…or did your neck throw up?

As comedians, and as comedians who run a website, we constantly seek to determine the importance to society of standup comedy and of humor.

And that’s how we ended up reading a description (complete with sample chapters) of a book called “Wired For Speech”:

Interfaces that talk and listen are populating computers, cars, call centers, and even home appliances and toys, but voice interfaces invariably frustrate rather than help. In “Wired for Speech,” Clifford Nass and Scott Brave reveal how interactive voice technologies can readily and effectively tap into the automatic responses all speech — whether from human or machine — evokes.

And exactly how does this relate to humor?

Well, since humor is so important to society, the book pays some attention to the appropriateness or usefulness of humor (very and very!) in voice interfaces and pays some attention to exactly what kind of humor should be utilized.

We can’t take complete credit for discovering this. The gang at MIT Press thought the book’s humor/voice interface connection to be interesting enough to excerpt it on their weblog, MITPressblog. It was there that we found the following excerpt from “Wired For Speech,” which quotes from Victor Raskin, Professor of English and Linguistics at Purdue University:

Humor has been underutilized in voice interface design. However, designers should not blithely include witticisms: jokes are powerful and must be used judiciously. Many types of humor have huge downsides. […]

No joke will be universally loved. What happens when, despite rewriting and testing, jokes fall short? Research by John Morkes directly tested this by creating additional interfaces with known unsuccessful innocent jokes. Although people wrote more negative comments (called “flames”) to the computer that provided bad jokes than to the computer that provided no jokes, no negative effects were observed on user’s performance, effort, or perceptions of the interface. Hence, the risk of failure is not as large as the benefits of success.

How can ineffective jokes be avoided? If there was an easy answer to this question, everyone could be a successful comedian. Nevertheless, here are some useful guidelines from Victor Raskin:

* Give exactly as much information as is necessary for the joke.
* Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke.
* Say only what is relevant to the joke.
* Tell the joke efficiently.
* Avoid jokes that are highly dependent on timing, as many users may have divided attention.

Books of jokes can be effective. Many of them are organized by topic, enabling the designer to select a joke to fit gracefully into the interaction. It is also useful to remember that jokes that were considered overused in a given generation may seem startlingly original for a new generation.

Fascinating. We can’t decide which nugget of wisdom we like more. “Many types of humor have huge downsides,” might be the winner.

We can’t help but see a bit of Kip Addotta’s influence in the above bulleted list. (Reminds us of his “How to tell a joke” bit.)