Roboticist Naomi Fitter performs stand-up comedy with a small humanoid robot to gather data on human-machine interactions. In a typical black-box performance space, a 2-foot humanoid robot stands on a square IKEA end table. In this YouTube video, a human arm from the edge of the frame holds a microphone to the robot’s smooth shiny head. “Hello, I am Jon,” he says and waves his small plastic arm, the joints at his shoulder and elbow whirring. “Of course, that is not my real name, but humans have trouble pronouncing: [the sound of mid-’90s dial-up internet].” The off-screen audience erupts into delighted giggles. This is just one of many zingers performed by stand-up comedian and research tool Jon the Robot, a creation of assistant professor Naomi Fitter in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Having graced many stages up and down the West Coast, Jon’s origin story begins some eight years earlier in Los Angeles, a city where anyone (even an android) might dream of making it big. At the time, Fitter was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California but had already been performing stand-up for years. Living in the epicenter of the entertainment world was an opportunity to fuse her passion for comedy with the research she was already conducting in social robotics and human-robot interactions. At a time when Hollywood and its talent pool are fiercely fighting the rise of AI in creativity, researchers like Fitter see humor as a means to connect robots with humans in ways beyond pure amusement. “Robots with a good sense of humor represent a pathway to helping technology successfully ‘read the room,’ in a wide range of scenarios,” Fitter tells Oregon Business. “This ability can allow new technologies to better understand their users and perhaps even better connect with them.” Jon, however, is not the first robot comedian to grace the public stage. Heather Knight, Fitter’s colleague at Oregon State and an assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, had been working at the intersection of robot and comedy some years before Fitter dived in. These days Knight leads a robot theater company called Marilyn Monrobot, which features performances by her invention Ginger the Robot. While both Ginger and Jon are NAO robots — which are humanoid and programmable — Fitter identified some unchartered territory in how technology might be harnessed in robot comedy, which differs from her predecessors. “I’d say that with my system setup, I focused more on giving the robot the ability to sense things and make decisions in the way I do,” Fitter explains. “I was shooting more for a robot comedy performance that could The Analytics of Comedy BY MELANIE SEVCENKO PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 18
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