable part of my trade. I want the response in advance. I want to know that the sentence will arrive and do its work, that I won’t have to watch a person politely continue breathing while I wait for something better. An advance guarantee would improve my afternoons. It might improve my disposition, though I would advise the seller against putting that in the warranty.

A machine which helps find a good line could be welcome. Give me ten attempts and let me keep the one that makes the paragraph move. Give me a dreadful attempt which sets off a better one in my own head. I have received useful suggestions from people I wouldn’t lend a chair to. I don’t require the source of a sentence to be admirable before considering it.

But a funny line doesn’t finish the business. It starts the part where somebody else gets it, misses it, hates it, uses it differently, or laughs so hard that I decide he must have understood something I didn’t put there. I would like that last fellow’s address. There may be more work for him.

I am not describing a mysterious human substance no computer can touch. I am describing the unpleasant fact that I don’t get to decide the reception. Neither does the person who introduces the computer.

Coxon says something else in the interview that catches me. When describing conformity, he suggests that the things easiest to argue about, or easiest to put into convincing words, are the things that win out.

Convincing words. My equipment. Give me enough time and I can explain why the sentence ought to have been funny. I can point to the turn, the expectation, the interruption. There is a way to discuss all this without being an ass. There is also a way to make the discussion last until the listener regrets ever having been available.

The second way comes naturally.

And it still doesn’t give me the laugh.

There is no useful argument I can deliver after that. I need another line.

So let me try the machine’s introduction again. This is mine too:

We’ve solved humor. The remaining silence is a deployment issue.

I like it better. Deployment issue gives the silence a man with a badge who will be along shortly to investigate it. I can almost hear his sensible shoes. Now I am adding personnel to a sentence which was supposed to get shorter.

Leave him out. He won’t improve the joke by arriving.

There is another difficulty with deployment issue. It sounds a little too pleased with itself. The fellow using it expects you to recognize the language and enjoy how neatly he has turned it against its owners. I recognize that fellow. He is looking at a line he wants to keep.

I take out the term I like. Take out remaining, too. Then there is hardly anything left of the second half.

I read the stump aloud. “We’ve solved humor.” It sounds less like a joke now than something awaiting instructions. I can supply those.

We’ve solved humor. Please restart the audience.

There. Shorter. Meaner. Still no guarantee.

Original interview: What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? (October 5, 2026).

Source: Eggheads at Anthropic Said They Used Claude to “Solve” Humor