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Your tax dollars at play

“Summertime Blues” is a rather hefty PDF that’s making the rounds. It was published jointly by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and it’s subtitle is “100 stimulus projects that give taxpayers the blues.” It’s an updated, internet version of Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire’s old Golden Fleece Award– Proxmire served in the Senate from 1957 to 1989 and made headlines on a regular basis by highlighting frivolous projects from 1975 to 1988.

Here, from “Summertime Blues,” is #36:

36. Scientist Attempts to Create Joke Machine (Evanston, IL) – $712,883264
Conan O’Brien vs. Jay Leno was nothing. Competition among late night television hosts is about to get
very interesting. That’s because researchers at Northwestern University are using stimulus money to
develop “machine-generated humor.” And nothing is funnier than a robot repeating someone else’s
jokes. The lead designer plans to use artificial intelligence to create a “comedic performance agent” that
“will be funny no matter what it is talking about.” Computer systems will mine jokes from the
Internet and then use them to create hilarious presentations that mimic real-life comedians. The lead
designer hopes to model his new creation off of News at Seven, a web-based “entertainment oriented
system that combines clips from CSPAN with topics [sic] humor and comments pulled from Twitter to
create a Daily Show-like experience.”

Not sure how this will stimulate the economy. If it works, it’ll put a bunch of comics out of work. (Actually, we’re certain it’s doomed to failure. At best, it’s “machine-generated humor” has the potential to put a few morning DJ’s out of work. But we’re still not sure how that will stimulate the economy.

Perhaps not all stimulus fund projects are designed to directly stimulate growth in the GDP, but are merely designed to distract us from the dismal conditions that prevail. But that’s the job of comedians. And we already have a lot of them. So this project, in addition to be stunningly dumb, is redundant.)