What will it take to give machines a real sense of humour

Much of what we consider humorous is a perishable commodity. As the shifting plates of the Zeitgeist create new opportunities for humour in one domain of human experience, other opportunities dry up or cease to be topical. To situate automated humour generators in a smart environment, we shall need to build frameworks that allow designers to react rapidly to changing norms and exploit topical new targets for wit. In this talk I consider Twitter to be one such environment, and explore the rapid development of new humour generators by transferring a reusable sense of humour from one domain-specific generator to another. I shall articulate what it means for a computer program to have a sense of humour in the first place, before I distinguish between those aspects that are generic and reusable and those that are bespoke and tied to a specific goal.